The Museum of Heartbreak - Meg Leder Page 0,26

I said, heading to the door.

“You don’t have to leave, you know,” he said, and oh God, his smile was deep and dark, like a thousand books begging to be read, like the doorway to Narnia. “Come over.” He patted the wooden floor next to him.

I blinked three times. This was happening.

I took careful steps through the moonlight over to him, thinking be cool thinking don’t fall thinking don’t blow it thinking seize the day, and slid down against the wall, pushing aside a stack of books and papers and folding my skirt and Docs under me.

He offered me his flask.

“Sure,” I said, and took a small sip, and it burned a river so far into me, I felt it in my fingertips. I tried not to cough and mostly succeeded, stifling a throat tickle when I handed it back. “Thanks.”

“Of course.”

He took a swig, and I saw his eyelashes silhouetted in the moonlight. Long. He was wearing two different socks again: the left a black sock with tiny Christmas trees, the right a tan one with alphabet letters all over it.

“You’re the girl with the comic book, right? I’m the worst, but remind me of your name again?”

“You’re not the worst,” I said. And then, “Penelope.”

“Penelope,” he echoed. “The girl who reads comics.”

He studied me, moving closer, his face inscrutable, inches from mine, and I felt my breath catch inside me.

He smelled like red hot candy, things that burned your tongue.

“I don’t always read comics,” I started to say, when he held his finger up.

“Wait.” He turned and started rooting through a pile of books next to his bed, then passed me a weathered paperback. My fingertips skimmed his and I felt the hundredths of millimeters of possibility between us, and my whole body shivered.

“You should read this instead,” he said. “It’s fucking incredible.”

I held it in my hands: On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The cover was wrinkled like someone had spilled something on it, and the pages were covered in black ballpoint underlined phrases with exclamation points in the margins.

“Okay, yeah, I will.”

I wasn’t sure what to say or do next, but since I didn’t want to leave, I sat there, my chest rising and falling with his, studying the books in the room, the book in my hand—anything but his eyes. I was pretty sure if I started reading those, I’d . . . I didn’t know what I’d do, but it would surely end in tears.

“So tell me, are you having a good time at the party?” he asked, his voice strangely vulnerable.

“Of course, it’s really . . .” I tried to think of a word that wouldn’t betray how much I hated parties. “It’s fun.”

His head fell back against the wall. “ ‘Fun’? Oh man, that’s no good.”

“But fun is good. It’s an awesome party!”

“Good.” He smiled sleepily and closed his eyes.

This was totally weird.

My gaze fell upon a framed picture on his bedside table: Keats in a prep-school blazer, standing in front of the fountain at Central Park, his arm around a reed-thin girl, long shiny model hair blowing across her face. She was mid-laugh, face raised to the sun, and Keats was gazing at her, and his face was reverent, his eyes wide open and alive, clearly in awe of the girl he had his arm around.

I was 100 percent certain that no one had ever looked at me like that.

And for that second I felt it in me—how badly I wanted that, how I was so hugely envious of that girl that I almost cried out from the unfairness of it all.

“That’s my ex.”

I glanced over at him, startled he’d seen me looking, startled to realize he was watching me.

“She broke up with me this summer. After three years.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She insisted I was cheating on her. With Cherisse, you know her?”

My heart stood still.

“I wasn’t, though. Cherisse is just an old family friend.”

My heart exhaled.

“I think Emily, my ex? I think she was scared.” He paused. “She burned me bad, made me feel like I was the worst person on the planet.”

I felt myself wanting to challenge this Emily to a duel, to fight for Keats’s honor, to reassure him he wasn’t anything close to the worst anything at all.

“I’m sorry,” I said instead.

He made a small noise of surprise. “Yeah, me too.”

I practically felt his eyes as they traced my face, the overpronounced slope of my nose, the curve of my cheekbones, the tips of my eyelashes. And then, like