It was never effortless to love Aaron Warner. He was a difficult teenage boy who seemed to forget a lot of the time that that was what he was-a teenage boy. He'd always felt that loving or even caring for him would be impossible for all the world to...
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I'M LISTENING TO Taylor Swift when the door to my room opens. And in walks the same girl I watched sleep a few hours ago—Juliette Ferrars.
She looks around worriedly as she enters and goes white when she sees me. I quickly pull out my earphones and smile at her.
"Hey," I say.
"I'm sorry," she says, shaking her head in frustration. "I must've gotten the wrong room—"
"No, you didn't," I assure her. "This is right. You're my new roommate."
Juliette cowers back slightly, clearly afraid and damn. She's traumatized as hell. "Okay," she whispers. "Sorry."
I frown and chuckle when I say, "What? Why would you be sorry?"
She shrugs.
I get up from my bed. "I promise I'm not totally terrifying. I'm nice, I swear. And also super fun to have sleepovers with. Do you want to put your stuff in those drawers?" I gesture to the drawers between our two beds.
Juliette glances at it and then back at me. Says, "I didn't bring anything. I didn't even know we were coming."
"Oh, right," I say. "Sorry. Slipped my mind."
"It's okay."
I beam at her, hoping it's not freaking her out and somehow making her feel welcome. "I'm Mara."
She blushes a little. Tucks her hair behind her ears and smiled gently. "I'm Juliette."
"It's nice to meet you," I say, nearly forgetting that we can't shake hands because of her lethal touch. Yeah, she has lethal touch. The girl can kill with her bare hands apparently. But she looks too sweet to even think about doing that. "Hey do you want an exclusive tour?"
Juliette nods. "Sure."
"Come on, I'll show you the cool stuff around here."
I lead her through the hallways until she asks me, "What were you listening to? I thought the Reestablishment destroyed all the music. . ."
"They did," I tell her. "But a lot of us saved things and that includes music. Trust me, you could never have separated me from my headphones when I was a kid."
"Me too," she admits, her cheeks reddening a little. "I loved reading too. Do you read?"
"Only romance stuff," I say to her. "I would read crime and horror and stuff like that if it didn't totally scare me. Seriously, once, I was reading some horror book in the middle of the night and Kenji and Isaac thought it'd be fun to scare me with clown masks."
Juliette chuckles softly. I'm glad I was able to make her laugh but it wasn't funny for me at the time.
I roll my eyes at the memory. "I will never forgive them for that. I haven't touched a horror book since."
