The Way I Used to Be (The Way I Used to Be, #1)

by Amber Smith

“You’re lucky there wasn’t a train coming!” Josh’s voice says, pulling me back into the present. My eyes refocus on his bedroom ceiling. He’s still laughing. I had stopped. “Am I?” I accidentally say out loud. If there had been a train coming, then I would have been killed or at least seriously and irreparably injured. And 542 days later I would have been lying in either a grave or a hospital somewhere, rotting away or hooked up to machines and not in my bed with Kevin in the next room and me thinking he was the greatest person in the entire world, incapable of hurting me in any way, because, after all, he had saved the day. Maybe if that day never happened, maybe I wouldn’t have become so smitten, so pathetically infatuated. Maybe I wouldn’t have flirted with him over a game of Monopoly earlier that night. And maybe I would’ve screamed when I found him in my bed at 2:48 in the morning, instead of doing nothing at all. And maybe it was essentially all my fault for acting like I liked him, for actually liking him. “Of course you are,” I hear a dim voice say through the fog in my mind. But now his face has changed to serious. I can’t remember the last thing either of us said.