Free Let's Get Lost by Sarra Manning Page A

couldn’t snarl back at him, but when I finally finished spitting and rinsing, I glared at him.
    “Take a picture, it lasts longer,” I snapped, which had to be one of the weakest comebacks ever.
    Smith smiled faintly. “Excuse me, are you, like, ten?”
    I splashed cold water on my face to remove my makeup because there was no other option but to start again with a blank canvas. “So, you’ve gone from thinking I’m quite cute and wanting to get to know me better to what? Getting over me in, like, five minutes?”
    He stretched out his legs. “Believe me, I was never under you.”
    “Huh?” I looked up from slapping on tinted moisturizer like it was going out of fashion. “What’s that meant to mean?”
    “You said that I was over you, which implied that I’d been under you first.” He paused as if he were giving the matter serious consideration. “I’m sure I’d have remembered if I had been.”
    If I hadn’t been doing precision work with the silvery green powder and my pocket mirror, I’d have rolled my eyes. “Do they teach you all that fancy semantic crap at University? That’s really going to help you become a worthwhile member of society.”
    His shoulders slumped a bit, but then he tilted his chin and watched my attempts at beautification with interest. “You looked prettier without all that on your face.”
    “Whatever. So why are you sitting up here being all mopey. I mean, what have you really got to be depressed about?” Because it seemed to me he had it all, apart from manageable hair and a small but perfectly formed nose.
    He was thoughtful. “I don’t really need a reason. I have maudlin tendencies.”
    “It’s probably because of all that whiny boy-rock that you listento. You need to start getting into disco. A bit of Gloria Gaynor and you’d soon be feeling all kinds of perky.”
    Smith made this funny snorting noise. “Was that a joke?”
    “Yeah, you wish.” I looked better. I wasn’t going to be approached by any model scouts, but I looked a little less like a walk-in to the nearest plague hospital. And it might have been because I didn’t have any deep desire to go downstairs, and it might have been because I genuinely wanted to know, but I asked him again. “Really, why are you sitting in a deserted kitchen, looking like you’re about to slit your wrists?”
    Smith sat up and hauled his legs over the edge of the worktop, leaving his feet dangling forlornly as he rubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m not. Not thinking suicidal thoughts, anyway. I’m just having an off day, you know?”

    “Yeah, I know,” I said quietly, and there was something resigned enough in my voice to make him look up, startled.
    “Girls like you don’t have off days,” he said. “You’re pretty and you can have anything or anyone that you want.”
    I opened my mouth to spit out a furious protest, but he held his hand out.
    “Shut the hell up, Isabel,” he growled. “You’re all, ‘oh, no one understands me. My bitchdom is such a burden’ but you have it easy. God, you have it so easy.”
    There should have been another furious protest bursting and I could see the words “you patronizing bastard” scrolling across my cerebral cortex in fancy type. But I wanted to be that girl. The girl he thought I was. Who had nothing else to angst about but how her hair looked and why her friends didn’t understand her.
    And Smith? Did he not just tell me to shut the hell up? No one would ever dare say that to me. Well, not if they still wanted to have kneecaps come Monday morning. He was watching me from under his lashes with a wary smile, like he knew that I was mentally weighing up whether I should slug him or not. I decided not.
    “Maybe I do have it easy. Maybe I have all sorts of dreadful secrets that you don’t know anything about.” I smiled in a manner I knew to be extremely annoying when he snorted in disbelief. Then I padded over to lean against the bench, right next to his