She Read Free Page A

exercise,” he says. “Swimming, mostly. And slack line.”
    My mouth betrays me again. “That sounds kinky.” I am sucking on the end of my straw, looking at him like a pervert, and unabashedly thinking about how hot he is. My mind is still reeling — he thinks I’m beautiful! He’s been waiting for two years! I hear these words, but I’m unable to accept them…why is that? Once again I flush scarlet, and I hope he doesn’t notice, though I suspect he does.
    He gives a little laugh and my insides melt. “It’s not,” he tells me. “It’s like a tightrope, but wider and closer to the ground. It’s brilliant for focus.”
    Mastering my own focus better, I am more casual when I say, “A new fad?” There’s always something new sweeping through Paris.
“Sort of,” Logan smiles. He adds, “All the cool kids are doing it.”
    I laugh, and then tell him, “My friend took me somewhere the other day, it’s called air yoga. It’s kind of Cirque-Du-Solei for beginners. You do a bunch of stretches and upside down moves—”
    “I don’t go upside down,” he says immediately.
    “You don’t—”
    He shakes his head. I can’t help my look of curiosity.
    “Childhood trauma,” he explains
    “Oh…” I think of Logan as a child, and assume he was adorable. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    “No,” he grins. “Do you?” He’s already come to grips with my invasive curiosity. Fast learner, Logan. I like that.
    “Kind of,” I say. Again, I can’t stop myself. “What happened?” My insides hum at the prospect of talking about him. I want to know everything. Please, Logan, I plead, tell me everything!
    “I got stuck upside down on a roller-coaster.”
    I gasp in shock, and nearly choke on my first bite of pasta, which is delicious. Stuck on a roller-coaster; I’ve seen those horror stories on the news, and they are literally my worst nightmare! “That’s terrible!” I wail.
    “It was,” he assures me. He pauses, studying me for a moment, deciding whether to lapse further into the story. It seems I am worthy of hearing his tale, because he continues, “My parents took me to a theme park, this was in the States,” he interjects, and I nod, “and neither of them wanted to come on the ride with me, so they sent me on by myself. We were stuck up there for four hours.”
    I gasp again, and he grins a little at my dramatic response.
    “I passed out twice from all the blood going to my head.”
    I let out a low whistle. My food lies momentarily forgotten as I long to hear more. More, Logan, more .
    He obliges. “The other children on the ride all had parents with them to keep them calm and comfort them, but I was all alone.” He shrugs, “And that aloneness did something to me. It made me angry at my parents. Furious, really. Why hadn’t they come with me? Why couldn’t they be bothered? I felt I’d been abandoned.” He shakes his head, and laughs a little. “It all seems nonsense to me now, but at the time that’s how I honestly felt,” he opens up. “It’s strange what things will do to you.”
    “Are you still angry at them?” I ask.
    “No. I adore them more than anything. They saved my life.”
    “How? Did they get you down?”
    We slowly begin to reengage with our food, so as we continue talking we’re eating too.
    “No,” he says, “The engineers got us down. But after that incident, in my rage at them and feelings of being abandoned,” he rolls his eyes as he remembers his former reactions, “I went a little off the rails. A lot off the rails, really. I stopped going to school, I consumed something’s I shouldn’t have—”
    “How old were you?”
    He thinks back. “This was between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.”
    “Shit,” I breathed.
    “Yeah, I was a shit,” he chuckles. “It’s a long time to live with a destructive teen. But they were just so cool about it. They bailed me out of jail about seven times.”
    My mouth drops open in shock. This