Page 63 of Haunt Me

It makes no difference; I can’t let them see my darkness anyway. The emptiness crawling inside of me. They won’t understand—they’ll get scared and freaked out and uncomfortable.

But Eden is ok with the real me. She gets me, without me having to say anything. I can be silent with her, or I can talk. I can be sulky or I can laugh. She won’t leave, no matter how sad I am.

What shewilldo, is share her Jane Austen books with me. Whether I want to or not.

…

Today, she is readingPersuasionfor what feels like the hundredth time.

“Read it to me,” I tell her.

“Read it yourself,” she laughs.

She makes me read Captain Wentworth’s love declaration letter to Anne until I’ve learned it by heart. All the while, she sits there, alternating between staring at me with her soul in her eyes and laughing at me. Meanwhile, those words have touched me deeply. They are expressing exactly what I feel, and so well. Man, that Jane kind of had a way with words, didn’t she? Imagine being able to create entire worlds within a person just by using words?

The right words, in the right places. How would anyone begin to do that? I can’t even imagine the amount of work it would take.

“Quiz me,” I ask her and she does.

I know every single line by heart, which she finds hilarious. I watch her as she collapses on the floor, laughing.

What if I wrote a song with Wentworth’s words as lyrics and sang it to her?I think.Who will be laughing then? That ought to stop her. Not that I would ever have the skill and talent required to do a thing like that.

“Do you have any more of these?” I ask her.

“These what?”

“Love declarations.”

I hide my face as I say it, scared she’ll laugh even more at my scarlet cheeks, but she doesn’t. She stops laughing and turns dead serious.

Books do that to her. Books are serious business with her.

As they should be, I am beginning to realize.

“I do,” she replies. “I have more of these. A lot more.”

And that’s how it starts.

We read the ‘haunt me’ scene fromWuthering Heights, the ‘caged bird’ scene fromJane Eyre, the ‘my brave girl’ scene fromOur Mutual Friendand the ‘most ardently’ scene fromPride and Prejudice. And I fall in love with these books and with her while she reads from them, as if it was possible to fall even further in love with her than I already was. I can barely think, just looking at her eyes sparkle as she reads, let alone memorize, but I do my best.

“Which one was your favorite?” she asks me in the end.

I swallow. “Honestly, I have no idea what you were talking about,” I say. “I was looking at your lips the entire time.”

She blushes furiously and reads everything again.

“Wuthering Heights,” I decide. “Is that a good book?”

“Horrible,” she replies in that curt, sharp way of hers.

“Why?”

“Because I’d love for it to be true. A boy to worship me, to be my slave.”

“I do,” I reply at once. “I am.”

She laughs as if I just said the weirdest thing, and I don’t mind. She’s laughing, that’s all I care about. I can’t get enough of the sound of her laughter. I close my eyes and drink in the rare sound of pure happiness coming from her. I would make a fool of myself every single day just so she could laugh like that more often.

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