Read Online Pull (Push #2) by Claire Wallis - Free Book Online

strong. I down a dram of Scotch and head back to bed, knowing Jennifer Lawrence and her red push-up bra will not be back tonight.

Chapter 11
    David—Present Day
    I twist the key into Emma’s door, and it clicks open. It’s dark, but the clock on her microwave tells me it’s nearly two thirty in the morning. I need to sleep. Exhaustion is setting in, and if I don’t shut myself down, I’m going to suffer tomorrow.
    I walk into Emma’s room and see her sleeping on the bed. She’s turned over onto her other side, but there’s no indication she woke up. Nothing that tells me she knows I even left. Her naked body is spread down the length of the bed, one leg tossed over the other and her red hair spilling across the pillowcase.
    Looking at her, I see possibilities. I see some kind of future. I see a grown-up version of me. He’s taking a miniscule step out of the shadows and into real life. I smile a little at the thought as I undress and slip into bed next to her. My arms fold around her as I push the front of my body up against her back. She stirs a little and snuggles back into me. I brush my face into her hair and go to sleep.
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    Before I know it, Emma’s alarm clock blurts out the arrival of Friday morning. Despite its deafening volume, she’s perfectly still. I lose it for a second, thinking maybe the delayed pulmonary edema they mentioned at the hospital had settled in overnight. Maybe the x-rays were wrong. Maybe there was water in her lungs after all. I quickly raise my hand and press it flat against her back, feeling her lungs fill and empty, confirming she’s still here with me. I rub her back softly. A few minutes pass before she lifts her arm and smacks at the clock, shutting it off and groaning lightly.
    “Good morning,” I say as she rolls her body over to face mine. “How are you feeling?”
    “Sleepy, but good,” she says with a sexy little stretch. “Where did you go last night?”
    Oh. She did wake up.
    “Sorry. I hope I didn’t freak you out by leaving. I didn’t want to wake you, but I also knew that if you knew where I was going, you wouldn’t let me go.”
    She twists her head to the side just a little bit and narrows her eyes at me in question. “Why? Where did you go?”
    “I went to see Matt,” I say as I brush her cheek. “I needed to talk to him before you saw him at work today. I didn’t want you to have to lie to him. This whole thing is my responsibility, and I wanted to be the one to explain it all to him.”
    “Oh,” she says. “And here I just thought you went up to your place to take a shower.”
    “Nope. I still smell like a fish. Sorry.”
    “So, what exactly did you tell him?”
    I tell her everything. I tell her that Matt now knows the truth about how her brother Evan killed Michael, a fact he could easily confirm by reading a newspaper if he felt so inclined. And then I assure her that that particular piece of information is the only true thing I told Matt. I didn’t tell him about how getting rid of Michael was my idea and how I tried to pay her brother Ricky to do it. I didn’t tell him that Ricky, in turn, manipulated Evan into swinging the bat and then blackmailed me into paying for his silence. Nor did I tell him about what I threatened to do to Ricky if he’s ever stupid enough to tell the cops about my initial offer. And I sure as shit didn’t tell him the real reason we were up on that bridge.
    Instead, I told Matt a bunch of lies. I tell Emma how I lied to him about fake paperwork from a lawyer, and about her brother paying me to get rid of her, and about how the whole thing was staged so Ricky would think she was dead. I tell her every single little detail about the string of lies I told Matt, so that if he does ever bring it up, she’ll know precisely what to say.
    As I’m talking, she’s watching me