He's Come Undone by Theresa Weir Read Free Book Online Page B

about a woman who takes on a secret identity, gets Jimmy Stewart to fall in love with her, then she vanishes only to reappear with different colored hair and really new eyebrows. He finally realizes her deception, but is driven a little mad by the whole thing. A lot mad.
    I stuck it out and tried not to squirm, and when it was over and we were in the bright lobby, Julian asked if I wanted to go somewhere for a beer.
    This could be my chance to move directly to the last scene. A drink, then his place. But that wasn’t long enough to break someone’s heart.
    I went for the drink, and after two beers I told him I had to go. I left him there. He looked startled, and I had to wonder if any girl had ever left him anywhere before. No.
    After Vertigo , there were more movies and more drinks and more coffee shops, more jogging and accidental meets that weren’t accidental. One bowling gig where I finally gave him my phone number, and he began texting me at odd hours and I would text him back. We talked about stuff that interested us both, some silly, some serious.
    He finally confessed that he was a fan of Doctor Who . I was too, and I didn’t have to lie about it. That led to text conversations about the best Doctor. Mine was David Tennant, because really? How could it not be? Julian was old-school Who , and preferred Tom Baker. Good choice.
    I began to look forward to his texts. The ones that came early in the morning, and the ones that came late at night, the timing of the text telling me he wasn’t sleeping with anyone.
    The deeper stuff we got into? This took me completely by surprise, but one day at a coffee shop I suddenly found myself talking about my mom’s cancer and how I’d taken care of her until she died. I don’t know how that personal revelation surfaced. I just started talking about death before I really knew what I was doing. And once I put it out there, it was too late. And once I got going, I had a hard time shutting up.
    “Nobody gets it,” I said. “Death. They just don’t understand it. Sometimes I feel so alienated from people my own age, you know?” I was engrossed in finally sharing my story with someone, the mad pounding of my heart overriding logical thought. And maybe I felt kind of safe unloading on him since he’d never connect the dots, and he’d never know the whole story of Ellie Barlow.
    I was so wrapped up in unloading the mother thing and the cancer thing that it took me a while to notice that he was staring at me with a stricken expression on his face. I can’t even describe it, because it was just so odd. Like he suddenly wanted to be anywhere but there, talking to me. Panic in his eyes, followed by a darkness that came over his face, his whole body language changing to that of someone I didn’t even remotely know.
    This time he was the one who left. “I have to go,” he said woodenly.
    He tossed some money on the table, got up, and almost ran from the café.
    People sure didn’t like to talk about death. And then my next thought: Had I blown everything?
    * * *
    Back at the loft, Devon stopped me as I shot for my room to change clothes. He spun his laptop around on the kitchen island. “Have you seen this video?”
    I joined him and he hit Play while we both hunkered down in front of the small screen. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. A dark bar. Noise. Screaming and chaos. A girl with blond hair and a red dress. Jumping on a guy’s back while she bopped him in the side of the head.
    Oh.
    My.
    God.
    Devon paused the video so he could look at me with a huge grin. “Yeah.” Back to the laptop. “You haven’t seen the best part.” He hit Play again, and the noise and chaos continued, the final few seconds of me falling to the floor, my dress around my waist.
    “That’s maybe the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen,” Devon said. “It’s already had 500,000 hits.”
    And then I noticed the title: Who’s That Girl ?
    Several thoughts collided in my