The Brokenhearted Read Online Free PDF Page B

shrugs. “Okay.”
    I move to stand beside him and aim my index finger at the top of our building. “We live in that tall building with the spire. Fleet Tower. On the top floor.”
    “Huh.” He shrugs, seeming indifferent, like it’s all the same to him. Like me and my address aren’t inextricably linked. “Must be nice to live somewhere like that.”
    I nod, relieved that he’s not mad at me for lying to him. “I guess.”
    “You guess ?” he grins. “I’m hoping it’s at least sort of nice.”
    He flips his hair out of his eyes and stares at me playfully. I open my mouth to explain, but it takes me some time to find the words.
    “It isn’t always . . . as nice as it seems,” I finish lamely, sucking all the flirtation out of the conversation.
    “No?” he asks, turning to face me, his face growing serious.
    A cold blast of metallic air hits my face, and I flip my coat collar up. “My sister drowned when she was seventeen, and my parents never really got over it. My mom, especially.”
    Gavin winces, then grabs my hand. “I wasn’t born yet,” I go on, conscious of his fingers resting lightly around my wrist. “The only reason they had me was to replace her. I think my dad hoped I would give my mom a reason to live again. But I’m starting to realize that no matter how perfect I try to be, I can’t ever make up for what they lost.”
    A car alarm bleats in the distance. Gavin pushes his hair out of his eyes again. When he stops to face me, the smile he wears is sad. “It must be tough to not only live your own life but to try to finish someone else’s.”
    “Sometimes, yeah,” I whisper, thinking of my mother’s episodes of immobilizing sadness, her month-long bouts of depression that come out of nowhere, dragging us all down with her. I’d give anything not to turn out like her. Scared of everything. Too sad to really live.
    “You’re enough, you know.”
    “Enough?” I blink hard, the image of my mother vanishing, replaced with Gavin’s face earnestly studying mine.
    He shrugs. “You’re amazing.”
    Gavin carefully tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear and bends his face toward mine. We both go quiet. I rise onto tiptoes and my hands find the nape of his neck, his hair blowing against my fingers. Our lips come together, gently at first. Desire surges through my body, so powerful it weakens my knees as the kiss becomes more urgent and we move closer together.
    I’ve kissed Will more times than I can count, but it’s never made me feel like this.
    Gavin pulls back eventually. His arms stay wrapped around my shoulders. “Sorry,” he says. But the dazed grin on his face tells me he’s not.
    “Don’t be,” I breathe, a dazed grin stretching across my face. I link a few of my fingers with his and steal one last look at the ballet dancer on the wall as we begin to walk back up the hill.
    The sky has turned a purple gray in the twilight. Across the river, the old-fashioned streetlamps are beginning to flicker on. Here on the South Side, with no streetlights to speak of, the dark begins to wrap around us like a cocoon.
    When we get to the top of the embankment, Gavin points toward the sky past the bridge. His hand finds mine again, the heat of it and the closeness of his body warming me. We watch hundreds of circus birds fly from west to east, a neon cacophony in the darkening sky.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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    CHAPTER 5
    “Will?” My voice echoes softly in the cavernous stone chapel the next day. The flying buttresses and soaring ceiling designed a century and a half ago are supposed to make God-fearing Bedlamites feel small and awestruck, and even though I know it’s a trick of architecture, it works.
    The chapel, I realize as I walk slowly up the aisle, is the last place I saw Will. I pause at the pew I was sitting in on Friday, the place where I realized I didn’t want to go