Tether Read Online Free Page B

to waltz right back into that world because of some guy?”
    “Hey!” I snapped. I’d put up with enough of his crap. No matter what lies we’d told, we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend—we weren’t even
friends.
Aurora was the only thing knitting us together. I didn’t owe him an explanation. “You don’t know everything that happened to me over there. Don’t pretend you do.”
    “I wish he had died,” Grant said, clenching his fists so tight his knuckles turned white. “Maybe then I wouldn’t have to constantly look over my shoulder, wondering when they’re coming back for me.”
    “Screw you, Grant,” I spat out. It made me so
angry,
looking at him, completely fine, whole and intact and doing
nothing,
while Thomas suffered on the other side of the tandem. Even if Thomas was alive, alive wasn’t
okay;
it wasn’t
free.
How could Grant say he wished Thomas were dead? Juliana tried to steal my life, but I would never want her to be hurt or killed. “It’s your fault it happened in the first place!”
    “I knew it,” Grant said, gritting his teeth, as if he was holding himself back from saying something much worse. “You do blame me.”
    “He was going to send you back! If you hadn’t lost your temper and hit him, we would’ve been on Earth by the time Lucas and Juliana got there, and Thomas wouldn’t have gotten hurt!” I’d never straight up accused him of that before. Italways seemed like a waste of breath: making him feel guilty wouldn’t change anything. But if he was going to start whipping blame around, I wasn’t going to give him a free pass.
    “How the hell was I supposed to know that?”
    I kneaded my temples. He had a point. “You weren’t.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said, but it was hard to tell if he meant it.
    “No, I’m sorry,” I insisted. “I’m sorry you’re afraid—”
    “I’m not afraid,” he lied.
    “I’m sorry you had to go through what you went through. But you don’t get to tell me what to do, or what to think, or what to want.”
    “What happened wasn’t even a little bit your fault,” Grant said. “Even I know that.”
    “I was the one they needed,” I reminded him. “You were just the door into my life, and you suffered because of it, and I’m sorry. If I could go back and change it, I would.”
    “Would you really?”
    I hesitated. “No.”
    “Then maybe you do owe me an apology.” He sighed. “Look, I get that you think it’s none of my business, and maybe it isn’t. I’m not exactly an expert on being happy. I just don’t think—There’s nothing for you over there. You’re from
Earth.
This is where you belong.”
    “It doesn’t feel like I belong here,” I confessed. “Not right now. There are a lot of things I don’t have figured out, but I’m sure about that.” We kept having the same fight over and over again, and I was exhausted. All Grant wanted was to forget, to pretend it had never happened. Knowing that made me want to hold on to the memories even tighter. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.” It made me nervous to think of Grant wandering around the neighborhood after dark. I always worried he’d do something reckless.
    Grant looked around the deserted park. “This is where it happened, you know. He was waiting for me. He stepped out from behind that tree, and he looked exactly like me, right down to the clothes he was wearing. I thought I was hallucinating. You know what the funny part is?”
    “What?”
    “He looked as scared as I felt.”
    It wasn’t funny at all. Meeting your analog is like an electric shock. It cuts right down to the core of you like a spear through your chest and awakens a part of you that you never knew existed, something deep and ancient and true. It’s terrible and wonderful all at once, unnatural and so very right. That person is you, but also not you; it takes a while for our brains to comprehend the paradox, and even longer to believe it. By then, the damage might already be