Every Little Kiss Read Online Free Page B

to outrun the memories of the middle-of-the-night calls when someone stopped breathing, and the pain in the family members’ faces as they helplessly watched him work.
    An icy wind blasted his face. He turned into it, welcoming the raw cold. His job should have made him grateful for every day he was alive and healthy. Oddly, it had done the opposite. It had numbed him, in a way, to his life. It could all get taken away so easily, so why get invested?
    It was part of why he kept himself cordoned off from any relationships that got too deep or too heavy. He often thought of his love life like those confetti cannons that fire at concerts. They went off with an explosion that took your breath away, and had you thinking the whole world was shimmering—only to realize that it had just been crumpled, wrinkled paper the whole time.
    That’s just the way it is , he thought—then immediately wondered how he’d gotten so jaded. He didn’t much like the hardened cynic who stared back at him every morning from the bathroom mirror.
    What might be altogether worse, though, were the ways in which the reflection was cracking—the ways in which he had to accept that his parents weren’t going to be around forever. His dad, especially. It was impossible not to see the fissures in his façade when he thought about it, and to feel as though he might rip apart like a fault line during an earthquake.
    He stumbled, nearly losing his footing. He threw out his arms, fighting for balance. When he righted himself, he took a deep gulp of the crystal air. His thoughts were too heavy, too coarse. He knew it. All this existential clamor about feelings was useless. It wouldn’t change a damn thing. He should stop right now.
    But at the same time, he felt a heavy weariness he couldn’t shake. God, but it was exhausting work, living with this reality that life was tenuous, even delicate. It could all end— poof! —in a single moment. A fire. A misstep. A piano falling from the sky.
    This truth had kept him on the on the edge of his own existence, in a way. It had given him his nickname at the station: Ninety-Eyed. “Eyed” was a homophone for IED. Every relationship he’d ever been in blew up within ninety days. Ninety- IED . He did it. He pulled the trigger and he knew it. The guys at the station knew it. And the parade of women through his life certainly knew it—if not at first, then certainly by the time they’d dusted off the rubble and gotten over the shock.
    For years, he’d enjoyed the nickname because he’d been happy. Hot sex for a while, then an explosion before things got complicated. But now he was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t happy as much as he was…indifferent. It was hard to be too bummed about anything when nothing really mattered.
    He grunted, straining under his pack. For the first time in memory, he was experiencing feelings he didn’t want to bat down. A tiny spring bubbled inside him every time he thought about Casey Tanner, and he was barely doing a half-assed job of damming it up.
    The memory of her soft hand inside his while they were trapped in the elevator had his heart pounding more than it normally would along this section of the trail. He followed a fork to the left into a cluster of birch trees, ducking amid low branches.
    If he’d been put off by her reckless decision to go down to the basement when they’d first showed up, he’d warmed to her when she said she was an accountant. He respected the logic of numbers. And then to find out she was working at Robot Lit was an added bonus. The place had been able to teach him to read, had emphasized the wonder of books when most of his teachers had simply shrugged off his struggle for literacy, saying the words would be there when he was ready. Robot Lit mattered to him, and he liked meeting people who felt the same way.
    It also didn’t hurt when those people had thick auburn hair and wore form-fitting sweaters that emphasized just the right curves.
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