Shatter (Club Grit Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

the botanical gardens I’d visited on a school trip had smelled and it lingered in my mouth the way my first kiss at those same gardens had, with a boy whose name I’d forgotten but whose touch, as clumsy as the absinthe was sharp, as sweet as the sugar, was anything but.
    “Is everything alright?” asked Lawrence gently, placing his half empty glass back down.
    I looked at him, and at the space between us on the bed, the edge of which we were sitting on, and I had the sudden urge to fill the space, and to be filled by Lawrence, but only one of those needs was satisfied. I scooted over, our shoulders touching, and took another sip of my drink before answering, “Everything and nothing.”
    “It sounds like maybe you need to relax,” said Lawrence, before pressing a button on a remote on another level of the cart. The lights dimmed and were replaced by another set of lights. I looked up and gasped: the ceiling of this section had been rigged so that it looked like the night sky. I don’t mean it was dark and there were pinpricks of light: it was as if I was under the stars in the middle of nowhere, except I’m pretty sure that there aren’t large beds and absinthe and dubstep remixes of pop songs playing in the middle of nowhere.
    Lawrence leaned back, hands behind his head, and shimmied further on the bed. I followed his lead and we just looked up at the stars for a while. They were blinking, like real stars, and a few were in different colors, like dark red and bright orange, and every few minutes, a shooting star trailed across the ceiling.
    “How does it work?” I asked. “Is it a TV or something?”
    “Actually, it’s a lot cheaper. Each of those stars is part of a group, which blinks at the same time, operated by a single controller. The blinking is actually set to the beat of the music outside, and because something fast is playing, they’re blinking faster. If someone were to play something like a slow sonata, they’d pulsate much more slowly. The planets just have different LEDs hooked up to the fiber optics, and the shooting stars are their own groups, which are set to go off in set paths in a certain way. Because there’s just spaces that glow, like pixels, instead of a bunch of stuff glowing, like a television, where even a so-called dark screen still lets off light, the stars look more realistic because they’re against a matte black background,” explained Lawrence.
    I turned to him. “You own the club, don’t you?”
    He chuckled and took my hand in his, and I didn’t pull my hand away. “How did you guess?”
    “I’ve never seen anyone up here before, someone called the bouncer to let us in, and you know a lot about that ceiling,” I said with a laugh of my own.
    “I guess the jig is up. You’ve caught me. I do own Club Grit,” he said, pressing his palms up into the air as if he was putting his hands up, admitting that he was guilty of lying through omission, as if my eyes were guns that could shoot bullets of judgment.
    I laughed and pressed my hands into his, pulling them down to our hips, and then, pressed the side of my body into the side of his. “It’s fine, Lawrence,” I said with a drunken giggle, a laugh steeped in vodka and good times. “It’s fine. I like the fact you have secrets, the fact that there are parts of you I don’t understand...yet. The fact that you aren’t boring, like the others.”
    “What others?”
    “The other others, the ones out there, the others out there, out there, the others,” I said sloppily, pointing out towards the crowd and staggering over to the sheer curtains. I pulled them back and looked out over the balcony, grateful for the handrails, because I knew that if I fell, it’d be fatal, from this high up in the air. Lawrence kept a hold of my hand and moved up behind me, placing his hands on my waist and pulling me close to him, his face grazing the top of my head.
    “You smell so good,” he murmured, and he took in a large