Intrusion Read Online Free PDF Page A

this feeling only gets worse as time ticks on. The silence gets steadily heavier and heavier, with only the sound of my knife to punctuate it.
    When he speaks it’s practically a thunderclap—and not just because of the volume.
    There is also the content of his words, and the rambling way he says it.
    â€œYou realize I don’t even know your name. You’re in my house cutting me pie at a table no other person has sat at, and I don’t know what to call you.”
    My mind plucks at that one concept—no other person—as it might the one thread that will almost definitely unravel the rest of a sweater. Just me, no one else, only me, only me in his inner sanctum, I think, and then end up in a tangled mess on the floor.
    It’s a wonder I can answer at all.
    â€œIt’s Beth,” I tell him, but it takes an effort—so much so that I almost mispronounce my own name. Somewhere in that one syllable there is definitely an extra letter. It almost sounds like I said Beath , though he hardly seems to notice.
    His busy curiosity is already working on something else.
    â€œIs that with an a-n-y on the end or an e-l-i-z at the beginning?”
    â€œNeither—just Beth without anything extra. My parents were weird, I guess.”
    â€œNo more than mine. They called me Noah Gideon Grant.”
    â€œI don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”
    â€œYour lips say it’s okay, but your eyes say weird .”
    â€œMaybe I like weird. Maybe I like it a lot.”
    â€œI guess you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”
    I see the way he’s holding the fork I gave him, like a spear primed for the battle of casual conversation. I watch him eat all the crumbs around the slice, ever-neatening it until that triangle is perfect enough to put in a math test.
    And I love it, I love it all.
    â€œThat seems like a fair assumption.”
    â€œAre you not going to eat your piece?”
    â€œI’m too busy concentrating on you eating yours.”
    â€œI could stop straightening the corners if that would help.”
    â€œWho says I want to be helped?”
    â€œYou do—with your eyes,” he says, and I know immediately that he means something other than what we were just talking about. Suddenly, it isn’t about whether I need him not to be so odd. It’s about the other matter I need help with. My legs kick in the darkness behind my eyes, and the memory makes me flinch.
    And of course he catches it.
    â€œSorry, I know that was. . .not the right thing to say. I have some trouble turning off my compulsive need to assess and analyze,” he says, and I’m grateful.
    Now I have a way out.
    â€œAre you psychiatrist?” I ask with as much nonchalance as I can manage. I want to seem like I’m not changing the subject, even though I definitely fucking am.
    And now it’s his turn to look uncomfortable. He looks much the same as I think I did a second ago—as though he revealed something he didn’t quite mean to, or knows he now has to talk about something he’d rather avoid.
    â€œIn a roundabout sort of way. I taught subjects like that.”
    â€œWhere did you teach?”
    â€œAre we getting into those kinds of questions already?”
    He sounds restless, agitated somehow—but hey, he opened the door.
    â€œYou just raised the subject of my mental state. I think we probably passed being coy about our jobs around then.”
    â€œI didn’t mean to. It was a mistake, and I can see that it was awkward of me. As you might have guessed, I don’t have the ability to engage in casual chitchat. Somehow, I always end up talking about something so terrible everyone just wants to throw themselves off a cliff,” he says, and I see him roll his eyes at himself. I swear, some of his expressions are so big and so open I hardly know how no one guessed what he is really like.
    One look should have done the