Solving for Ex Read Online Free PDF Page A

freaking grinned at me. Like he was gloating.
    “Kristin and Bruce are not going to be happy about you being in the house,” I grumbled as I led him to my front porch with me, “but I don’t trust you not to run for a second. And I’m not going after you again.”
    Finally, huffing and puffing, I made it to our blue-painted front door, pushed down the handle and…
    “Oh, shit,” I yelled at the rocking chairs and little glass table that lived on the porch. “Shit. Locked out.”
    I reached under the mat for the spare key, and found a key-shaped outline on the concrete, but no key there. That would be, I realized, because I’d grabbed it when I went for a run the other day, stuffing it beneath my sneaker’s insole—and left it there. Locked inside the house.
    I surveyed the situation. Giant, runaway-prone dog. Slobbery shirt, muddy shorts. Aunt and uncle gone. Starving. Locked out. I only had one choice.
    I craned my neck up to the Thomas’s house. My eye automatically went to Brendan’s window. Every single time. Once in a while, I’d see his thin silhouette changing shirts, his hands running through his hair to unconsciously re-mess it when the shirt was down. Then my heart would trip and I’d have to take a deep breath to keep myself from daydreaming about being in there with him.
    Yeah. I was definitely pretty far gone.
    The light in his window was on, and so was the one in the hallway below it, so at least I knew he was awake. I glared at Hamlet and yanked on his collar. “Come on. And don’t you dare pull me over again, you mutt.” I ruffed the top of his head with my other hand and he gave me that goofy happy dog look again, and trotted back to his house alongside me. Like he was just out for a stroll to retrieve me, instead of me being the one to take him back home.
    I opened the heavy glass door to the Thomas house, but when I raised my fist to knock on the main door, it pushed open the slightest bit. Hamlet nosed it the rest of the way open and barreled in, his nails skittering against the polished hardwood floor.
    “Hello?” I called up the stairs, and waited a second or two. I was about to turn around and go home, wait on the porch or something, when my stomach growled. Then I remembered the cabinet full of junk food in the Thomas’s kitchen—a studier’s paradise. It didn’t make any sense, but after a summer full of home-baked muffins and cookie bars from my mom, there was something about the processed, packaged goodness of a strawberry frosted Pop-Tart that made my mouth water.
    I traipsed into the kitchen, which was still, quiet, and lit only by whatever summer morning’s sunshine filtered through the curtained windows. The countertops were as pristine as the floors, which was insane considering that at least one teenaged boy was living in the house at any given time. The only thing that I saw there was a wineglass. Must have been left out from the previous night. I could imagine Hamlet propping his paws up there and knocking it over, into the built-in range top that it sat next to, so I moved to pick it up and put it in the sink. As I got closer, I noticed that it had a fresh water ring around the base, and the liquid in it was cold and damp to the touch.
    Someone had poured it this morning.
    A voice echoed from the upstairs, a lazy, low, yet loudly feminine cadence. Brendan’s mom. I hadn’t seen her yet, and I was excited to say hi, so I grabbed a shining foil pack of Pop-Tarts and walked back around to the stairs. But as I got closer, I heard her uncontrolled tone interspersed with a calm, quiet one—Brendan. Then, a high-pitched, crazy-sounding laugh, and Brendan saying, “Come on, Mom.”
    I made it halfway up the stairs and just barely saw Brendan closing a bedroom door behind him, leaning against the wall next to it, and blowing out a breath. He didn’t look like my carefree Brendan. He looked stressed. Exhausted. Sad.
    “Hey, what’s going on? You okay?” I couldn’t