Lost To Me Read Online Free Page A

and need some sleep. I’ll catch you guys later.”
     
    “Catch you later,” Rob called as I opened the screen door on the side of the house. “If you don’t want Tabby anymore, I’m gonna hit that.”
     
    “Not if I do first,” Kyle said, freezing me in my tracks. I’d always known he thought she was hot. She flirted with him relentlessly. I took it in stride. That’s just how she was. Now I wondered if Kyle believed it had meant more. I didn’t know if he was mentally able to tell the difference, not that Tabby ever made her intentions clear.
     
    She and I had been together a little over two years, with temporary break ups every couple months. She was popular. I was popular. Everyone expected us to be together, and her parents were rarely home, giving us a lot of time alone. Who was I to complain?
     
    But over the last few months, I’d become less and less interested in Tabby. She had ulterior motives for everything, and if something didn’t work to her gain she wouldn’t do it. We had nothing to talk about, nothing in common. It was a waste of my time, despite the sex, and I was over her.
     
    I closed my bedroom door, flopped onto my bed and toed off my shoes. I closed my eyes, and Lauren filled my mind. My chest swelled thinking of her hand in mine, her lips against mine. She was hot. Looking into her dark brown eyes made me crazy, made me forget everything but being there and wanting her.
     
    I shucked my jeans and crawled under the blanket in my t-shirt and boxers, then reached over to my nightstand and flipped my alarm on to buzz at six.
     
    My head sunk into the balled up pillow I’d stuffed underneath it. Just as my mind drifted from consciousness there was a knock on my door, and Kyle entered my room.
     
    “Hey,” he whispered, “you asleep?” The light from the hallway silhouetted him and stung my eyes.
     
    “No. What’s up?”
     
    He sat on the end of my bed. “Did you mean what you said about Tabby?”
     
    I sighed and punched my pillow into shape before jamming it back under my head again. “Yeah, I meant it. I won’t ever be with her again. Why?” I knew why and clenched my jaw waiting to hear him say it.
     
    He dropped his head back, staring up at my ceiling. His fingertips drummed together. “I might ask her out if you don’t care.”
     
    There was no way Tabby would go out with Kyle. She may have before, but not now. He wasn’t the Kyle he used to be—athletic, intelligent, witty, the person I looked up to. A few months ago something in his head went haywire.
     
    Daily he’d complain about the guys at school talking behind his back, saying they were out to get him. It all blew up the day he falsely accused his Algebra II teacher of searching through his locker and took a swing at him. The principal and school counselor had a meeting with our mom, and a psychiatrist evaluated Kyle by the end of that week.
     
    The diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia.
     
    Kyle was hospitalized for two weeks, where they began medicating and counseling him. I’ll never forget the hollow and helpless feeling of seeing him almost catatonic from high doses of medication, and then agitated and raging when it wore off.
     
    The big brother I used to know was gone. The nineteen-year-old, sometimes child, sometimes adult, who sat on the end of my bed, took his place. I missed my brother—the brother he used to be.
     
    “Well?” Kyle said. His knee bobbed impatiently.
     
    “It’s Tabby. Why would you want to ask her out?” I said, stalling.
     
    What could I do? Tell him no? Send him spinning into the blackness inside his head, spurring him to smash his fist through doors and shatter pictures off the walls?
     
    “Because she’s Tabby,” he said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “She’s hot. And I like her.”
     
    “Wouldn’t it be weird going out with my ex-girlfriend?”
     
    His lips pressed tight, and I knew I was starting to agitate him. “Weird? What do you mean,