Hit by Delilah S. Dawson Read Free Book Online

cared? Eloise Framingham’s son couldn’t even pull the trigger from thirty feet away; there’s no way he could put a knife to my skin. But Robert Beard’s son can. He’s big, straddling my waist with all his weight, and I can barely breathe.
    â€œI told you to read the card,” I say through clenched teeth. Istruggle beneath him, and the knife, or whatever it is, stings my neck and makes me hiss.
    â€œDon’t move,” he says, followed in the same breath by, “Where’s your gun?”
    I swallow and roll my eyes. Did he bring friends? I don’t think so—the truck isn’t moving, and I see only one bedheaded hulk with a knife. The red digital clock is reflected in the wetness of his eyes, the seconds draining away.
    â€œIt’s under the front seat,” I say. “Can I pull up my blanket now?”
    He looks down and realizes that the blanket is puddled on my side and I’m not wearing much. It’s cold out, and the tank’s mostly see-through. I don’t have much, but even in the low light, it’s showing. The knife jerks away like I’m going to cut him instead of the other way around.
    But I lied. The gun is in my right hand, still under the blanket, just like it was when I fell asleep. I tighten my grip and find the trigger. Thankfully, much like his old man, Max Beard is a sucker. No one expects a girl as skinny and ridiculous as me to be any kind of a threat. I take a deep breath, letting my boobs stick out inches from his arm.
    â€œOh God. Sorry.” He fumbles the knife, and it clatters against the metal floor of the mail truck. It’s lost now, in the dark under my bed, and he knows it. I smile.
    â€œNo problem,” I say, much cooler than I feel. My heart is beating so loud I’m surprised the sound isn’t filling the truck like something out of a Poe story, and I’ve gone all cold again. My finger is cramped where it holds the trigger, and I make sure to point the gun away from myself, in case I lose all feeling and do something stupid. He scoots down farther, still straddling me, but not so heavily and around my knees instead of my waist. At least I can breathe.
    I pull the blanket up over my chest with an embarrassed smile that’s both real and fake at the same time. But when I go to shove the gun in his face, I find it pinned under his leg. That’s when I look down and notice that the straddling and wiggling had other consequences that he probably didn’t think about when he was trying to intimidate the psycho chick who shot his dad. He’s in flannel pajama pants, and it’s my turn to look away, embarrassed from catching him in a deeply private moment for the second time today.
    In that pause, everything changes.
    He should have been an easy kill. I should have marked Maxwell Beard off my list and collected my bonus, easy as that. But seeing the confusion and anger and grief and naked, unwelcome desire on his tearstained face crumbles me from the inside out. No one has ever looked at me like that before, like I’m something, and even if the circumstances are impossibly horrible and horribly impossible, I can’t help it. I can’t lift the gun. I’m stunned and weirdly flattered and mortified, and at the base of it all, I don’t want to be the kind of girl who kills a guy with a pajama boner.
    The silence spreads out in the dead air of my mail truck, broken only by the steady drip of rain falling from sky to pine tree to government-issued vehicle and our hearts banging like monkeys in a drum. The longer we don’t speak, the more awkward it gets, like the never-ending slow song in the middle school cafeteria at a dance you didn’t want to go to where no one asked you to dance. He’s cuter than the boys who usually ask me out and who I usually turn down, and I can tell by the way he tosses his bangs that he knows he’s cute, but he doesn’t know what to do,