Read Online The First Night by Sidda Lee Tate - Free Book Online Page A

The night before, after a long day at work, the most she could manage was dragging the home-gym boxes from the garage to the spare bedroom. On Saturday morning, this was the last thing she wanted to do, but she’d made a promise to her morning coffee to have it assembled and be working out on it by noon. She had three hours left and was staring failure in the eye.
    She also realized the lone bookshelf in the room would have to go in order to make room for the completed project, and she could’ve kicked her own ass for not moving it before unloading all the parts to the gym. She looked around the small room, hoping for a way not to have to rearrange the area, but it had to be done. “Gah!”
    She reached up, grabbing the straggles of hair that had fallen from her messy bun, retied it, and got busy clearing the shelves, placing the literature in one of the equipment boxes…fiction, non-fiction, high school yearbooks…her senior yearbook. She smiled. It had been so long since she’d opened the cover, probably the summer since she’d graduated. She picked up the book and held it to her chest as she went to the kitchen for more coffee. She filled her cup, cleared a small stack of books from the table, and set her senior memories down, allowing the pages to fall open at random.
    Not believing what she was seeing, Kayla blinked hard at the photograph in front of her. On the “Who’s Who” page, directly above the word shyest sat a teenage boy and girl. Her stomach jerked and twisted, and her grip on the coffee cup was making her hand cramp. The longer she stared at the picture, the more faded the girl became.
    She found herself not breathing and sucked in air, at the same time, reading the name under the caption. Luke G. Knight …Gannon…his teenage self stared back at her from the page. She sipped her coffee and glanced at the clock. Thirty-six hours. It had been approximately thirty-six hours since she allowed her thoughts to settle on him and there he was, a sixteen-year-old kid ruining every bit of the progress she thought she’d made.
    That boy, the one who cooked her pancakes every morning in home economics class…his eyes…his smile…the one she had looked for in the halls every day during her senior year. The one guy she kept in the back of her mind, sometimes bringing him to the forefront and asking herself ‘what if?’ He was Gannon? No.
    She flipped to the autograph pages in the back, remembering she’d asked him to sign it. Had she read his words afterward? She wasn’t sure, she couldn’t recall as she scanned the scribbled mementos from her classmates. At the bottom right corner of the very last page, she found the message, her breath halting deep in her chest as she read it aloud. “Kayla, I will never forget you. Luke . ” Simple, yet complicated. She sighed and read the words again. The innocent statement that somehow seemed more like a promise hammered over and over in her mind.
    Slamming the book closed, she propped her elbows on the table and let her head fall into her hands, splaying her fingers across her forehead and to the edge of her hairline. How could she not have known? It was as obvious as the golden beams of sun shining through her windows. She could see it now . Gannon and Luke, the sweet boy from the picture, were the same. But did it make a difference? No!
    Okay, maybe. But it didn’t matter. She’d let him please her again and then she’d stormed out of his bar, ignoring him as he yelled out for her to stop. Kayla shook her head and dropped her hands to land on the book cover.
    Her front yard, she needed to see the white and lilac flowers he’d planted. She wanted to see the grass he’d cut and the hedges he’d trimmed. She should have thanked him. Instead she threatened to not pay him. She scooped up the book, tucked it under her arm, and went to the living room window, but it wasn’t her yard that caught her attention. A huge basket of red tulips sat in the center of