Lantern Lake by Lily Everett Read Free Book Online Page B

loved her ease—her casual generosity, her willingness to drop everything for the prospect of adventure, her unthinking, simple joy in her own body and what it could feel when the two of them were together.
    “What happened?” Cooper asked, before he could stop the words. “In the last ten years, what changed for you? You used to be so…”
    “Stupid?” Vivian asked, every line of her body tensing into taut, wiry suspense. She reminded him of the horse across the lake, when it first sensed the presence of potential predators. “Weak? Cowardly?”
    “No!” Cooper grabbed her stiff shoulders and turned her to face him, but she looked down. The black fringe of her lashes hid her expression. Always hiding from him. “I meant—you used to be free, too. Happy. What changed?”
    “You really don’t know?” She glanced up from under those lashes, the shine on her eyes making his heart clench into a fist. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
    “It matters to me,” Cooper said roughly, not even pausing to question if that was the truth, or if he was playing her. He wasn’t sure he could tell the difference anymore. Maybe he never could.
    Vivian closed her eyes briefly. “Oh, Cooper. Do you honestly think my life was so perfect back then? When we met, that first day of Professor Engelhoffer’s English Lit class—that was the first time I ever tasted freedom. Happiness. Before that…”
    She shook her head mutely, and Cooper had to fight down the urge to turn her upside down and shake her until the rest of her answer fell out. “I don’t understand.”
    Vivian finally met his gaze head on, no hiding. “You want me to say that it was my awful ex, or the years of loveless marriage, or the scandalous divorce that made me this way. But it wasn’t. I was always like this—except when I was around you.”
    ***
    She was giving him too much, every word leeching strength from her as if she’d sprung a leak like the old gas stove in the cabin. Any minute, she’d go up in flames of embarrassment and nerves. But Vivian held her head up and stared deep into Cooper’s green-gold eyes. He deserved the truth.
    So what if it left her a pile of ashes on the frozen ground?
    “You never met my parents,” she reminded him, wrapping her arms around herself to ward off the chill. “Maybe you thought…I know you thought it was because I was ashamed of you.”
    Cooper dropped his hands from her shoulders, stepping back. “Can’t say I gave it that much consideration.”
    Vivian averted her gaze politely from the lie. “Well, that’s not what was going on. I wanted to elope with you, to run away and leave everything behind, because I knew that if I told my parents about you—if they understood what you meant to me—they’d stop the wedding. Stop us from ever seeing each other again. And I was right.”
    She swallowed hard at the look on Cooper’s face before he smoothed it into distant blankness. “What do you mean?”
    “The dean invited them down to talk about donating a new wing for the science building,” Vivian recounted, the entire sequence of events engraved on her soul. “They decided to stop in and visit me at my dorm after lunch, but I wasn’t there.”
    “You were never there,” Cooper agreed absently. “You’d all but moved into my apartment by that point.”
    The apartment. A wave of nostalgia swept over her head, drowning her in memories of the grimy little fourth-floor walk-up where Cooper had lived and studied during their college years. A blazing oven in the summer and colder than a freezer in the winter, no kitchen but a hot plate and narrow mini-fridge. “I loved that place,” she said without thinking.
    “Right.” Cooper’s cheeks went brick red, in the way that meant he was embarrassed but didn’t want to show it. “You loved it so much, you married me and we lived there forever. Oh, wait…”
    Pain scraped along her nerves, scouring out her ribcage. “No, you’re right. I had some