Jeremiah Quick Read Online Free PDF

the hill to keep stupid people from
tumbling down onto the freeway.
    The view was of the Aerial Lift Bridge and
the shipping canal that gave Duluth its claim as a tourist
attraction.
    The lights that dotted the residential
hillside paled against the ink-black smudge that was Lake Superior,
a yawning black mouth of riptide and nothing. Dare you dare you
dare you it chanted as Pretty wandered closer to Jeremiah,
tucking her hands into the pockets of her jacket.
    He pulled on her sleeve, maneuvered her so
she was between his body and the barrier, and leaned against her as
if holding her captive, her stomach pressed against the wall.
    He was solid behind her, long, sinewy, lean.
He was still too thin – and yet the weight of him had her sucking
in her breath, near panicked by his proximity.
    "Don't…" she wanted to say, and…
    "Leave my life alone"
    …but together they made perfect sense, for
she knew now he would NOT, and all her "don'ts" weren't going to
make any difference, because he would change every single one of
them to "please."
    Perhaps that was his magick. Perhaps she
would learn some of it.
    "Jeremiah Quick," she said, and the cool
autumn breeze lifted his name into the wind.
    "Shh," he said. "Names have power."
    She nodded. "So. This is weird," she said.
"You wanna neck in the car, see if we get caught? Cause a
scandal?"
    He laughed into her ear, a low chuckle, and
his hands massaged her shoulders for a second, then roamed down her
back, slid into her pockets, his fingers sliding over the backs of
her hands.
    She was acutely aware of the touch of his
skin, knuckles bulging like mechanical joints, curling around hers,
not just her own fingers, but all the muscles and joints of her
fisted hands.
    He worked her fingers free of their tight
clench while breathing into her ear.
    She hadn't realized the fingers of her left
hand were clenched around her phone, her lifeline, until he slid it
out of her pocket and flung it over the idiot-barrier and down the
hill.
    His arm settled then around her waist, firm,
almost clutching her against him, and he leaned his weight into her
more, until her breath was nearly gone.
    "You did not just do that," Pretty
gasped, feeling dread close her throat – all her obligations,
contacts, emails – everything, tumbled down the hill.
    The iPhone's Where's my wife feature
completely defunct.
    Yes. The truth. She'd been expecting her
husband to retrieve her before this thing with Jeremiah went too
far.
    Shit.
    Another truth: this thing had already gone
too far.
    He laughed, then pointed down the hill,
toward the lights. Her eyes followed as his fingers traced the
shoreline east, then a slight jab north, toward the old
neighborhood. "We didn't have them. Didn't need them. You don't
need it now."
    She mourned her phone, down there in the
weeds, abandoned. Or perhaps mourned herself, abandoned to this
arbitrary decision she had made to follow Jeremiah Quick without
knowing, exactly, what he wanted.
    "Fucker," she murmured. "I'd have given it
over to you, if you'd have asked. But I would have liked to tell my
husband everything's all right."
    "Really?" he breathed into her hair. "Lie
like that? How do you know anything will be all right, ever
again?"
    She shrugged against him.
    "Just a feeling," she said, and pretended,
for a few seconds, that he didn't hate her.
    "Still so shiny," he said. "Doesn't anything
slay you?"
    "Of course it does." She could taste her own
impatience. "I've had pain. I deal with it, let it flow into me,
through me, and then out again. I don't grasp it. I don't let it
hang around to stagnate, or allow it to poison me. I make my way in
the world, Jeremiah, but I don't let the world get in my way. And
yes, I am all right. I would go to the ends of the earth, give up
everything, to have this time with you. I just did."
    "Do you remember Martin Luther King Day?" he
asked. It was such an unexpected question that she laughed, despite
her panic about her phone being halfway down