Read Online Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner - Free Book Online

fine. You know, it’s actually kind of a relief,” she said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I didn’t see a strong long-term picture here, either.” She forced herself to look at him, blinking rapidly so the tears in her eyes wouldn’t spill onto her cheeks. “I hope you weren’t thinking of…you know…a future together. Because I wasn’t.” She crossed the room to where he was standing, feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped, the very portrait of the modern CEO-to-be, and took his hands. “I’m sorry if I misled you.” Her little speech left him flummoxed and silent, the way she’d hoped it would. She made a fast sweep of his place, gathering up her things—a hairbrush, a pair of running shoes, her copy of Smart Women Finish First —because she knew that having to see him again with a box of her stuff in his arms would send her right over the edge.
    “Hey,” he said, his voice so gentle that she knew she couldn’t look at him or she’d start to cry and beg him to let her stay. “You don’t have to do that now.” He looked miserable as he cleared his throat. “I know this has been a hard year for you. Your mother…”
    “Oh, that was a long time coming. We’d made our peace. Really. It’s okay!” she said. Toothbrush. Dental floss. Perfume from the Gap that she’d poured into the Boucheron bottle her roommate had tossed. She went to his kitchen for a plastic bag. “I’ll see you around. Take care now!”
    She made it to the elevator in his high-rise building before she had to lean against the wall. Breathe, she told herself, the way she had when the phone had rung four months ago and it had been Mary, twenty-six but sounding six years old, crying and calling her by her little-girl nickname. “Kay-Kay, Mommy’s gone.”
    Kelly forced herself off the wall in case Scott thought to stick his head out the door to look for her. She tucked the plastic bag under her arm, took the elevator down to the ground floor, crossed the campus, and found a bar, which was loud and hot and crowded. She pushed her way through the crowd and ordered a double vodka, straight up, and gulped it down like a kid swallowing cough syrup. She didn’t make a habit of this. She’d only done it once since high school, the night before her mother’s funeral, at a bar in Ocean City with her sisters beside her, and it hadn’t been vodka then but Maker’s Mark, their mother’s beverage of choice. Paula O’Hara had poured it into her Tab and plopped in front of the television set, the pink can in her hands, the blue glow painting her cheeks, watching Dynasty and Dallas and tapes of Days of Our Lives while the eight of them came and went.
    The bartender held the bottle in the air.
    “Do it again,” Kelly said. Stupid. God, she’d been so stupid, thinking that Scott Schiff was The One, turning down the other guys who’d asked her out, putting all her eggs in one biscuit, or basket, or whatever it was you weren’t supposed to put all of your eggs into. She gulped her second shot, ordered her third, and was reaching for her purse, trying to remember how much money she had, when suddenly there was a hand on top of her own.
    “Let me get that.”
    Kelly looked up and saw a guy in a navy-blue suit. Nice looking enough, she thought—a little pale and pinched, his eyes a little too intense—but who in the entire University of Pennsylvania, professors excepted, wore a suit on a Saturday night? A suit with—she looked down, feeling herself wobble on the barstool—wingtips?
    She peered through the cigarette smoke at the guy, who had pale-blue eyes, thin red lips, carefully combed brown hair that was already thinning a bit, and a prominent Adam’s apple above his blue-and-
gold tie.
    “What’s with the suit?” she said, yelling to make herself heard over the babble of voices and Hootie and the Blowfish issuing from the jukebox.
    “I like suits,” the guy yelled back. “I’m Steven