Fall Guy (A Youngblood Book)

by Reinhardt, Liz

  The guy, Callum Long, stands with a bouquet of mixed flowers, maybe more gorgeous than any Winch got for me. I take them from his hands and bury my nose in the petals, but I don't inhale the sweet aroma, because there's a line between playing along to mend my tattered heart and taking a sledgehammer to the last brittle pieces, and I'm not strong enough to jump that line yet.

  "You kids look smart together," Granddaddy beams, hooking his thumbs through his red suspenders.

  I wish, right then, that he'd had the opportunity to meet Winchester. I wish he'd been able to take him aside and smoke a cigar on the porch with him. Maybe he would have opened up about his story, how he left his family and struck out on his own. Maybe Winch would have told Granddaddy his problems. If anyone can fix any problem, it’s my grandfather.

  But I was so wrapped up in just figuring Winch and me out while we were together, I never considered having him over.

  Now it's nothing but the dust of old regrets, and I need to shake it off.

  I kiss Granddaddy on the cheek and let him pull me into a long, gruff hug.

  "You take care of her, Callum," my grandfather threatens with a wag of his finger.

  Callum’s voice is rich and low, with just that bit of a country-boy drawl that always uncoils something deep and sweet in me.

  "Of course, sir. I won't let out of my sight for a single second. Were you ready, Evan?"

  His light eyes flick up and down me quickly, clearly pleased with what he sees.

  There's a kick of delicious warmth in my stomach, exactly what I would have expected from having a good-looking, tall, sweet-eyed boy looking me over.

  It's just not anything close to the inferno I feel when Winch looks me over.

  "Let me say goodbye to my grandmother," I stall, but Gramma is bustling in to take my bouquet and arrange it in a vase, just like she did with Winch's, but without all the drama.

  This time she's all smiles and kisses and pats on my backside, telling us to be good and have fun. She looks happy. She looks relieved.

  “Your granddaddy and I will be out late, but I won’t be surprised if you come home after us!” She winks at me.

  I wish I felt a sliver of her enthusiasm.

  Callum opens the door of his sleek sports car for me, and I sit on the leather seat and smile and make inane conversation as we weave into downtown traffic and head to a fancy restaurant I used to go to with Rabin, but it was called something else then. I hated the lambchops. They were overcooked.

  And just like that, it's like life has been dimmed, and I'm back to remembering less than delicious meals and less than amazing boyfriends. Small talk is hard to keep up, and everything feels distracted and distracting.

  Callum orders a bottle of wine for us, and this place is swank enough that they don’t card me or seem to care if I drink. The sweet drizzle of the bubbly white is crisp and dulling at the same time. He’s talking about his engineering classes, and, to be fair, it's not his fault he's being so boring. I've hardly done more than sip my wine, smile, and nod at him.

  I can just barely process the taste of the food when it finally comes, and, though I force myself to have dessert and walk downtown a little with Callum, I can't will myself to hang around for a drive to a party.

  "I'd love to. I would." I act as best I can, all wide eyes and emphatic nods. "But I'm just really tired. I had community service this morning and it was a long day. You understand, right?"

  I bat my lashes and his sweet smile is a relief. He's not going to push the issue.

  "Of course, darlin.' St. John's had crazy community service requirements when I was a senior, too. On the plus side, it looks amazing on college applications."

  His smile is so sympathetic, I don't bother to correct him and let him know that this particular community service will do nothing at all to attract colleges toward me.

  The drive home is quiet, and I give Callum a chaste kiss at my front door, hoping it will communicate nothing more than my tepid appreciation for this night. This date. This first step that is, I hope, not going to be reflective of how bland and lukewarm life devoid of Winch will be.

  I watch him walk back to his car, and I turn into the empty house. Gramma and Granddaddy have never set a solid curfew before, but tonight all time limits were waived because, I think, they hoped I'd fling myself back into a social life and some semblance of happiness.

  Even though the dinner felt like it lasted for hours, it's only been a scant two. Saturday night looms long and empty. I walk upstairs and fall back on my bed, not bothering to change out of my dress.

  I decided, after looking in the plush bathroom's gilded mirror at the restaurant, that I really don't love the dress. Or maybe I was just caught up in the theme of the entire night: blah.

  I text Brenna, and she texts back such an excited stream of questions, I wind up just tapping a message to let her know that I'm having so much fun, I'll have to fill her in later.

  Brenna has been rooting for my happiness, however it comes, like a frantically hopeful cheerleader, and dishing all the depressing details of my latest social failure just feels like too much effort at this point.

  I do my best to switch my brain off as the dark rolls in and the house goes utterly, depressingly silent. I've gone blank. Erased. Empty. It's the only way I can be if I want to survive without sobbing over Winch and all the possibility the two of us had, now lost for good.

  But no matter how hard I work to shut my brain down, my body aches for him in the dark. I crave comfort that goes way beyond warm baths, soft pajamas, creamy chocolate truffles; those are shallow, nonessentials. I need his touch, his hold, his love.

  I know I can't have it. I know the need will have to eventually melt away. But tonight, in the dark of my room, I'm not convinced I can live without it.

  And then I hear the hiccupping roar of an engine. It's Saturday night. It could be any stupid showoff on a date. There's a way bigger chance it isn't him than that it is.

  A yell shatters the quiet of the night.

  "Evan!"

  I sit up, shocked at the way that voice has morphed around my name. Because it's him. It's Winch. But not the way I know him. I get up and run to the balcony outside my room, ignoring the slight bite of a chill on my skin. It takes my eyes a long few seconds to adjust in the dark, but when I finally see Winch, shock seizes through me.

  "Winch?" I ask, not sure the loping, staggering figure below could be my cool, collected, always-in-control Winch.

  "Evan!" He yells like he didn't hear my voice. He looks up and squints, then trips over a potted plant. The ceramic pot crashes and I hear the heavy thud of his body crashing into the dirt and his guttural curses. "Evan!"

  His yell is impatient this time, and I raise my voice, glancing nervously at my neighbor's house. He's going to wake the entire damn street up.

  Even as I think this, a thick, sweet happiness swirls through me. I have no idea why he's here or what he wants, but I'm completely thrilled that he's down there, waiting for me.

  "Wait, Winch! I'm coming down."

  "No!" he protests, but I ignore him and fly down the hall and stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door that leads me into the gardens and his arms.

  He folds me in his embrace, but staggers back and has to lean on me to keep from falling over.

  "Evan." His voice, always so strong and calm, comes out like a whimper around my name. "I've missed you so damn much. You don't know...you have no idea how much I wanted you."

  His mouth is nuzzling near my ear, and I turn my face so our lips can meet, momentarily shocked by the stench of liquor on him. One kiss has my head spinning, and I feel like I downed a viciously hot shot of whatever he drank.

  I ignore his drunkenness and kiss harder, balling my hands in the fabric of his t-shirt, pulling his hard, lean body close to mine. He wraps his arms around me and kisses back like this kiss is his final request. His hands roam everywhere, pressing against my skin and stopping to squeeze while he murmurs
sexy pleas in another language.

  "I want you. Now," I plead, using the full force of my willpower to pull away from him and drag him behind me.

  He stumbles along, trying to talk to me, trying to talk me out of this, maybe, so I refuse to slow down or listen. I just power forward, into my room and onto my bed, pulling him down next to me. He smells sooty and sweaty, nothing like the clean and polished Winch I'm used to.

  "I love you," I insist, hoping to throw up the one roadblock he won't dare smash through.

  It works. My words still the protest that I know was on his lips.

  "I love you," he says instead of whatever he was going to say to argue us out of this tangled, sweet perfection. "I have to tell you something...I have to tell you--"

  I clamp a hand over his mouth, his lips and breath warm and ready on my palm. "I want to be with you. Now."

  I slide my hand down below the waistband of his pants, skim along the elastic of his boxer briefs and listen to the hiss of his breath as I cup him, smooth, hot, and hard, against the palm of my hand.

  "I love you, and I don't really care what you're going to say. I want you. I want you so badly, Winch. Don't say no to me. You've said no to a million things I've asked. Not this time, okay?"

  "You're gonna regret this." He leans his forehead on mine and squeezes his hands at my hips hard. "Please, hear me out, Evan. Please let me tell you what--"

  "Stop." I kiss his lips, hungry for the taste of him, the taste I can never get enough of. I rip my mouth away. "I'm not an idiot. Whatever you're going to tell me, I know it will be bad, okay? Maybe it will even be bad enough to end everything permanently. But before I hear it, I want this. I want right now, and when it's done, I swear to you, I will never regret being with you right now. Please. Please, Winch. I love you."

  He groans and blows a long, hard breath against my neck, then swallows so his throat goes tight and nods.

  "I love you, too. Never doubt that, okay? Never doubt that."

  Then, in the dark of my room, Winch strips my clothes off with efficient ease, no fear or reluctance. His hands run over my body, cradling my skin, caressing every inch of me with a finality I don't want to ponder too long.

  My silky green dress is puddled next to us on the floor, my flimsy underthings twisted in the sheets. I tug his clothes off, careful of the bruises that still purple his body, slowly turning a dingy green around the edges. When we're both naked, our hands running up and down over the hot skin of each other's bodies, he whispers against my ear, a long, shaky string of sentences in a language I don't need to be fluent in to understand.

  He's saying good-bye.

  My brain realizes it, but my heart rejects it completely. And my body is convinced it can change his mind.

  My kisses are quick and light while his voice rumbles against my ears, but they pick up and press harder when he falls silent. I lick and nip until my mouth and tongue and teeth coordinate to restructure the cadence of his breathing and, when I lay my hands on his chest, I can feel the frantic beat of his heart.

  Frantic from me, frantic for us, frantic over love.

  "Winch," I moan, leaning over to grab for a condom, eager to draw this out, but twice as eager to be with him and capture him in an inescapable moment while he's, possibly, looking for a reason to stay.

  His mouth slides over mine, his hands run up my back and press into my hair, and everything goes still for a second when I straddle his hips, pressing against him and over him the same way I have with so many other guys before, but also in a way that's completely new and wholly, totally, extremely for Winch and Winch alone. I roll the condom on and press myself down on the length of his hard-on, flattening my palms on his chest as we fit together.

  "I love you," I declare, my voice rubbed raw from the confusion of never being sure with him coupled with the pleasant pain of always trusting, no matter what.

  He drags his hands down my arms, my ribs, and holds my hips tight, his teeth clenched, his head thrown back, like he's fighting against the fall. I kiss his neck, the space behind his jaw, along his stubbly chin, and pull his face up to kiss his lips, his mouth, him.

  I use my hands and mouth and words to push him closer to the edge.

  "Only you," I whisper, and the rhythm of our two bodies is awkward and jerky because my eagerness is warring with his attempt to hold back. "I know you came here to tell me...it's over."

  "Evan," he pleads, his eyes slitting open, deep blue and welled with drunken sadness.

  He wraps his arms around me and buries his face in the space between my neck and my shoulder, kissing and sucking at my skin before he pulls away with a groan.

  I rock harder against him, loving the full, heavy, pumping feel of his body in mine.

  "Don't. Don't hold back, Winch. Let go. Let go with me."

  "I can't," he begs. "Evan, I can't. I promised...I promised not to break your heart." His hands hold firm until he stills me. He looks right at me, his eyes bloodshot and ringed with purple bruising. "I made a promise I couldn't keep. I took a gamble, and I shouldn't have. I thought I could leave before something like this happened. And now it happened." His voice cracks, and he lifts a hand to my face, tracing a thumb gently across my jaw. "If I could walk away, I would. But I can't. I can't, Evan. And this one is the end."

  I have no idea what happened. Laundering? Drug trafficking? Murder? There's nothing I'd put past the Youngbloods.

  But I lace his fingers through mine and shake my head. "I'll never give up on you. I can't do it. I tried, and I can't, so I'm not going to waste my time. We're in this together, whatever it is."

  He flips me over so the long, hard weight of his body covers mine. He kisses my lips, runs his tongue along my jaw, sucks softly down my neck, nuzzles my hair. He doesn't agree or disagree with my proclamation.

  "I don't deserve you," he chokes out, and moves against me with all the desperation of a guy who has nothing to lose.

  A guy who's ready to fall because he's between a rock and a cliff's edge.

  And, as his body clings close to mine and shudders right along with me, I know he thinks this is the end. That this is his last grab before the long, lonely descent.

  What he doesn't realize is that I'm already standing at the bottom, waiting to catch him. And I never miss.

  Winch 15

  I never drink more than a beer or two, at the most. You can't keep a reputation for being level-headed when you're stumbling like an asshole. I'm a melancholy boozer, anyway, the no-fun kind of drunk who sulks in a corner until he passes out. Lala used to complain that partying with me was like hanging out with the school chaperone.

  Even if I was a happier alchie, seeing someone as constantly lit as my brother always is kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth where alcohol’s concerned. I'd mopped up my fair share of regurgitated Jack and Coke, and I'm at a place now where just hearing that drink order turns my stomach.

  But when Colt called and I went home to my dour, straight-lipped family and they spelled out what happened and what needed to happen, I grabbed my mother's bottle of Evan Williams. And had a few shots. Then drove to Evan's house.

  Not the best idea. I think Benelli wanted to stop me, but our father held her back. Our father isn't always the most rational person, but I think he would have stopped me, except he knew what a death sentence he'd just leveled on the next few years of my life. I was as good as gone, and one last night with Evan was all I was going to get, so he let me have it.

  A pity-based consolation prize for the royal fucking my life was about to be subjected to.

  Part of me felt like the guillotine fell a minute before I was ready to pull my neck out and walk away.

  But even if a week, a month, a year or two had passed, this was a classic Remy/Winch situation, and I would have been summoned. And what could I say?

  Throwing those shots back, I fantasized about exactly what I could have said. Say a few months had gone by. Evan would be ready to graduate. She'd be headed off for colle
ge, and, instead of watching her go and trying like hell to forget her burnt-sugar smell, the sound of her laugh, the icy pierce of her eyes, I could go, too.

  Maybe apprentice to a stone mason. Maybe rig us an apartment, spend my nights kicking back, watching her gorgeous ass study from an open textbook while I reveled in the ache of muscles sore from a day of hard labor. Maybe get to fall into bed with her and wake up with the cling of her smell on my skin. Maybe start to build a life that didn't revolve around the buzz of my phone and a new set of crazy violent situations and court dates broken up by helpless fucking stretches of watching my brother wither into a blood-vomiting scarecrow while everyone kept their mouths shut and let it all happen.

  And that string of fantasies is what broke my resolve to keep Evan out of everything. I just wanted...I needed one more minute with her. One more minute to hold her and tell her I loved her more than anything, wanted the two of us to be together more than anything, before I said goodbye for good and got caught up in something so dark, it more than trumped all the petty shit I'd been involved in up to that point.

  Ending up naked in her bed, her sweat-slicked, slack-limbed body soft and sweet under mine, wasn't in the plan. But my plans have been getting fucked up left and right, so maybe this was inevitable.

  I try to roll over to the side, but she pulls me back, her hands running along my back, her eyes raking over my face.

  "Tell me. Tell me why you think you're leaving me again. Because you're not, you know. You're not leaving without me."

  I kiss her, even though I should get up and leave. This has already gone further than it was supposed to.

  "Evan...you have no idea how much I love you." I push the long pieces of hair tangled at her neck back, run my hands over the smooth skin of her cheeks, rub my thumbs over her lips, brush over her eyebrows with the tips of my fingers and watch while she closes her eyes and makes a noise that sounds kind of like a cat's purr. It's a noise that instantly works to turn me on, fast and hard, like I didn't just have the most amazing sex with this girl ten minutes before. She makes me crazy.