Read Online The Whole Golden World by Kristina Riggle - Free Book Online

flashbulbs, as if her friend was on a red carpet somewhere. He had a lean, long face that made him look—now that she was paying such close attention—nearly regal. Elegant.
    Morgan shifted closer on the overstuffed den couch. She tilted her ear toward the upstairs and heard nothing from her brothers. She had swallowed her indignant pride not to bring up Connor’s “fag” remark because she knew that out of sheer obnoxious stubbornness, Connor would find a way to say something like that again tonight, just to prove Morgan was not the boss of him. As her reward for not bossing the twins, they were staying out of her way. Morgan would thank them, if that were the kind of thing the three Monetti kids ever did for each other. But that would be way too weird.
    Morgan yawned and scooched closer again to Ethan. The couch was so soft, and the movie so comfortably predictable with its adorable actors and wacky antics, that her insomnia was catching up to her like a freight train. Most of Friday night she’d been awake after a 3 A.M. nightmare jolted her out of bed. The details escaped her conscious mind, but the feeling of panicky suffocation had hung with her the rest of the night and most of the day.
    It might not have helped that she’d swallowed about four Motrin just to beat back the headache.
    Ethan stretched his arm along the back of the couch, then with his hand, gently as she’d ever been touched by any boy before, he gathered her into his side.
    The movie, the house, the twins—it all swirled away as she savored the rise and fall of his chest and his enveloping warmth.
    Safe. Happy. Giddy. Morgan named all her feelings and wondered if she could write a pretty poem now. If her nightmares would go away. If she could sleep again.
    How had she overlooked him all last year? No matter. She’d certainly noticed him now. Someday maybe she’d ask him what took him so long to reach out for her like this.
    Credits rolled. He started to reach forward for the remote, but Morgan put her hand on his chest, gently holding him back from sitting up.
    â€œWhat?” he said, giving her an odd look that wrinkled up her feeling of safe happiness.
    â€œNothing,” she said, reaching for the remote herself and stopping the credits. She arranged her hair back the way she liked it, realizing it had been pushed off her face, exposing the scar, which happened to be facing him. She’d forgotten to sit on his other side.
    â€œCan I show you something?” she asked, and he nodded yes in a casual way, throwing in a shrug.
    Out from under the couch, where she’d stashed it earlier to prevent having to trek to her room and risk an encounter with the boys, she pulled out her notebook. “I’ve never shown anyone this before,” she said. “But I like to write.”
    â€œCool,” he answered.
    She shoved the notebook in Ethan’s lap to keep herself from slamming the cover shut and hiding it again.
    His eyes seemed to widen, but not in horror as Morgan had feared. It was more like surprise. Even awe.
    â€œWow,” he said, again not seeming to recoil one bit from her weirdness, even the poems about her scar. “These are great.”
    Morgan swallowed the boulder in her throat and dared ask, “You don’t think they’re sick? Like, twisted?”
    Ethan paused before answering, showing a thoughtfulness Morgan instantly loved him for. How many teen boys were this genuinely thoughtful? “Not everything has to be all sunshine and flowers.”
    Morgan shoved the book out of his lap onto the floor and threw herself forward into his arms. He returned the embrace and chuckled softly. “You shouldn’t have been so nervous. What did you think, I’d run screaming?”
    â€œYeah,” she answered into his shoulder, chuckling herself. “Something like that.”
    â€œI’d never run screaming from you,” Ethan said, and patted her