Read Twilight for Free Online Page A

to end… the moonlight, his embrace, any of it… all of it.
    “Not nothing,” he said, reaching up and pulling a strand of hair from where the wind had blown it, so that it was sticking to my lip gloss. I always seem to have that problem. “I know you, Susannah. I know there’s something the matter. Come.”
    He took me by the hand and pulled. I went with him, even though I didn’t know where we were going. I’d have followed him anywhere, even into the bowels of hell. Only of course he’d never take me there.
    Unlike some people.
    I did balk a little when I saw where he had led me, though. It wasn’t exactly hell, but…
    “The car ?” I stared at the hood of my mom’s Honda Accord.
    “You’re cold,” Jesse said firmly, opening the driver’s side door for me. “We can talk inside.”
    Talking wasn’t really what I’d had in mind. Still, I figured we could do what I had had in mind just as easily in the car as in the rectory’s vegetable garden. And it would be a lot warmer.
    Only Jesse wasn’t having any of it. He seized both my hands as I tried to slip them around his neck, and placed them firmly in my lap.
    “Tell me,” he said from the shadows of the passenger seat, and I could tell by his voice that he was in no mood for games.
    I sighed and stared out the windshield. As far as romance went, this was not exactly what I’d call a prime make-out spot. Big Sur, maybe. The Winter Formal, definitely. But the rectory parking lot at the Junipero Serra Mission? Not so much.
    “What is it, querida ?” He reached out to sweep back some of my hair, which had fallen over my face.
    When he saw my expression, however, he pulled his hand back.
    “Oh. Him ,” he said in an entirely different voice.
    I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. That he’d known, I mean, without my having said anything. There was just so much I hadn’t told Jesse—so much that I’d decided I didn’t dare tell him. My agreement with Paul, for instance: that, in return for Paul not removing Jesse to the great beyond, I’d meet with him after school every Wednesday under the auspices of learning more about our unique skill… although truthfully, most of the time it seemed all Paul wanted to do was get his tongue in my mouth, not study mediator lore.
    Jesse would not have been particularly enthused had he known of the lessons… less so, if he’d had an inkling of what they actually entailed. There was no love lost between Jesse and Paul, whose relationship had been rocky from the start. Paul seemed to think he was superior to Jesse merely because he happened to be alive and Jesse was not, while Jesse disliked Paul because he’d been born with every privilege in the world—including the ability to communicate with the dead—and yet chose to use his gifts for his own selfish purposes.
    Of course, their mutual disdain for each other might also have had something to do with me.
    Back before Jesse had come into my life, I used to sit around and fantasize about how great it would be to have two guys fighting over me. Now that it was actually happening, though, I realized what a fool I’d been. There was nothing funny about the grounding I’d gotten the last time the two of them had gone at it, destroying half the house in the process. And that fight hadn’t even been my fault. Much.
    “It’s just,” I said, careful not to meet his gaze because I knew if I looked into those twin dark pools I’d be lost, as usual, “Paul’s been… worse than usual.”
    “Worse?” The glance Jesse shot me was stiletto sharp. “Worse in what way? Susannah, if he’s laid a hand on you—”
    “Not that,” I interrupted quickly, realizing with a sinking heart that the speech I’d been up half the night rehearsing—the speech that I’d convinced myself was so perfect, I needed to hurry right down to the rectory to say it now, at once, even though it was the middle of the night and I’d have to “borrow” my mom’s car to get