In the Clear Read Online Free

now.”
    “That’s not really him.”
    “It’s him.”
    “No.”
    Sean threw up his hands. “Fine. Don’t believe me. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. That way we can all go back to our regularly scheduled lives without you getting in the way and mucking things up.”
    “You’re serious?” Fletcher— their Fletcher —was some kind of superhero who saved women from lakes? “Gimme that.”
    She tried harder to get the phone back, but Sean held it out of her reach. He only had two inches on her in the height department, but he’d always had freakishly long arms. Like an ape.
    “Just go to work, Lexie,” Sean said. “I only mentioned the picture because I don’t want you to stumble across it on your own and call him. Promise me you won’t.”
    “Why can’t I call him? He’s my friend, too.” She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t even let her voice wobble. Why was it, no matter how many years passed, she was still the outsider to their close-knit duo, the sidekick reject all alone in a cape and tights?
    “Because,” he said with painstaking calm, as if he were talking to one of his freshman English students, “you’ll make him feel weird about it. That’s what you do. Whenever you get excited about something, you bounce all over him like he’s some kind of trampoline. But Fletcher isn’t springy like that—he just absorbs it. And you never see the dents you leave behind.”
    She sniffled, and this time she didn’t try to hide it. That had to be one of the cruelest things Sean had ever said to her. She would never hurt anyone like that—especially Fletcher. “I don’t leave dents.”
    “You don’t mean to, but they’re there all the same.” Sean sighed and, for the first time that morning, real kindness flickered across his face. He placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, but it was like putting a Band-Aid on a knife wound to the back. “Look—can we talk about this later? I’ve got to get to campus, and I’m pretty sure you were supposed to leave fifteen minutes ago.”
    “Oh, crap.” She looked at the retro cat clock on the wall and groaned. They had a staff meeting starting in ten minutes.
    After grabbing her purse and shoving her feet into the nearest shoes she could find, Lexie took one last look around the apartment—at the pile of her breakfast things, at the stack of recycling she kept forgetting to take out, at the Christmas tree she’d only halfway decorated before remembering that the box of her favorite ornaments was still in storage at their parents’ house.
    There was no use pretending. It was a mess.
    Her shoulders sagged as she carefully shut the apartment door behind her. Maybe Sean is right. Maybe I do flail and leave dents everywhere I go.
    But for some reason, she’d always thought Fletcher was the one person able to withstand them.

Chapter Three

    “Someone’s here to see you, Mr. Owens.” The car lot receptionist, a pixie brunette named Clara he was pretty sure hadn’t known he existed yesterday, batted her eyes at him from the doorway of his makeshift office, which just that morning had been a storeroom for decades-old paperwork and car parts deemed too valuable to scrap. “Gerald says you can go ahead and take a long lunch if you want. He says he can do better if he puffs it off that you’re home resting after your big adventure.”
    Fletcher let loose a soft laugh. Contrary to Gerald’s expectations and exactly on par with his own, he hadn’t magically transformed into a laidback charmer who could convince people to buy vehicles they weren’t sure they wanted in the first place. Even the suit he’d been wrangled into—he refused to put on Ben’s army uniform, even upon Gerald’s threat to fire him—did little to help. A few people recognized him and offered their congratulations, but the second he started telling them about three-point hitches and engine torque, they got the same glaze in their eyes that people always had when they talked