Read Online Endless by Amanda Gray - Free Book Online Page A

in script that probably wouldn’t have been legible even if it had been in English. The paper, yellowing and curling at the edges, felt dry and fragile, like it might turn to ash if she held it too hard. She tipped it carefully toward the arched window.
    “It looks like … Russian?” She looked up, meeting Ben’s eyes. “Or maybe Polish?”
    “What? You’re a linguist?” he said sarcastically.
    “No.” She tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “I’m just saying. The characters are different from ours. It’s not a regular alphabet, you know?” She handed the papers back to him.
    He looked at her gloved hands. “Do you always wear those? It’s, like, a million degrees up here.”
    She shrugged, turning her attention to the stuff strewn across the floor around him. “What is all this?”
    He sighed. “Junk, mostly.”
    “Your junk or someone else’s junk?”
    He set the papers onto a pile to his right, reaching into a box for something else. “Someone else’s. We don’t usually stay in one place long enough to have junk.”
    She caught something in his voice. It was bitter and full of loss, but when she looked into his eyes, she saw regret there, too. He already wished he hadn’t said anything.
    “You guys move around a lot?” Jenny prodded.
    “You could say that.”
    Wow, cryptic much? Jenny thought. He obviously didn’t want to talk, so she reached into the box, feeling around until her fingers grazed something smooth and scratchy. Grabbing ahold of it, she pulled her hand from the box, surprised to see an old wool fedora in her fingers.
    “Hey! Look at this!” She shook it against one palm, trying to shake the dust free. She put it on her head, pulling it down mysteriously over one eye and bracing herself for criticism as Ben surveyed her silently.
    But all he said was, “It’s not too bad.” He plucked it off her head and put it on his own. “But it probably looks better on me.”
    “What?” Jenny laughed, wondering if that was really a smile fighting for life on Ben’s lips. “Okay. I see how it is. You do have rights to this junk, after all. But I totally have dibs on the next one.”
    “Only if you can find it first,” Ben said, already lunging for a trunk near the wall.
    He wasn’t exactly nice. He didn’t cross the line into friendly or anything. But he did let her work next to him, pulling stuff from the boxes and trunks and putting them in one of four piles: Keep, Give Away, Throw Away, and I Have No Idea. Sometimes they talked, though he was careful not to talk about himself.
    Jenny didn’t mind. She wasn’t anxious to spill all her dirty secrets, either.
    The silence stretched between them with nothing but an occasional burst of laughter from the kitchen or a bird fluttering in the eaves outside the window. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as it should have been, considering that they didn’t really know each other.
    Jenny studied him when she thought she could get away with it, taking in the strong jaw and broad shoulders, the eyes that flashed as blue as the sea even in the half-light of the attic. He totally wasn’t her type. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t cute.
    It was easy to get lost in the old stuff they were finding, and from the look of concentration on Ben’s face, she could see that he liked it, too. There was a lot of paper with writing in the strange language they’d seen in the first stack, and even some old photos of serious-looking people dressed so formally that it made Jenny itch just looking at them. There was also a lot of vintage clothing, and by the time they’d reached the last box, Jenny was draped in an old boa, wearing a vintage bed jacket with the crushed top hat, and gripping a cigarette holder—carefully wiped down with the end of her shirt between her teeth.
    “I think we’re almost done.” Ben reached into the box, his arm swallowed past his elbow.
    “Is there anything left?” Jenny wasn’t ready to leave their fairy-tale