If Only to Forget Read Online Free Page A

heads to the kitchen without checking to see if I’m following, and the casual way he acts makes me feel a little easier. Maybe if we act like nothing’s going on no one will be suspicious.
    Right.
    Tori stops me before I have a chance to get all the way to the kitchen.
    “Where have you been?” she asks, raising her pierced eyebrows suggestively.
    I roll my eyes even though my neck is so hot it feels like it’s going to explode. “Taking a shower before the water turns off.”
    She snorts and shoves a few strands of dark hair out of her face. Her eyes dart toward the kitchen, to where Riley just disappeared. When she looks back, her gray eyes are sparkling behind her thick, black frames.
    “Right. Not that a shower doesn’t sound good, but a piece of that sounds even better.”
    She’s the closest person to our age if you don’t count the teens—which I don’t because sixteen is way too young for me to have a normal conversation with—and I’d guess Tori’s around forty-one. There are a few streaks of gray in her dark hair, but the pixie cut is cute enough to take about seven years off. She has hoops in both eyebrows and a stud in her left nostril, then there’s the Monroe piercing. I caught sight of a few tattoos once when we were in the locker room together, too. I heard her tell someone she was an art teacher or something. I haven’t paid a lot of attention.
    I twist the bat between my hands nervously. I don’t know what to do or say in front of this woman now. Before I did everything possible to ignore the other survivors, but now things feel different. I’m not sure why sex with Riley opened me up, but it has.
    “Yeah, well, we were just trying to pass the time,” I say, focusing on my feet. My leopard print ballerina flats are looking a bit worn, and totally out-of-place during a zombie apocalypse.
    “I hear you.” Tori rolls her eye so far back all I can see are the whites. “Do it as much as you can. We’re all fucked, so you might as well find something you can enjoy until the inevitable end.” She blinks a few times, then turns away. “A shower sounds like a good idea.”
    Shit.
    I watch her walk away feeling a little bit like I’ve been slapped. I guess it’s not just Riley and me who have accepted the fact that we’re living on borrowed time.
    Double shit.
    I head to the kitchen only to find Riley heading my way. He has a plate in each hand, loaded down with steaming food. Eggs and bacon. Toast. Some fruit. All the food that will go bad if we don’t use it soon.
    “That for me?” I ask, not able to hide my surprise.
    “Of course. I need you to keep your energy up.”
    I laugh, which earns me a glare from another woman. She’s probably fifty, although she dresses like she’s seventy and this is 1992. The floral dress she wears was probably sold by K-Mart at one point, although I bet she bought it at a yard sale. She’s tall and thin with severe brown eyes that snap my way, full of the judgment of a person who has spent her life looking down on others. Her thin brown hair is pulled back into a braid that hangs down to her waist. She’s plain and as dull as her life probably was before this. I can picture her going to prayer meetings with other women who are just as eager as she is to rip her neighbors to shreds.
    I’ve encountered her type before and have no desire to be anywhere near her now that the world has come to an end, so I tilt my head to the other side of the room. “Let’s go over there.”
    Riley nods and smiles at the woman who is still giving us the evil eye. I don’t know him well, but I can already tell he’s a nicer person than I am.
    “What’s her deal?” I ask, laying my bat on the table as I slide into a chair. We’re far enough away now that she can’t hear me.
    Riley shrugs and takes a big bite of eggs. “Same as us.”
    “Right,” I say with a snort.
    “She’s lost her family, Kyra.”
    “That may be true, but she’s not like us. She still