From
Half My Blood
Copyright © 2015 by Lauren Gilley
“What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the tidy
stack of handwritten pages she’d left beside the keyboard.
She
was distracted a moment by his tongue curling around a grape and plucking it
off the stem, then refocused. “It’s one of Ava’s stories. One of her old ones.
Sam found a box of them while we were unpacking, and she said we could read
them, if we wanted.” She gestured to the tomblike office around them. “We were
having a quiet day, so…” She shrugged.
“Can
she write worth a damn?”
Holly
frowned. “I don’t have much to compare her to, really. But…” She pressed her
lips together as she stared at the handwritten cover of the story. She’d
worried, at first, that she’d be unable to identify with the characters in any
story. Not that she wouldn’t like them or understand them, but that she would
have no idea what they were talking about.
But
on page one, she’d been sucked in. The office had faded around her as she tumbled
into the life of a girl trying to find her place in a cruel, unsympathetic
world. The phone had rung three times before she noticed it.
“I
think she’s good,” she said, glancing back at Michael. “You could probably read
it, if you wanted to.”
He
shook his head emphatically and picked up his sandwich. “Nope. Not reading
something somebody else’s old lady wrote.”
She
laughed. “Why not?”
He
sighed, elbows braced on the desk, sandwich dripping pink tomato juice onto the
plate. “Because if she’s writing about…what she wants to do to Mercy or
something” – he shifted in his seat – “and I read it, that’s…a violation, or
something.” He frowned at his own awkwardness and Holly bit back her smile.
“No.”
“Okay,
fair enough.”
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