The Worst of Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

funny when someone’s talking to you but then you can look so sad.’
    ‘I’m not all that sad, it’s just the way my face looks,’ I said, covering as much of it as I could with my hands and hair. But on the word ‘face’, my voice cracked.
    ‘I know you don’t need rescuing,’ Jonah said carefully. ‘But how would you feel about joining my gang, anyway? And we’ll do brave and heroic things together.’
    ‘Your gang?’ I thought about Steve the slightly disapproving slightly beardy one, Lewis the slightlyweird one, and wondered how Jonah’s gang would feel about this invitation.
    ‘Yeah, very exclusive gang. Membership at the moment is just me, in fact, so if you say no, that would be slightly tragic, actually. You should probably say yes just out of pity for me . . .’ He raised both eyebrows.
    I felt hot all over. I took a breath and let it out without speaking, just so I could make the moment last half a second longer. He was beautiful, sitting there in the late, low sunlight, his shiny hair, big arms, clever smile taking away any choice.
    He leaned across the café table and kissed me. It was strange to kiss in the daylight when I hardly knew him. His neck smelled like lemon trees and his lips were endlessly soft. I felt as if I were floating. But thoughts of the grimness of the evening ahead piled into my head like bricks falling on me.
    ‘I have to go,’ I said. I must have said it a bit weirdly.
Don’t be weird. Not yet. Let him like you first. Fool him a bit longer.
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘Nothing.
Really
.’ I looked up at him, trying to smile. ‘I just lost track of the time. I said I’d be back by now.’
    ‘Hey, don’t look sad again. Is everything okay? I shouldn’t have —’
    ‘Everything’s lovely,’ I said.
Lovely?
I laughed athow lame I sounded. ‘It’s all lovely,’ I said even more goofily, trying to sound like I was making fun of myself.
    ‘You’re . . . kind of mad,’ he said, grinning.
    He brushed over the back of my neck, combing my hair through his fingertips. Just a little touch, it seemed to set off tiny fireworks all the way down to my ankles. I wished he was holding me. ‘Okay, I’ll let you go home, Cinderella. Are you doing anything tomorrow night?’
    I wanted to throw my arms out and shout it: ‘I’m not doing
anything
tomorrow night.’

Chapter 3
    On Friday night my best friends were at the party of the year and I was kissing a boy on the other side of town. Have you ever wondered what’s the point of kissing? If you think too hard about it, kissing doesn’t make any sense and it’s quite a disgusting idea. When it’s with someone you don’t really fancy it’s more
weird
than disgusting, because you start thinking too much. With Ian, it had started to get difficult for me because he was older than me and we’d been going out six months and his mates must have been asking him about it because my mates were asking me about it. You know,
it
.
    In fact, Ian hadn’t been pressuring me about going all the way. But I had been pressuring myself, worried about whether he was getting fed up of me. I played the conversation in my mind – that’s one of my worst habits, mentally rehearsing my future, but the real thingusually doesn’t turn out the same way. I tested all the ways of telling him I wanted to wait till I was sixteen until I could do it without sounding uptight or clichéd, but I never said them out loud, to him. We just kissed. We held each other. Sometimes he held me tighter and sighed through his whole body and I was afraid we couldn’t keep doing this for much longer. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I was just scared it would change us and scared of getting it wrong. I always thought it would happen, but we never had the conversation.
    Now I was kissing a different boy, and that conversation was all over my head, interrupting my thoughts like my mum banging on the door of my room. Ian had always been around, I’d known him for