Echoes by Marissa Lete (best books for students to read txt) 📕

him. I reach my hand out, plucking the coat from his fingers, careful not to make contact with his skin.

I pull the thick, soft material around myself, taking in the leftover warmth from Maverick’s body heat and the sweet, musky scent buried deep in the jacket. “Thanks.”

We stand there for a moment, staring at each other across the cold air, the moonlight glowing around us. “Is everything okay? Do you need anything?” Maverick finally asks.

“I need the truth,” I reply.

His eyebrows furrow. “I’ve told you the truth—”

“I know,” I cut him off. “I believe what you’ve told me. But I want more. I want to know everything.”

“Everything?” Maverick blinks in surprise. “Everything about what?”

“About you. About me. About all of this,” I wave my hand aimlessly through the air. “Like how long we were…together. Like what your plans are to stop Alice. Like why you live in a mansion when last year you lived just across the street from me.” I meet Maverick’s eyes as I say the last statement and he winces. “I just need to know. I’m so confused because I don’t know who you are when you obviously know me pretty well. I don’t know if I can even trust you, but I feel like I should be able to. I need answers.” Maverick just stands there as I spill the words out into the night, eyeing me thoughtfully.

He nods. “I understand. All you have to do is ask, Laura, and I promise I’ll be honest with you about whatever you want to know.”

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, hoping his words are true. “Then tell me. Tell me all of it.”

Maverick nods again. “Shall we walk?” he asks, gesturing into the park. I look down the dimly lit path and hesitate, wondering if it’s safe to be out here alone with him. Then I think of Maverick pulling his car in front of the Suburban to allow me to escape, fighting off the men sent to kidnap me, then dragging me through Alice’s laboratory, into the woods, and out of her reach. Everything he had done so far, he had done to protect me. Even though some of his methods were questionable.

“Yes,” I reply, then start down the path, careful to keep a few feet of distance between us.

We walk in silence for a minute, then Maverick clears his throat. “We dated from October until June,” he says.

I count the months off in my head. “Nine months?”

“Technically more like eight, since our first date was in mid-October, and then mid-June was when…” he trails off.

“When you made me forget,” I finish for him.

His face twitches. “Yeah—that.”

“I’m mad about that. But I’m trying to understand,” I admit. It’s hard, though. It’s easy to just be angry and spiteful about something someone did to you, to hold onto a grudge. It’s harder to accept things, to forgive, and to move on.

“You don’t know how much I appreciate that,” Maverick tells me, his hazel eyes cutting through the dark.

A few beats of silence pass before I ask another question. “Where did we go on our first date? I heard an echo of us leaving, but the location was a surprise, so I didn’t know where we had gone, and I kind of have to be in the same place as the echoes to hear them.”

Maverick looks over at me curiously. “I took you for ice cream, first.”

“At Coffee and Cream?” I ask, remembering how I’d been there. But I hadn’t heard any echoes. Had I just barely missed them?

“No, no. It was another ice cream place, somewhere off of Brooks Street, I think? We didn’t start going to Coffee and Cream until, I wanna say, December? On our first date, we went to the other place, and you ordered a double scoop of cookie dough ice cream.”

“Well, it certainly sounds like me,” I tell him.

Maverick laughs under his breath, a low, clipped sound that’s somehow the same, yet somehow different from his echoes. Colder. “We tried a few different ice cream shops, but one day we stumbled into Coffee and Cream and you said it was the best cookie dough ice cream you’d ever had. You vowed to never eat another brand again.”

We both laugh, and I try to imagine the moment. I remember going to Coffee and Cream a few times now, and all three of them I’d been impressed by the cookie dough ice cream. Perhaps it was the best I’d ever had.

“On our first date, after we had ice cream, we had dinner at this little cafe, and then we wrapped it up with a stroll through the park. This park, actually.”

I look around us, the moonlight glowing softly through the trees. It’s such a strange thought, that I was with him, right here, over a year ago. That I’m with him, right now, under these unbelievable circumstances. To think that all of this happened without me knowing about any of it scares me.

A cold chill runs through me. “I want to know about your house,” I say suddenly. “The one you have now.”

The warm, lightness of the air between us goes cold and heavy in an instant. Maverick stiffens, his movements growing rigid as we walk through the dark. He doesn’t respond for a few minutes.

“Did you…” I pause, trying to judge his body language, “take it from someone?”

Maverick’s eyes flash at me. “You think I used my ability to get it?”

I shrug. “I don’t know what to think.”

He lets out a long, steady breath. “I didn’t,” he says, to my relief. “I inherited it from my father.”

Distantly, I remember an echo I’d heard.

“So what’s your dad up to, then?” my own dad had asked him.

“My dad isn’t around. I never really knew