Shatter Me Complete Collection Read Online Free PDF Page B

colliding currents of confusion, so desperate so desperate so desperate to be close so desperate to be far away. I don’t know how to move away from him. I don’t want to move away from him.
    I don’t want him to be afraid of me.
    “Hey.” His voice is soft so soft so soft. His arms are stronger than all the bones in my body. He pulls my swaddled figure close to his chest and I shatter. Two three four fifty thousand pieces of feeling stab me in the heart, melt into drops of warm honey that soothe the scars in my soul. The blanket is the only barrier between us and he pulls me closer, tighter, stronger, until I hear the beats humming deep within his chest and the steel of his arms around my body severs all ties to tension in my limbs. His heat melts the icicles propping me up from the inside out and I thaw I thaw I thaw, my eyes fluttering fast until they fall closed, until silent tears are streaming down my face and I’ve decided the only thing I want to freeze is his frame holding mine. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “You’ll be okay.”
    Truth is a jealous, vicious mistress that never ever sleeps, is what I don’t tell him. I’ll never be okay.
    It takes every broken filament in my being to pull away from him. I do it because I have to. Because it’s for his own good. Someone is sticking forks in my back as I trip away. The blanket catches my foot and I nearly fall before Adam reaches out to me again. “Juliette—”
    “You can’t t-touch me.” My breathing is shallow and hard to swallow, my fingers shaking so fast I clench them into a fist. “You can’t touch me. You can’t.” My eyes are trained on the door.
    He’s on his feet. “Why not?”
    “You just can’t,” I whisper to the walls.
    “I don’t understand—why won’t you talk to me? You sit in the corner all day and write in your book and look at everything but my face. You have so much to say to a piece of paper but I’m standing right here and you don’t even acknowledge me. Juliette, please —” He reaches for my arm and I turn away. “Why won’t you at least look at me? I’m not going to hurt you—”
    You don’t remember me. You don’t remember that we went to the same school for 7 years.
    You don’t remember me.
    “You don’t know me.” My voice is even, flat; my limbs numb, amputated. “We’ve shared one space for two weeks and you think you know me but you don’t know anything about me. Maybe I am crazy.”
    “You’re not,” he says through clenched teeth. “You know you’re not.”
    “Then maybe it’s you,” I say carefully, slowly. “Because one of us is.”
    “That’s not true—”
    “Tell me why you’re here, Adam. What are you doing in an insane asylum if you don’t belong here?”
    “I’ve been asking you the same question since I got here.”
    “Maybe you ask too many questions.”
    I hear his hard exhalation of breath. He laughs a bitter laugh. “We’re practically the only two people who are alive in this place and you want to shut me out, too?”
    I close my eyes and focus on breathing. “You can talk to me. Just don’t touch me.”
    7 seconds of silence join the conversation. “Maybe I want to touch you.”
    There are 15,000 feelings of disbelief hole-punched in my heart. I’m tempted by recklessness, aching aching aching, desperate forever for what I can never have. I turn my back on him but I can’t keep the lies from spilling out of my lips. “Maybe I don’t want you to.”
    He makes a harsh sound. “I disgust you that much?”
    I spin around, so caught off guard by his words I forget myself. He’s staring at me, his face hard, his jaw set, his fingers flexing by his sides. His eyes are 2 buckets of rainwater: deep, fresh, clear.
    Hurt.
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I can’t breathe.
    “You can’t just answer a simple question, can you?” He shakes his head and turns to the wall.
    My face is cast in a neutral mold, my arms and legs filled with