Imaginary Lines by Allison Parr Read Free Book Online

written him off completely.
    I leaned forward and plucked a fry from the table, holding it up like a teacher’s pointer. “How have you been for the past four years? You went from the boy-next-door, the small town hero, to a vaunted celebrity known to millions.”
    Amusement flashed across his face. “You asking as the girl-next-door, or the sports reporter?”
    “I haven’t even started yet.” I devoured the fry. “But if you’re offering an exclusive...”
    He laughed. “I don’t do press.” He leaned forward and shot me an intimate, unshakeable smile. “Though maybe I could make an exception.”
    That was it. No way was that in my head. He was flirting with me. “ Abraham .”
    He widened his eyes innocently. “Tamar.”
    I shook my head. “Thanks for asking me to meet up.”
    I grinned the entire subway ride home. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had so much fun. Abraham Krasner. It wasn’t like I’d forgotten how much I liked him, but I hadn’t viscerally recalled the warmth that filled me around him and how he made me laugh.
    Actually, I hadn’t spent so much time thinking about Abraham Krasner since we cut our losses four years ago. Yet here we were, in the same city, and all of a sudden old daydreams were floating back up when I closed my eyes. Which was silly, because I’d made the mistake of headlong infatuation once, and I had no intention of going there again.
    No, I wanted stability. I had a job, an apartment. I had straightened out my life. I knew where I’d be a year from now, and I certainly hadn’t been able to say that since graduation. I had my own health care, for God’s sake.
    Well, I would when I signed up for it. I didn’t have to pick my enrollment for another week and a half.
    But I was ready for a real, serious relationship. The kind where we fell in love and went away on weekends and eventually moved in together. And there was no way in hell I was going to let my heart get wrapped up in Abraham Krasner all over again, after all the time it had taken me to get over him. I wanted to like someone who actually wanted me back.
    I entered my apartment and fell into my desk chair. Where was it? I found my airplane list of goals beneath a pile of edits. Yes, there was magic in this city.
    I had one last item to add to the list—an item, I suspected, that precluded completing several of the other items. I wrote it in broad, bold strokes of blue.
9) Get over Abraham Krasner.

Chapter Five
    On Monday, I headed to the Flatiron District in the low East 20s of Manhattan for my first day at Sports Today .
    I didn’t expect to be so nervous, but I woke up filled with butterflies hatched overnight. My hands fumbled as I pulled on the outfit I’d assembled the night before. Now it seemed too daring, the royal blue of my dress too loud, the hem perhaps too high. I considered dumping all of it for all black, and then got a grip and went to work on my hair.
    I loved my hair, but it was a pain in the ass; thick and wild and unruly. I used to mess it with tons of product to keep the curls in line, but now I’d given up on that. Instead, I usually wrung it with a cotton cloth and let it air-dry, which worked great in California, but the humidity here turned my hair into a baby-eating monster.
    So instead of dealing with the uncertain combination of hair and humidity, I tucked it into a sleek roll and wrapped it into a well-behaved prisoner of pins and elastics. Then I slipped on my Payless pumps and headed out the door.
    Sports Today was part of a whole family of papers and websites that made up Today Media . The organization had started out as a monthly magazine fifty-odd years ago, but was one of the first to jump from the print ship to the digital bandwagon when magazines started tanking. Back then, Today Media had been only three magazines, but now they’d broken out into six different specific brands. Each maintained an extensive website and released an expensive, shiny magazine