Total pages in book: 184
Estimated words: 186756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 934(@200wpm)___ 747(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 934(@200wpm)___ 747(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
She was the girl who made my heart beat a certain way.
When you’ve lived your life by monitoring your heartbeats, keeping track of your pulse rate, you get familiar with it. You get familiar with how your heart beats, its cadence and its rhythm. Its triggers. Things that mess with your heart.
She’s one of them.
She messes with my heart.
She makes my heart race.
And I know what happens when I can’t control my heartbeats. The world starts to disappear. My vision gets blurry. The edges of my body start to strain, and it feels like I’ll burst out of my bones if I don’t find something to ground myself.
So I should stay away from her, shouldn’t I?
But it’s hard.
I thought my initial fascination with her would go away, but it hasn’t yet.
My brother was right.
I do want her.
To put it mildly.
To put it accurately: the want of her keeps me up every night and torments me every day. The want of her makes me feel like I have a thousand paper cuts all over my skin.
To put it even more accurately: It constantly makes me want to punch a hole in the wall. It makes me want to break my rule of one cigarette per day and smoke the whole pack away. The want of her keeps me on edge every second of every day, and I have to physically stop myself from hunting my twin down and hurting him.
And that’s why she’s dangerous; I knew that the first night.
Because she makes me dangerous.
Because if my twin brother is my biggest trigger, she’s my fucking kryptonite. Nothing, not one thing, has tempted me, threatened my control, fucking chipped away at my sanity, like she does.
So even though it’s hard, I’m not going to go after her.
She’s the very last girl on this planet I’d go after.
Instead, I’ll do what I’ve done for the past year: keep my distance, ignore all this, bury it somewhere deep, and go about my day. So I watch the games and prepare a strategy to discuss at tomorrow’s meeting. Once done, I go back to the hotel we’re staying at and spend an hour on the treadmill and then another hour with the weights like I do every night.
Structure is the key.
And if I hit the weights harder than usual and run at a higher speed than what I normally do, I don’t pay it any mind. Anything to put that conversation with my brother behind me. Anything to curb this want that seems to attack me the hardest at night.
When I go up to my room, I quickly shower and then do what I’ve been itching to do all day: grab a smoke and look for a book to read. I know I won’t be getting much sleep like I haven’t gotten any in the past year. I also know that I won’t be able to focus enough to make it past page one, but like always, I try.
Just as I’m settling down, though, I hear a chime.
It’s not my phone, it’s Shep’s.
In his usual fashion, he’d left it in the locker room. He has a habit of leaving things behind: his phone, his books, his soccer cleats. And since I always kept myself busy by doing chores, cleaning up after my siblings, I have a habit of picking up things he forgets. And so, in my usual fashion, I picked up his cell phone as I was leaving.
When I go to switch it off, though, I see the reason why it chimed up in the first place.
A text.
From her.
Isadora
Hey
And the anger that lives deep in me surges up.
The jealousy I’d felt the night she ran across the garden in a sheer white dress and fake wings only to end up in my brother’s arms rages in my veins.
It rages and rages.
To the point where the world starts to disappear.
Where it’s hard to remember things.
Remember who I am: the ice.
Or who she is: the fire.
It’s hard to remember that I have rules. That I need to stay away from her.
It’s hard.
So much so that before I know what I’m doing, I open the text message—we may not be similar in any way, but we do share a face and his password is facial recognition—and my fingers start typing.
Chapter 5
A few hours before the text…
She’s running toward him.
Her dark hair’s flowing behind her, along with her dupatta. Her traditional Indian-style lehanga is whipping around her legs. Her arm is outstretched toward him just as his. She’s trying to catch up to him. She’s trying to take his hand, but I don’t think she will.
I think she’ll miss it.
Because he’s on the train that’s leaving the station and she’s not fast enough to get there in time.
So when she does, when she does catch up to him and their hands meet and he grips her fingers oh so tightly and pulls her on board, I take a breath that I’ve been holding throughout this scene. A deluge of happy tears flows down my cheeks and my skin bursts with goose bumps.