The Rarity of Falling
By
Leeann M. Shane
COPYRIGHT
THE RARITY OF FALLING © Leeann M. Shane 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner, including electronically or mechanical, photocopying, or by an information and retrieval system, without written permission from the Author/Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblances to the actual persons, alive or deceased, business establishments, events, or locales, are entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Authors Note
Other Titles
Stay Connected
For the highs and the lows.
CHAPTER ONE
Bishop
I was a quiet guy.
In fact, I detested talking. Mostly because I had nothing to say and most people wanted something, or worse, they didn’t want anything at all.
“Then why are you on a team?” I’d been asked on more than one occasion.
My response, when I absolutely had to give one was: “You can’t play hockey by yourself.”
I loved hockey.
Love was another aspect I wasn’t entirely familiar with. I enjoyed hockey more than anything else, so I figured that was love. But what did I know? I’d never been loved or loved anyone else, so I was simply going on emotions.
Which never helped anyone.
School started a few weeks ago. Hockey had, too. I made the final cut that morning. I was officially on the team. I wasn’t an excitable guy, but I admitted to myself that I was pleased. Pleased to be on the ice again after six long months of practicing and waiting. I missed the lights, the cold of the stadium, the chill cutting through the air.
Since school had finally settled into normalcy instead of the chaos of a new year, the teachers were no longer forgiving. Hence this new, horrible turn of events.
“Bishop, did you hear me?”
I looked up from my desk and into my teacher’s eyes. They were brown. Muted in color and despondent—she probably hated her job—and her lashes were caked in mascara. I had this bad habit of studying people. They weren’t interesting in the literal sense, but more in the confused sense. I wasn’t like everyone else. I wanted to study them not to become them, but maybe to understand myself better. I didn’t know…
Miss Barter waved her hand in front of my face and the snickers a few tables over tore me from studying the inner parts of her lips where her red matte lipstick had missed.
I blinked at her. I’d heard her all right. I just hadn’t liked what she’d said.
In response, I grabbed my backpack off the empty seat next to me so my partner could sit down. Miss Barter huffed, waving my partner on.
The worse partner I could have asked for.
She was made of bubbles. I was sure of it.
Blonde, pink, and loud.
Friendly would probably be a nice way to describe her, but I was in fact unfriendly, and she was the kind of girl who didn’t take the hint. She set down her gray JanSport backpack with coral-colored flowers on it onto the table and grinned at me.
“Hi, Bishop.” She tucked her skirt under her legs and sat down, bright teeth on display.
She said “hi” like we knew each other. True, Ava and I had been going to school together since my foster parents had taken me in, which was around ten or eleven, but we’d never really spoken. She was a drama student. I was a hockey player. Our circles weren’t supposed to cross.
I turned back to my desk, reading the carvings in it from other students, who had sat in my seat and felt the same way or most likely didn’t. FREE ME, however, resonated with me. I traced the scratched words.
Ava Mackson sighed as if I’d popped her bubble and then folded her hands together on top of the table. “This is going to be a long year, isn’t it?” she mumbled under her breath.
I narrowed my eyes and sat up straight, folding my arms behind my head and resting in my chair. She meant sitting next to me would be arduous, because she liked to blab, and I didn’t. I would typically keep quiet, but the fact that she thought she was the one put out here was insulting. “The longest.”
She brushed her dark blonde hair out of her way to shoot a glare my way. It was a true glare, too. Not one of those fake one’s girls give you when they’re trying to be cute and pissed. No, Ava was just plain old pissed, instead of her sweet, nice self. I brought that out in her. Cool.
“Are you implying something by that comment, Bishop?”
My eyes trailed over her. Ava was striking. I wasn’t a total introvert, or blind, for that matter. She had a cute, diamond-shaped face, with these puffy lips that she’d glossed with something clear and a pert nose. Her hair was blonde naturally—I couldn’t remember it ever not being blonde, but she’d streaked it with darker golden highlights at some point. She had a tiny patch of freckles under both eyes, like she never wore sunglasses, and her eyelashes were bleached of color, making her light brown irises shimmer like honey. She was tall-ish, shorter than me, but most girls and some men were, too. At six-three, I was a bulky wall. Long and quick—it was like I was made to play hockey with my reach and speed.
Everything else, I fell short at.
She looked away and yanked open the front pocket on her backpack. She pulled out a mirror and stared at herself in it.
“Where is it?” She turned this way and that.
I frowned at her. “Where’s what?”
“The massive zit you’ve been staring at for like five minutes straight.”
I shook my head and turned my focus on Miss Barter at the front of the classroom. Had I really been staring at her for that long? I shook my head once more, catching the table of girls who’d snickered earlier grinning at me. I ignored them. The teacher began talking about our upcoming assignment. Home economics was a class that was required to graduate, but it was one of the most grueling, so everyone waited until senior year when they couldn’t avoid it. We’d spent the first two weeks working on a paper that completely drawn-out how broke and inexperienced we were when it came to bills and supporting ourselves.
I got an A to admit I was clueless.
Welcome to high school.
But Coach Stan was brutal when it came to grades. If we didn’t maintain a 3.7 grade point average on top of practices every day after school, not to mention winning, we’d be off the team. No questions asked. No rebuttals. I got this feeling that hockey was my way out. Without it, who would I become?
The lack of answers freaked me out the most.
“That brings us to our newest assignment. Most of you are probably wondering why I’ve put you into groups. In our last assignment, we established how expensive being an independent person is in today’s world.” She pulled out a box. “Now we’re going
to do this as couples. I want a detailed paper on the costs of being a broke newlywed, however you want. Whatever dynamic your group brings. It’s due in two weeks and it had better be good. Now, take a ring and wear it. If you lose your ring, I’m docking ten percent.”
Beside me, Ava gulped.
Yeah, I thought caustically. You and me both.
CHAPTER TWO
Ava
I wasn’t normally unfriendly.
Being rude didn’t work for me in life. It wasn’t a quirk or a ruse. I liked being nice. But Bishop Manfield made it almost impossible to be nice. He was so quiet his silence was too loud. He was short when he did speak, and that irked me, especially when I wasn’t being rude to him, and he was imposing. A man child. Too tall and too long to sit next to me until we had to move seats again.
He toyed with his wedding ring.
I’d yet to put mine on.
Miss Barter had caused an uproar. My friends Laurie and Henny were paired together. Not fair. I wanted to marry my best friend.
Felix raised his hand and Miss Barter called on him. “Um, my partner’s a boy.”
“So?” She waited for the big deal.
“Yeah, so?” his partner, Wren, said, grinning. “What are you afraid of? I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not buying you flowers, that’s for sure.”
Felix glared at him. “Why the hell not?”
He snorted. “Roses are too expensive.”
“Carnations then,” Felix argued.
Wren shook his head, so serious a few of us were trying not to laugh.
“Fine. I see how it is.”
Wren asked him a question, but Felix looked away, refusing to talk to him.
“We gotta get this paper started,” Wren argued. “Ignoring me won’t help.”
“Do it yourself,” Felix snapped.
Miss Barter clapped happily. “Welcome to marriage, kids. You either have to buy him roses or your assignment—aka your marriage—suffers, and then nothing gets done. Compromise.”
“But our budget, which is already squat, goes down,” Wren griped.
Miss Barter was unapologetic. “Money isn’t everything.”
“But,” Wren said, brows drawn down. Felix nodded, like tell ‘em. “This is a class about money.”
“No,” Miss Barter said. “This is a class to teach you about life. If you’re unhappy now, wait until the next assignment.” She grinned maniacally.
I hoped psych evaluations were still a thing.
“Different partners?” Wren asked hopefully.
All Miss Barter did was wink and shake her head.
“Rings on!” she called out, settling at her desk.
It just so happened that my costume jewelry wedding ring was surprisingly pretty. Small diamond, thin band. It’d go with all of my outfits. Bishop’s was black. It almost looked like a nut or bolt on a skateboard. I put mine on and turned my hand this way and that.
“Should we include our rings in our budget? I bet that’s a trick a lot of them are going to fall for. We’re not rich, so ideally, we’d have to pay our rings off over time.” I felt like we’d earned an extra point for working that into our paper.
But all Bishop did was point at something he’d already written under our budget section. RINGS. Oh. He’d already thought of that. Well, aren’t you so smart and handsome?
I crossed my legs and decided to be honest with him. “We have to work together, Bishop.”
He cut his eyes to mine. “We are.”
“No, we aren’t. You had an idea and wrote it down on your paper. I had an idea and told you.”
His eyes narrowed a bit. As far as eyes went, they were uneconomical. If they had a price, they’d definitely be out of our budget. Icy blue with shards of darker blue interwoven in his iris, with specks of black flecked in for good measure. His hair was inky black, so were his lashes, and the combination of his pale skin with the dark of his hair and the richness of his eyes, Bishop Manfield could quite possibly be in the running for the handsomest fake husband ever.
But we’d never really gotten along. Not that I hadn’t tried to be nice to him. The poor guy was always an outcast, but not in the typical sense. No one bullied him or pushed him away, quite the contrary. It was almost like he didn’t want the attention he knew he garnered. He was really popular amongst the female population and he’d been one of the top players last year in the hockey division. Not that I cared. My dad was the sports guy. He was a sports broadcaster during football and hockey season, and he wrote for the sports column in a magazine.
“Do I have a pimple now?” he asked, an edge to his words.
He was intentionally distasteful. Every time. Would it hurt him to be nice? I took a deep breath. “We need to get along for as long as this project lasts. Do you agree?”
He turned back to his notebook. “Not getting along would be an interesting approach. Think about how expensive it would be to take your budget from the last project and mine and try to make that work while we secretly want to kill the other.”
My lips popped open. An uncomfortable feeling wormed its way into my chest. “You want to kill me?”
He rolled his eyes and shot me a look. “No, I was just making a suggestion.”
I turned straight. Great. My partner wanted to kill me. He hated me that much. I hadn’t remembered ever doing anything to Bishop to earn that much anger. “To murder me? Awesome.”
He ran a hand through his hair and groaned. He looked around and then leaned close. “You’re the one who doesn’t like me. I was just trying to make it easier on you.”
I gave him my eyes sideways. “I never said I didn’t like you.”
“You suggested it.”
“How?”
He was losing his patience. He blinked, taking too long to open his eyes, and he leaned even closer to me, like it would rein his anger in if he looked at what was causing it. “Your mannerisms suggest that. Look. Forget I said it. You’re right. We need to get along. I’m…” He cringed. “Sorry.”
“How sorry?”
“So sorry it burns to even say it,” he lied, rolling his eyes again.
He rolled them so meanly. That made me want to hit him, which made me think that maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t like him any more than he liked me.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he muttered, writing down roses in the bills pile.
His choice made me laugh. “That’s not even nice. You got that idea from someone else. And I don’t like flowers all that much. Try again, Bishop.”
“What do you like?” he asked, eyes teeming with frustration. It made his eyes glimmer, which admittedly made them prettier.
Who knew a guy got even better looking with aggravation. “Guess. We’re newlyweds. You barely know me.”
“Why’d I marry you then?” he grunted.
“Because I’m an amazing kisser and you’re whipped,” I whispered. “Now shut up and buy me something pretty by tomorrow morning.”
He stilled, watching me carefully. “I have never been whipped. I doubt it’s even possible in here.” He tapped his head.
I pointed at his crotch. “What about in there?”
He tried to keep a straight face, but his lips quirked up in the corner anyway, and that only seemed to make him even madder, the fact that he found me amusing, and then he dropped the look altogether and groaned.
He wrote something down under roses. I leaned over his shoulder to read it. “Marriage counseling?” I was so offended, I wrote something down on my own notebook.
He leaned over my shoulder to read it. “A divorce lawyer,” he read. “Good idea, babe.” He pecked me on my temple and leaned back.
I rarely got overly angry. It just wasn’t me. But right then, boy, did I get mad. My blood boiled. I cracked my neck from side to side and took deep breaths. “Miss Barter?” I called, rubbing my temples. “My husband is giving me a headache.”
“Better write down aspirin,” she quipped.
Bishop did.
I snatched his pencil from him and lobbed it across the room and then I turned to him, pointing threateningly. “If you screw up my perfect grade point average with your crap personality, I will decapitate you. Am I clear?”
“Sorry. Decapitation devices aren’t in our budget.”
“Who said I need a device? I’ll just use these.” I held up my hands.
He smirked, like I was a puppy trying to be a grown up. “You’re cute, you know that?”
I growled under my breath. “You’re a walking, talking headache. Did you know that?”
“No,” he said, like I’d helped him or something by realizing that. “But thanks for letting me know.”
I had two options. Either I could stoop to his level, which was somewhere on the ground, and argue back with him. Or I could be myself and let it go.
I turned straight and ignored him for the rest of class.
Wondering why anyone got married in high school.
CHAPTER THREE
Bishop
My breath clouded in front of me.
Ice created a dense layer of air in the stadium that tasted of cold. The team groaned when we took the ice, but I smiled behind my facemask. We had our first game next weekend and we’d have to practice in full gear until then. Coach hadn’t wasted time picking just any player. He’d assembled a team. A solid force between the puck and the opponent.
I was the center for the Minnesota Loons. I took myself seriously, even with the play on words. The loons were birds, not a testament to our mental instability, but I liked the doubt. A badass name came with a lot of expectations. With a name like the loons, we came ready to defend ourselves. Underestimating us would be our opponent’s greatest mistake.
Sweat dripped in my eyes behind my facemask. I cut through the ice, sending my elbow into anyone in my way. The puck was a magnet to the end of my stick—I couldn’t lose it. The puck was my only focus every single game. Ice, sweat, and goals. They were my life.
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