Forever in Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

Indeed, such a time it was, it had effectively wrecked all the rest of her times.
    But could she have gotten over Kostos if he hadn’t been taken from her so forcibly? If she’d just been allowed, over the course of months or years, to discover that he snored or that he was prone to zits on his back or that his toenails grew inward and made his feet stink?
    She stopped. Wait a minute. Objection. She demanded that her mind rephrase its question. Would she have gotten over him more easily had he not been forced away? She was over him now. Yes, she still thought about him, but not nearly as much. No, she hadn’t yet been with anyone else, but…
    For the rest of class, Lena found herself looking again and again at the hand to the right of the canvas across the way and the shock of hair above it. He was a lefty, she realized. Kostos was a lefty.
    He worked through the breaks. She couldn’t get so much as a peek at him.
    The last pose ended and Lena packed her things away slowly. She hung around, pretending to be thinking (well, she was actually thinking, wasn’t she). At last she drifted into the hallway.
    And because the truth must be told, Lena (who didn’t care) loitered for fourteen minutes in the hallway until he finally came out of the classroom and she got her look at him.
    She did know him. Okay, no, she didn’t know him. But she knew of him. He wasn’t her year. Maybe one or two years older. She had certainly seen him.
    He wasn’t the sort of person you would forget, appearance-wise. He was tall, with raucous hair, dark gold skin, and some very good-humored freckles.
    His name was Leo, and she knew that because he had a reputation. Not for being a player, so far as she knew, but for being able to draw. And that, of all things, was a turn-on to one Lena Kaligaris, Greek virgin.
    Her small circle of friends and acquaintances at RISD, art geeks that they were, whispered most fervently about the people who could or couldn’t, did or didn’t. Draw, that was. And this young man of the hair and hand stood among the few, almost legendary people who could.
    She watched him with a surprising little thrill in her stomach and waited for him to notice her. How often did she want that? Not often. What she really wanted, she informed herself, was for him to look at her in a particular way. It wouldn’t matter if he had a serious girlfriend or wasn’t even into girls at all. She wanted him to give her the look, the slightly extended appraisal that would drain him of his mystery and transform him into a regular person. (She did want that, didn’t she?) It was this familiar look that confirmed her peculiar power, easily possessed and rarely wanted.
    These were the things that freed her. These were the things that made her bold.
    But he didn’t look at her like that. He didn’t look at her at all. He fixed his eyes ahead and he kept on walking, bringing to mind for the second time that afternoon the memory of the brown wedge boots.
    “I got in.”
    Brian slipped the news in between the mu shu pork and the fortune cookies.
    “You what?” Tibby demanded, unsure she had heard him properly.
    “I got in.”
    “You did?”
    He looked slightly sheepish. He cracked his fortune cookie in quarters and then eighths, and then it was a crumble.
    “That’s so great! I knew you would. How could you not?”
    Ever since Brian had hatched the idea of transferring to NYU from the University of Maryland, his grades had been faultless.
    “I just want to sleep beside you every night,” he had told her back in December. “That’s all I want.”
    She knew he would get in. She knew he would make it work. That was how he was.
    “What does it say?” he asked, pointing to the fortune in her hand.
    “ ‘Beware the prevalence of ideas,’ ” she read. She crunched on her cookie. “My lucky numbers are 4 and 237. How about yours?”
    “ ‘You are sexy,’ ” he read.
    “No way! It doesn’t say that. Let me see it!”
    He smiled