Suffer Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

a neatly divided notebook. I slide into the desk next to her and wait while she writes. And then I wait some more while I try not to look at her lips, which proves to be more challenging when she pauses in her writing and slicks on some shiny stuff, the palest shade of pink. Now I’m trying not to think about all the ways I could find out if her mouth tastes like a strawberry Starburst.
    Finally, she caps her pen and meets my eyes. Hers are large and the lashes are thick. And her skin is really smooth. But her
eyes
. . . Jesus, they’re like—
    â€œHello?”
    Oh, God. “What?” I ask, shaking my head to clear my brain.
    She twists her mouth. “I said, Are you Sam?”
    â€œOh. Yeah. You’re Hadley, right?”
    She nods and looks over her paper. “We have
Much Ado About Nothing.
Ever read it?”
    â€œYeah, I read it last—”
    â€œAre you friends with Josh?”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œJosh Ellison. Are you friends with him?”
    â€œUm. I just met him about twenty minutes ago.”
    â€œBecause he’s an ass.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œI realize you’re new here and everything, but just so you know, Josh Ellison is a dick.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œHe lies.”
    â€œDid you guys just break up?”
    She recoils back into her chair like I called her mother a whore. “What? No. I never dated him, I just . . .” She shifts her gaze away and her shoulders droop a little as she tries again. “He . . . I didn’t mean . . . he just—”
    She flinches and looks down, because my fingertips are resting on her hand. I’m not sure how the hell they got there, but I’m definitely touching her skin and she’s staring at me, her mouth parted and eyebrows lifted.
    I force myself to stare right back, pretty damn sure she doesn’t really want to talk about how Josh broke her heart or didn’t say hi to her at lunch or whatever. “So, Shakespeare?”
    She pulls her hand back and scratches the place where my fingers rested, like I made her itch or something. “Right. Sorry.”
    â€œNo problem.” I flip through my copy of
Much Ado.
“I like this one. It’s really funny and has all these crazy misunder­standings.”
    She looks at me for a moment longer before sliding her eyes down to her own book. “Yeah, I’ve read it. Benedick is kind of a jackass for most of it, right?”
    â€œHence his name. Love gets him in the end, though. Sucker.”
    She laughs. It sounds like that wind chime that used to hang from my grandmother’s front porch. God, I am a pussy.
    â€œHe and Beatrice both,” she says.
    We scan the play in silence for a while. I try to keep my eyes on the page, but my brain’s not registering a word. Hadley keeps crossing her legs and letting out these sighs and twirling her long hair around her slim fingers. This is so not going to work.
    I snap my book shut. “Okay, what act do you want to—”
    â€œDo you think that’s true?” Hadley blurts, her head tilted, mouth pursed.
    I stare at her for a few charged seconds, trying to get my brain to catch up with whatever the hell she’s talking about now. “Do I think what’s true?”
    She points at my T-shirt.
    I look down. I don’t even remember putting this one on. My room is a cardboard landscape right now. I’m lucky I found something that didn’t smell like the inside of my cleats. I pick at the gray cotton and the black block letters etched across my chest. APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH.
    I bought this shirt to piss off my mother. It’s the first line from her favorite poem, “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot. She did her graduate thesis on it, which is so ironic, it’s almost amusing. Or maybe it’s just incredibly depressing. April is the month she defended her thesis at Vanderbilt. It’s also the