My First Love Returned, His Stand-In Begged Me to Stay novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Paperback

He sat on the edge of the cot with the army blanket over his knees and the paperback in his hands.

I pulled the corner of the blanket around my shoulders and sat up against the wall.

The workshop lights were still blazing white.

"I thought it was a detective story," I said. "That summer. You never told me the title."

"It isn't one." He turned the cover toward me. "It's a book about a lighthouse keeper. Nothing happens in it for two hundred pages."

"You read that to a girl in a hospital."

"It was the first thing on the cart."

He opened it.

The pages were worn soft, and in the margins, in pencil, there was handwriting.

"I wrote on it every night," Kip said. "When I got home. I didn't want to forget what you said."

My throat tightened.

"Read me," I said.

He cleared his throat, and for a moment his ears went red, and I loved it.

"Night one," he read. "She doesn't talk. She doesn't eat. I read twelve pages and she turned her face to the wall."

"I remember the wall."

"Night three. She asked me to stop. She said her mother died last year and she hates stories now. I said all right. She said her mother wrote one poem, and then she said it, and I said it back to her. I got one word wrong. She fixed it."

"Owed," I said. "You said earned."

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