Episode One: Look Back in Anger Read Online Free PDF Page B

image alone had chased away all the happy moments with her mother, her father, birthdays, and Christmases combined.
    When she tried very hard to recall those happy times, those nostalgic pictures every young girl had a right to, there was only Arles. Arles’s smug smirk in the darkness of her bedroom. Arles screaming a fit so violent it made her daddy cry. Arles dangling her dangerously from her bedroom window by the waist, just before he was shipped off to boarding school for being too dangerous to have around the other children anymore. And of course, his return days before his mother, her stepmother, had mysteriously fallen to her death. She had many memories of fear and Arles, but what disturbed her more was the memory of his touch, scalding her skin with a deceptive gentleness that tormented her still.
    She was haunted by the ghost of his fingertips trailing her flesh, tainting every attempt at a normal relationship with men thereafter—God simply hadn’t made another set of hands like Arles’s.
    Ugh, she was as much of a sicko as he was.
    Sam sat in an overly plush chair before her father’s desk, her nose and mouth completely hidden by a pulsing brown paper baggy used to control her breathing. She carried them with her now, and apparently, when they’d seen fit to relieve her of her lab coat and drenched scrub top, they’d thought enough to pull one out for her to use. She didn’t want to think about it too much, since doing so meant she had to think about the missing lab coat and the fact that she was now wearing the jacket to Arles’s black suit. Arles’s jacket and nothing separating it from her feverish skin but a flimsy bra with painted bunnies doing lewd and inappropriate things to one another on it. It was even pink. No, she didn’t want to think about that at all.
    “I have to say that’s the first time I’ve had a girl swoon in my arms quite so literally,” Arles said.
    Sam wasn’t sure what annoyed her more, the cloud of smug surrounding him, or him perched on the arm of her chair, looming so closely.
    “I know I’m dead sexy, but you’re going to have to learn to keep it under control.”
    She was certain, however, that it was the smirk then, more than his words, that made her lose it, sending a back-fist hard into his chest. Once she started, she continued swatting until he relented, and without abandoning his amusement, moved away from her and her chair.
    “Vasovagal syncope, triggered by exhaustion, you ass.” It was difficult to sound fierce when one had a paper-bag muzzle, but the glare she shot him all but dared him to debate her. “You have no idea the day I have had. It happens. Mostly when I am stressed.”
    “It’s true,” Her father interjected softly. “Couple of weeks ago she collapsed on a service call.”
    In her defense, she was sure that call would have been stressful for anyone. Telling two children that the animal they grew up with was too out-of-date a model to find replacements for, telling them it would be best to just retire the animal and get a new one… It was heartbreaking.
    Arles’s eyes narrowed and the humor left his face in favor of morbid interest, or was it concern? It was hard to tell with him, but he was looking her over like a bug under a microscope. She had to fight the urge not to squirm like one, a battle she lost as he began to draw nearer.
    “Sam? What exactly is wrong with you?”
    “That’s none of your business.”
    “Of course it is.”
    “It is not!” She ripped the bag away and tossed it to the side of the chair. It wasn’t like it was doing her any good anyway, considering. “My health has nothing to do with you, Colfter, and unless you’ve some business with my father, I’d like you to leave.”
    “No.” His lips pursed in that thoughtfully argumentative manner that suggested any moment he would say something to make her absolutely furious. And she’d be forced to beat him senseless with a paperweight. Far be it from him