The One Worth Waiting For Read Online Free PDF Page B

rugged against the pale sheets, images from the past hovered at the edges of her mind. Garret had always been larger than life, not only because of his size and strength, but also because of the crackling air of raw energy that had surrounded him everywhere. When he’d grinned at her, she’d felt her heart explode like a fresh-bloomed rose in her chest.
    It had seemed to her that he’d grinned for her alone.
    Sometimes, when her mother had passed out drunk on the living room sofa, and her sister had cried herself to sleep in the room next door, she’d lain in bed and replayed each and every one of those grins in her mind like a precious treasure. And that day he’d taken on Tank Nemeth and all the other kids who’d made fun-of her and her sister, she’d barely been able to sleep with the pure joy. Someone had stood up for her. Someone had actually cared.
    It didn’t matter that he rarely spoke to her, after all, he was two years older and the hero of the school. It didn’t matter that the few times she saw him, she couldn’t get a single word past her lips. All that mattered was the fact that he’d grinned at her, and each grin was a spark of color firing into the black-and-white solitude of her life.
    She’d loved him passionately and purely and never expected him to feel anything else in return. Until the night she’d appeared at his house to walk with him to the bus stop.
    She swallowed heavily, her hazel eyes blinking back to the present and the sight of a wounded Garret lying in her guest bedroom, an IV needle stuck in his hand.
    And she forced herself to recall the other nights, the ones after the bus stop, when she’d lain wide-eyed into the early-morning hours waiting for him to appear. The nights she’d heard her mother’s drunken mumbling, and thought that this night, this night he would surely appear and take her away at last.
    This night he would save her. Night after night after night. But each morning she opened her eyes to her own bed and the sound of her mother’s groans echoing down the hall.
    She pushed away from the doorway, walking squarely into the room. Immediately, Garret’s dark eyes opened.
    “How do you feel?” she asked quietly, automatically pouring him a fresh glass of water from the pitcher beside the bed. Her hands trembled only slightly.
    He didn’t say anything, but his gaze latched onto the cold, tantalizing water. In response, she brought the glass to his lips and let him drink deeply.
    His head fell back when he was done, a small sigh escaping the parched tightness of his throat. He felt like a stone, trying desperately to absorb water before it evaporated away from the searing heat. She placed the back of her hand against his cheek, and he closed his eyes against the coolness of her touch.
    “Better,” she murmured, “but still hot.” A thermometer appeared in her hand and was unceremoniously stuck between his lips. His dark eyes glittered, but he didn’t say anything.
    In his fever-soaked visions, he felt he’d seen her a million times and in a million different ways. He’d seen her as the serious girl, walking the halls with her hunched shoulders and long brown hair. He’d seen her at the bus stop, her hazel eyes so luminescent in the rain, her pale face accepting. She always looked sad and strong in his mind, and those eyes had haunted him across more miles and more years than he’d ever intended.
    She plucked the thermometer from his mouth and held it up to the light. As her gaze found the red mercury line, she frowned and tiny lines appeared around her eyes.
    “A hundred and one,” she declared. “Better, but we have a ways to go.”
    “The bus stop,” he said, the words gravelly and low as they rumbled across his cracked lips. Her eyes met his warily.
    “Water?” she asked smoothly.
    He closed his eyes and searched along the fire-seared edges of his mind. “Do you remember the bus stop?” he whispered, knowing only that he had to know. So many