Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

replied.
    “You know what I mean,” he said, lunging forward with mouth open, moaning melodramatically. His lips pressed fleshily against the mesh.
    “Now,
that’s
disgusting,” I said. “Do you know how long it’s been since that thing was washed?”
    “C’mon, baby,” he said, his face straining, the tip of his nose mashed against the side of his face. He moaned and grunted, the screen turning his tongue gray, painting dirty grid marks on his forehead, while I’d dissolved in laughter. “C’mon, let’s make contact! I’m in for life, dammit, this is all I’ll ever know of looooove!”
    Now, as James stood uncomfortably on the porch, it seemed impossible that we’d ever been so unguarded.
    I opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind me.
    “Hey,” James said.
    “Hey,” I said, eyeing him.
    He tried to meet my eyes and failed, looking instead at a spot of peeling paint, exposed wood, to the right of his foot. He looked like hell. His shaggy hair, always uncontrollable and mussed and flyaway, was matted in clumps. The skin on his face was gray and slack, sagging under his eyes and against his cheekbones, sinking into the pitted hollows above his jaw. His bloodshot eyes darted between my face and his own feet.
    “I look like shit, right?” he said, smiling wanly.
    I bit down against love, fought against moving toward him or touching him or asking if he was all right. I thought to myself,
I don’t care, don’t care, don’t care
, until the thought had taken on a life of its own and beat with dull pulses against the inside of my skull. I didn’t care. I would not care, refused to care.
    His smile faded. “Okay, so let’s talk.”
    “Let’s go out back,” I said. “Where it’s more private.”
    James nodded. We walked, a foot of self-conscious space in between us, across the sunny lawn to the place where it suddenly dipped and gave way to a steep, rough incline studded with trees. At the bottom, only a couple feet deep and making inconspicuous babbling sounds, was a small creek. This was where we had always sat together, in lazy conversation, in the permanent shade of one enormous maple tree whose gnarled roots had pushed their way through the lawn in reaching, fingerlike knobs.
    I settled against the tree. James paced nearby for a moment, then dropped to the ground in front of me. He picked at the dirt, collecting tiny stones and flinging them halfheartedly into the creek, while I waited.
    “I don’t know what to say,” he said finally.
    “How about, ‘I’m sorry,’” I replied flatly.
    “I—” he said. His voice cracked. “Of course I’m sorry. The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you.”
    I glared at him, willing myself to be hard-hearted. Tough. Unflinching in the face of contrition.
    “That’s funny. Because fucking and then dumping someone in the same fifteen-second period? I’d call that hurting.”
    He flinched at the word
fuck
.
    “Please don’t do that,” he said.
    “You don’t get to tell me what to do,” I snapped.
    “It wasn’t like that!” he cried.
    “Then tell me what it was like, James. Tell me what happened. Tell me what
you
think happened in your truck last night. Because to me, it was pretty goddamn clear.”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I wasn’t thinking.”
    “So what, it was instinctive?” My voice rose. “Is that what you’re saying? To get in my pants and get inside me and then just ditch me like some
thing
? Like a piece of trash?”
    “No,” he said, and stopped. He only managed to get out two more words—“I just—”—when his voice broke.
    The sight of his wide-open face made my stomach clench.
    James was crying, something I’d never seen him do. He had been close, once, the one and only time I had asked him about the day his mother died, when his voice had cracked and I had immediately regretted ever asking, had fallen down apologizing and begging him to pretend it had never happened.