Time After Time Read Online Free PDF

fingertips and think about the idea. “Your parents actually said I could sleep on your couch?”
    Anna nods. “Just for tonight. They agreed that it was too late for you to walk home in the dark. I told them you’d call Maggie and tell her not to expect you until tomorrow.”
    “I can’t call Maggie,” I whisper in her ear.
    “I know. Just pretend to do it.” She gestures toward the kitchen and I see the phone hanging on the wall next to the microwave. I cover my face with my hand. I wish I’d just said good night, gone outside, and poof , appeared back in her bedroom ten minutes later like I originally planned to.
    “You can change in the downstairs bathroom.” She points to a door I’ve never noticed before. “I’ll go get you set up.”

I fluff up the pillow and twist around in the blankets. For possibly the tenth time in the last hour, I sit up, resting my hands on my knees and staring out the sliding glass door and into the Greenes’ backyard. According to the clock on the mantel, it’s a quarter after midnight.
    The last time I sat on this couch, Anna and I were wrapped up in this exact corner while Justin and Emma curled up on the opposite side. We watched a movie and took turns reaching into an enormous bowl of buttered popcorn that her mom made for us.
    I throw my feet onto the floor and stand up. I walk through the kitchen and into the hallway, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. Her parents’ door is open a crack. Anna’s is completely shut. I’m about to close my eyes and bring myself to her bedroom, when I think of the look on her parents’ faces tonight. Sure, if they caught me in their daughter’s room, I could just go back five minutes, ten minutes, and do it all over. But going up there at all feels like a violation of their trust and I’m already on thin ice here.
    There’s no reason to rush things. I have plenty of time to see her tomorrow, the next day. I turn around, shuffle back to the couch, and collapse with my head in my hands. After a while, I settle into the pillow again and close my eyes, attempting to empty my mind. I finally feel like I’m about to drift off when I hear something that sounds like breathing.
    I crack my eyes open, lift my head up, and see a silhouette in the doorway. “Oh, God. I’m sorry,” Anna whispers. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
    “It’s okay.… I wasn’t sleeping.” I sit up a little bit and gesture for her to come closer. She sits across from me on the coffee table. The sight of her, the sound of her voice in this room, fills me with relief. “What are you doing down here? What about your parents?”
    “I checked. They’re asleep. Trust me, once they’re out, they’re out.”
    She sweeps her hair away from her face and twists it around a finger, holding it against the back of her neck. “I couldn’t sleep either. I’ve just been lying in bed, staring at my map, and thinking that, for the last few months, we’ve had all this distance between the two of us, you know?” She lets her hair fall, and then pushes it behind her ears. “And it suddenly dawned on me that tonight—finally—there was nothing between us but a door and a staircase, and it seemed”—she blinks fast—“silly.”
    I nod. “That’s definitely silly.” Even though the room is dark, lit only by the porch light on the back patio, I can see her blush. “I’m glad you remedied that.” I say.
    “Yeah, me too.”
    “But there’s still more, you know?”
    Her eyebrows lower and pinch together. “What do you mean ‘more’?” she asks.
    I stretch my arm out in her direction, angling it so my fingertip comes within a centimeter of her knee. “There’s this distance here—a whole arm’s length—which is really quite a lot if you think about it. This is, like, seventh-grade-dance kind of distance.”
    She laughs quietly. “That’s not even silly. That’s just…unacceptable.”
    “Right? And then there’s this,” I say, pinching a corner