Brittany Bends Read Online Free PDF

makes him turn the steering wheel toward me, which makes the car swing to the right, which makes it drive over three empty parking spaces before he hits the brake.
    If those spaces weren’t empty…
    I force myself to think about something else.
    “I got the job,” I repeat, a little softer. “Is that a problem?”
    He grins. “Hell, no, but wow . Just wow. Mom says there’s something magical about your family, but I didn’t think she meant it literally.”
    Now that I’m getting warm, my cheeks do heat up. I’m not supposed to talk about the magic at all. Ever.
    “Mom said that?”
    “Yeah, but she mostly says something about charisma. She didn’t say anything about luck.” He punches my arm gently. That’s Eric’s way of showing affection. “Go, you!”
    I bit my lower lip and say around the skin, “Thanks?”
    Fortunately, he still has his foot on the brake because he turns all the way toward me. The car rocks in the wind.
    “How come you’re not happy?” he asks. “Is it a lame job?”
    How do I know what kind of job it is? I haven’t started yet. But the first question…why am I not happy?
    I have no idea.
    I frown, thinking about how I feel. A little scared—no, a lotta scared. I have no idea what I’m getting into, and that always goes badly for me. And schedules, that’s going to be a problem. I’ll have to inconvenience everyone. And at minimum wage, I won’t be bringing millions into the household. Hell, I won’t even be bringing in thousands.
    “What’s wrong, Brit?” Eric asks gently, and he’s rarely gentle. “ Is there something you don’t like about the job? Because you can say no.”
    I shake my head. I can feel tears threatening. I’m not going to cry in front of Eric, I’m not .
    I take a deep breath, and instead of holding back words, the breath seems to inspire them. I blurt,
    “It’s just that the last job I had, I screwed up so bad that I’m either a laughingstock at home or everyone hates me. Sometimes both. Me and my sisters, we were jokes and we didn’t even realize it.”
    One of the tears has escaped. I can see it on the lower lashes of my left eye, hovering there, threatening to fall down my cheek, on the side of my face that Eric can see no matter what.
    “I mean, that’s one of the reasons I’m here, because we screwed up so bad, and Daddy…”
    My voice trails off. I can’t talk about Daddy in a rational way with someone who knows nothing about magic.
    So I take another deep breath and this one calms me. Kinda.
    “What about your dad?” Eric asks, and that ruins my calm. I can’t talk about my dad. Not with him, not with anyone except Megan, my therapist, who flies in every Sunday to talk to me special. Mom won’t even talk about my dad.
    I shake my head and the dang tear wiggles, then topples off my lashes. It misses my cheek, though, and hits the back of my left hand, which, I just notice, is balled into a fist.
    “After that job,” I whisper, “they took everything away from me. My home, my sisters…” my magic … “everything, and now I’m here, and I don’t understand anything, and I’m about to start a new job, and what if I do the same thing? I don’t have anywhere else…”
    I can’t finish that sentence, because if I finish that sentence, I will cry.
    “Jeez,” Eric says. “Jeez. I had no idea.”
    He looks at me, and he sees how upset I am, and he finally reaches out an arm and pulls me into half a hug.
    The Johnson Family is pretty touchy-feely, but me and Eric haven’t been because, as Eric said to me the first time he refused to hug me, we’re not related at all and that just makes everything weird, right?
    I have no idea what the everything that is weird is, but he’s uncomfortable, which makes me uncomfortable, and right now (right then) I was all about disappearing into a corner.
    His arm is pretty tight around me, holding me against the scratchy wool of his plaid jacket (which smells faintly of wood smoke) and