Touch by Jennifer Snyder Read Free Book Online Page A

forehead; there was just a void.
    A sudden urge to kiss him sparked deep inside me, spurred from the emptiness of his closeness. I allowed my eyes to graze his lips and the urge grew like a wildfire with only my thoughts to flame it.
    With my eyes open, I stood on my tiptoes and gave in, kissing Jet.
    My eyes closed as the same energy from our last touch spiraled through me. I’d expected to feel warmth, but didn’t. If it hadn’t been for the electrifying energy, kissing Jet would have felt like kissing the air. Just as the same images from before began to flash behind my eyelids, he broke our contact.
    “ What are you thinking?” he demanded. My cheeks reddened and I felt the heat spread to my neck. “We don’t know what will happen to you if you keep on... touching me.”
    I could hear the unease and embarrassment playing in his voice as he took a few silent steps backward. “Does it matter?” I countered, feeling slightly dizzy. “If it kills me, so what? I’m going to die soon, anyway.”
    The look on his face reinforced my words and the term kiss of death floated to the surface of my mind. If that was all it would take, kissing death, mainly this death—Reaper number 142—then it would be the sweetest form of suicide imaginable. Poetic, even.
    “ It’s not that I don’t feel anything for you… because I do.” He paused, obviously shaken at having admitted that out loud, and I searched his face for any tinge of pink to stain his cheeks, but saw none. “We just—we can’t keep tempting Fate.”
    I shrugged a shoulder. “Why not?”
    Worry soaked up all the sparkles of his eyes. “Because you can only tempt Fate for so long before it takes you, and if things don’t happen the way they’ve intended for it to then you might not come out of it as a Reaper, they may force you to just Crossover.”
    That thought had never occurred to me, and I made a mental note to behave myself if it meant I’d get to see him again when everything was said and done.
    Jet’s icy blue eyes glared back at me, his expression inscrutable. “I think I should go,” he muttered, shoving his hands deep in his pockets.
    In the time it took my heart to beat its next rhythm, Jet vanished.

 

     
    Chapter Ten
     
    Days passed and Christmas came and went. The tree in our living room, which had never been decorated, was moved to the edge of the woods in our backyard where the ever-present crows claimed it for themselves.
    The only thing about my Christmas break I enjoyed was the ample amount of uninterrupted time I was allotted to spend with Jet. Today though, he’d kept me waiting for his sudden appearance and the silence of my house seemed deafening. I bundled up in my blue marshmallow jacket and fled the emptiness of my house, attempting to save my sanity and kill some time.
    The noisy cawing of crows assaulted my ears the moment I closed the front door behind myself and nervousness twisted in the pit of my stomach. I crammed my hands into the fleece-lined pockets of my jacket and walked down the driveway, cutting a right this time to avoid the red-headed woman on the corner. I made it to the wooden gate of Dover Farm before the cold became too much and I decided to turn back, but someone’s muffled cries stopped me.
    I inhaled so sharply the cold air burned my lungs and my eyes darted around, searching for the source and praying I couldn’t see through whoever it was. I exhaled only once I noticed little Isabel Dover kneeling near the edge of Dover Pond, crying.
    “ Isabel—what’s wrong?” I asked, already weaving my body through the wooden slats that made up the gate. Isabel’s little tear-stained face jerked in my direction.
    “ Rowan!” she shouted, her baby-blue eyes gleaming. “You gotta help Fern; she’s stuck out there and I’m too scared to get her!”
    I glanced out onto the frozen pond and spotted Fern, Isabel’s dachshund, near the center of the ice. The dog was wearing a bubble-gum pink sweater