Love Exactly Read Online Free Page A

background.
    “Shut up Paul. You want me to kick your ass?” Evan threatened.
    “Thanks, Evan,” I said.
    “For what?”
    “For everything,” I said with a shrug as I stood from the bed and felt the emptiness of the place without him.
    “Thank you ,” he answered. “I had the most amazing day with you.”
    “Of course,”
    “Promise me something?”
    “Anything,” I replied.
    “You’ll start to
really
write again.”
    It felt like goodbye…and I felt the glass of my heart shattering.
    “I promise,” I whispered.
    “I’ve got to catch the plane, but I promise we’ll talk soon.”
    “Okay,” I replied, and wondered if it was a promise he could keep.
    “Goodnight, Emma.”
    “Goodnight, Evan,” I whispered, and I heard the background noise of the airport as he listened to my breathing, then there was nothing.

Chapter 3
    The next month went by in a blur. It seemed my employer heard rumors I was associating with famous musicians and while they didn’t have proof, the paper suddenly noticed me. They were giving me assignments that weren’t high school sports, and were more prone to let me work on music-related articles: there had been an impromptu concert given at a local coffee house by a band I had never heard of, but was apparently popular, and then they sent me to meet with a local artist who’d just signed to a major label. Today I woke to find an email requesting that I go to the local music festival, Aphrodite’s Hymns, on the water. It had been sold out for weeks, so I wondered who they snubbed to give me a ticket. The editor probably hoped my rock star lover would be there, but I knew he was somewhere in Canada on tour. The invitation only served to remind me it had been a month since I had seen him and two weeks since I heard his real voice. We texted almost every day, but he was in so many different time zones that it seemed we always missed each other.  It took days to have a five minute conversation about how our days were going.
    “Earth to Emma,” Mark, my co-assignee said, waving his hand in my face. “You there?”
    I shook my head. “Sorry, Mark. Where to next?”
    He shrugged. “I have no clue. They have some special guest we need to meet.”
    “Right,” I muttered more to myself than him as we made our way to the next stage.
    I wasn’t a fan of crowds and this event was starting to get to me. There were people rubbing up against me and jostling my thousand dollar camera. Mark didn’t seem bothered by it as he plowed through the crowd in front of me, but then again, the only thing he had in his hands was a fifty dollar recorder that was the newspaper’s property. My camera had taken six months of slave labor and a month’s worth of rent to purchase.
    “So who’s this special guest—will they be performing?” I called to Mark over the sound of the music.
    “Not performing—they aren’t on the schedule. I don’t think Main even knows who it is. There was an anonymous tip,” he said, nodding towards my pocket. “Have you checked your mail today at all? Or are you too busy snapping pretty pictures?”
    I rolled my eyes at him and dug out my phone. I was trying not to look at my phone every five seconds because it made envy run through me. I opened the email, but it said nothing besides we needed to meet with some musician at Concourse A.
    “Well, that’s on the other side of the pier, right on the water,” I said, nodding over his shoulder through the thickening crowd.
    “You go ahead, I need some funnel cake. I’ll meet you there later,” he replied, and from the look on his face I knew he was abandoning me. He had no plans to meet this mystery person and worse, he had no interest in doing his job by helping me.
    “I guess I’m on my own,” I muttered to myself as I clicked on the world clocks icon. Wherever Evan was, it was somewhere in the early morning. I heaved a sigh and shoved the iPhone back into my pocket before heading to the meeting area.
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