Anastasia Forever by Joy Preble

Author:Joy Preble
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781402268755
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Wednesday, 3:30 am

Anne

I cry for the first few blocks. Then I text Tess. I’m not surprised when she doesn’t respond. It is, after all, three in the morning. Normal people are in their beds sleeping, not almost having sex while in someone else’s body, confronting cranky Russian mermaids, and getting kicked out of their house. People who aren’t me.

Ethan lights a cigarette and smokes half of it, blowing smoke out his open window. I choose not to complain. The “I could die from secondary smoke” discussion is not where I want to expend my energy right now.

“We need to get some sleep,” Ethan says. We’re in Evanston now, headed in the general direction of his apartment, but neither of us has committed to actually going there.

“We need lots of things,” I say. It comes out much sharper than I mean it to. Probably I should apologize. But even talking is an effort right now.

Two more blocks.

Ethan breaks our more than cranky silence. “Pancakes.”

“What?”

He points. A neon IHOP sign blinks in the dark about a block ahead of us. “Do you want pancakes?”

“What?” I repeat. Is he actually offering to take me to breakfast? At 3 a.m.? In the middle of a crisis of legendary proportions?

“They have lots of syrup choices. Do you like syrup? I don’t think we’ve ever discussed it.”

Syrup?

Ethan pulls to the curb near the IHOP parking lot. The look on his face says that he is serious about the syrup question.

“If I take you home with me right now,” he says quietly, “we’ll both be uncomfortable. I want to take you home. I want you to sleep in my bed, and I want to hold you and keep you safe. I want to be there when you wake up in the morning. I want to brew you a pot of tea and make you toast with butter. Then I want to spend a day with you. We’ll walk by the lake and go to a museum, and later we’ll walk some more and we’ll talk. The sun will shine and we won’t be running and you won’t be scared. That’s what I want to do. But as none of that is going to work right now, I think we’re left with pancakes.”

It is the sweetest, most romantic thing he’s ever said to me. It’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me. Possibly that anyone has ever said.

“You want to take me for pancakes?” Maybe it’s a trick. Some Baba-Yaga- or rusalka- or Viktor-induced delusion that’s going to go poof as soon as I agree to IHOP.

But Ethan nods and shifts the car in gear. In no time at all, we’re walking into the brightly lit IHOP, being seated at a booth and handed menus. We order pancakes. Buttermilk all around.

“They used to have more choices.” Ethan points at the four little syrup pitchers tucked against the wall of our booth. “I liked boysenberry. But I suppose it really was wasteful to put all that out on each table.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.