The Stone Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

lips need to be sticky when he sees how good the gloss looks.
    Sethie turns her back to him, steps into the apartment so he can see her. She picks up her purse from the dining room table, turns around to face him, her arm leaning on the back of a chair, her hip cocked. She is posing.
“You look nice,” Shaw says finally.
    Sethie smiles. “Thanks.” She grabs her coat from the back of the chair she’d been leaning on. “You too,” she adds, even though she knows she’s lying. Shaw’s handsome, but he doesn’t look particularly great now, in his clothes that aren’t right at all.
    It’s okay, Sethie thinks. She looks right enough for the both of them. Shaw says they should walk to Janey’s building. It’s only ten blocks. Sethie is freezing, but she agrees. She didn’t think they’d be outside much tonight; Janey said they’d take a cab up to Columbia. So Sethie had decided to wear a light coat; her warmer one isn’t nearly stylish enough.
    “Why aren’t you wearing gloves?” Shaw asks after a few blocks of walking side by side.
“You’re not.”
    53 “But the cold doesn’t bother me like you.”
Like it bothers you, Sethie thinks, correcting his grammar in her head.
“I don’t like gloves.”
    “Come here,” he says, putting his arm around her. “You can put your hands in my pocket.”
Now Sethie is very happy they have decided to walk to Janey’s instead of taking a cab. Walking, Shaw is holding her close. She could never tell him that he doesn’t actually keep her warm, that it would be easier, and warmer, to keep her hands in her own pockets, and really it would help more if he would just carry her purse for her. She would never say that; she would prefer to be cold because his arms feel so good around her. He wants to make her warm, and that makes Sethie happy.
After walking in the cold, the heat in Janey’s apartment hurts. Sethie’s fingers feel like they’re burning, and she goes straight to the bathroom and runs water over them, starting with cold water and warming it up slowly, until her hands feel normal again. Shaw joins the group in the living room: Janey, and two other guys who must have known Jeff Cooper too.
In the bathroom, Sethie looks at her face in the mirror above the sink. The wind wore off her lip gloss, but her cheeks are pink and glowing. Her eyes are red, but they look very bright and shiny. Sethie reapplies her lip gloss and wipes her nose. She opens and closes her hands a few times. She wonders how late they will be out tonight. She’s told her mother she’ll be staying at Janey’s.
54 When she emerges from the bathroom, Janey is fixing
    Shaw’s shirt.
“A shirt like this should not be tucked in, buddy,” she
says. Her blond hair is pulled into a tight ponytail. Sethie
thinks Janey’s cheekbones look expensive. Cheekbones
like Janey’s are exactly the kind a plastic surgeon would
give you.
“All right, all right, thanks, Janey,” Shaw says. Shaw
doesn’t blush, and he doesn’t seem embarrassed or even
bothered that Janey is fixing him and touching him. Sethie
always waits for Shaw to touch her first. It’s only polite, she
thinks, since she knows she always wants him touching her,
but can’t be sure when he wants her touching him. “Wait, something else,” Janey says, reaching for Shaw as
he is about to step away, maybe toward Sethie.
“Your belt,” she says, grabbing for it, shifting it to the
side like it should be. Easily identifying what had been
wrong with it. Sethie inhales; her throat is tight, her skin
itches. Janey’s fingers fold over Shaw’s waistband carelessly,
without any sense of the intimacy of it. Sethie isn’t sure
whether she’s jealous that Janey is touching Shaw’s waist,
or that Janey was able to identify what was wrong and fix it
so easily.
“There,” Janey says, satisfied, mussing up Shaw’s hair
as though for good measure. Then she turns to Sethie.
“Honestly, how can you let him out of the house like this?”
A