Snowblind Read Online Free PDF

a stray lock of hair that hung across her eyes and she shivered again, their gazes locked.
    “I don’t play a lot of the songs I’ve written. I guess I’m a little afraid to share them. But you know my song ‘Stars Fall’?”
    She nodded. “I love that song.”
    “One night in high school I slept over my friend Willie’s house. Me and Willie and another friend, Aaron, had spent the day together, and it had been a great day. Maybe the greatest day, back then. Willie wanted us to stay over, to take sleeping bags and steal beer from the fridge in the garage and go and camp in the woods by Kenoza Lake. I got permission but after Aaron called home he said his mother wouldn’t let him sleep over. We all knew he was lying.”
    “He didn’t want to camp out or he didn’t want to drink?” Ella asked, letting the door swing closed, the two of them even more intimate now, just inside with the storm screaming beyond the door.
    TJ shrugged. “Maybe both. Thing is, that night cemented something for me and Willie. We didn’t see a bear or meet a bunch of girls or find secret treasure or anything. But we lay out all night by the lake and watched the stars. We talked all night about our families and about girls and about the future. I can still remember it vividly, but that’s because it felt vivid, even then. After that night, Willie and I were inseparable.”
    “Were?” Ella asked.
    A familiar grief ignited within him. “Iraq. He didn’t come home.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    For a moment, TJ said nothing. Then he reached out and took her hand, meeting her gaze again. “Things were never the same with Aaron after that night. He was still our friend, but he hadn’t been there, y’know?”
    Ella let out a breath and gave a tiny nod. “I think I do.”
    “I don’t want to be Aaron,” he said.
    “What…” she said, laughing softly. “What about your mother?”
    “The drifts are so bad out there, I’m not even sure the Jeep could make it,” TJ said. “I’ll call her and explain. She’ll understand.”
    Ella smiled. “Let me rebuild the fire, then. And you’d better get that guitar out again.”
    TJ grinned and bent toward her, hesitated for a second, and then brushed his lips across hers. No need to rush. They had all night.
    Ella locked the door to keep the storm at bay.
    Later, as she poked at the logs in the fireplace and the wood began to blaze with light and heat, he played “Falling Slowly” by the Frames, the one Ella was always asking for.
    And the power went out.
     
     
    Martha Farrelly loved her son, but sometimes it frustrated her that he treated her like an old lady. Sure, she’d been a late bloomer as a mother—she’d been thirty-nine when she gave birth to TJ—but she thought she was in excellent shape for a woman of seventy-one. She did yoga, went to the gym three times a week, and knew her way around a computer just as well as her son did, though that wasn’t saying much.
    The only reason she’d asked him to stay over tonight was that she was worried about getting out of the driveway in the morning. She had a man who plowed her little patch of pavement, but after even a moderate snowfall he tended to take his time, clearing the way for his bigger customers first. In a blizzard like this, there was no telling when he would show up, and Martha had a lot on her agenda for tomorrow, starting with her favorite yoga class at seven A.M. If the plow man didn’t show up, she wanted TJ there to dig her out, but he thought she was afraid of the storm.
    Silly boy, she thought. At her age, there wasn’t much that frightened her. Certainly not a snowstorm, no matter how many inches might fall. Her refrigerator and cabinets were full and she didn’t eat much anyway. If she ended up snowed in for a few days, it would just give her a chance to do some reading.
    When he’d called to say that he had gotten held up at the restaurant and the roads were looking ugly, she’d been a little perturbed, but