Break My Fall (No Limits)

by Cameron, J. T.

  “I was so scared. The pain was so bad I wanted to die,” she said. “It turns out I have an infection in my uterus. I know, it’s gross. Whatever. So, anyway, after a while I asked for Kyle and the nurse said she would check. Then she comes back and says there’s nobody with that name in the waiting room.”

  Rebecca had texted him and he had answered a short time later, telling her that he had to get to work.

  “I told him I needed him to take me home. He said he’d come get me. But then I waited an hour, then two hours. By then, I was in the waiting room, sitting in a wheelchair, pretending that I wasn’t upset every time one of the nurses stopped to ask if my boyfriend was on his way. Fucking humiliating.”

  If she hadn’t been so depressed already, I would have taken the opportunity to strongly encourage her to get rid of Kyle, once and for all, and just forget about anything good ever coming from knowing him. But she knew that.

  “Let me guess,” I said, “he never showed up.”

  She looked at me, her eyes flooding with tears again, her face all scrunched up in a heart-breaking expression. “He did, but I was already gone.” She paused for a moment. “The longer I waited for Kyle, the more I started to think he might not even come back.” She reached for another cigarette, lit it, and blew out a plume of smoke, adding to the bluish haze that occupied her entire apartment. “I called Connor.”

  My eyes shot wide open. “Wow.”

  “Yeah. I just couldn’t sit there anymore and Connor immediately popped into my mind. But I couldn’t tell him why I was there. I mean, who wants to tell someone that, especially a guy? Then I started to feel guilty because I had to lie to him. I told him I had really bad cramps and that’s what the medication was for. But you know something? I think he knows it was more than that.” She looked at me as if waiting for my view on it.

  “He might,” I said. “He’s not stupid, but I’m not sure how many guys would think to question that.”

  “He was so good to me, stopping to get me something to eat on the way home.” She picked up the McDonald’s cup. “That’s where I got this. And some fries. I can’t believe I could even eat, but I devoured them.” She cracked a smile for the first time.

  “So…Kyle?”

  “Right.” She put her cup down. “Connor brings me home, gets me inside—that’s when I think he knew more had happened—he says he needs to get back to work but that he’ll check on me throughout the day, and I can call him if I need anything, and also that he’ll come over tonight and bring dinner.”

  “Nice.”

  “I know. So, yeah, I’m done with Kyle.” She sat up quickly. “Hey, were Rick and Marla mad?”

  “No. More worried than anything else.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “Good, because I feel bad about it—I’ve never done anything like this to them—and I don’t want to lose my job there.”

  I laughed. “It’s Rick and Marla. They’re cool. They wouldn’t fire you for calling in sick. You’re worrying too much.”

  She leaned toward me, wrapping her arms around my neck. I hugged her back.

  She started crying again and said, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

  “I’ll miss you, too.”

  “What’s going to happen with you and Drew?” she asked, sitting up and sucking on her straw rather than a cigarette this time.

  I shrugged. “I really don’t know. But I have to go back to school, and he’s…well, you know, he won’t leave his grandparents. I can’t blame him. As much as I’d like him to move down to Tampa, there’s just no way it’ll ever happen.”

  “Maybe you’ll find a way.”

  “Yeah.”

  Probably not, I thought.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Looking around my apartment, I thought about how little I had brought with me to Charleston. Aside from my clothes and surfboard, all my stuff was back in Tampa, yet over the last three months this place had come to feel more like home than my actual home did at this point.

  As I sat there thinking, dreading more and more the thought of going back to Florida, my phone rang. It was Liz. What a coincidence.

  “Hey, roommate,” she said. “Or should I say possible roommate…I didn’t get the lease.”

  “Crap. I forgot.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that. I thought maybe you changed your mind or something.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re the only person I would live with. There’s just been so much going on…” I filled her in on the latest with Drew, including telling her about the trip to Atlantic City, but instead of telling her about the blackjack, I made it sound like it was just a little jaunt up the coast.

  “Nice. Romantic,” she said. “Did you tell him you love him yet?”

  “I…” My voice faded out. I was about to deny any such feelings, but trying to deny that the first hint of love was there would have meant lying to myself, never mind Liz. “No, I haven’t told him.”

  “Maybe if you do, you guys will find a way to make this happen.”

  “Doubtful. Actually, impossible. I told you about his grandparents.”

  “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Time to change strategy. Forget all that shit I said about not saying anything and letting him be the first to bring it up. Make him talk about it. It’s 2013. Bitches gotta take control.”

  I laughed. “Is that your new motto?”

  “I think it might be.”

  “Well, Drew isn’t exactly the type of guy to let bitches control him—”

  “Whoa, hold on,” she interrupted. “I don’t mean control him. I mean control the situation. Tell him what you want. Lay it out there. See what he says.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

  “You’ll thank me later,” she said. “But, hey, I have some bad news and some bad news.”

  “Oh, great. Usually people have good news and bad news.”

  “Yeah, not this time. The bad news is that Travis hasn’t proposed, so I think maybe I was reading too much into it, just like I thought.”

  I walked into the kitchen. “It’s only been a few days, right? It’s not like there’s a time limit.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” She sounded truly disappointed. I thought she should relax, give it time, chill out a little because it was clearly going to happen.

  “Now give me the other bad news,” I said.

  “All kidding aside, this is pretty bad. Kevin wants to talk to you.”

  I had been reaching into the refrigerator for some grapes, but froze when I heard those words. “When did you talk to him?”

  “I didn’t. Travis saw him earlier today. He said Kevin told him he needed to talk with you, that it was important, and he asked for your number.”

  “Travis doesn’t have it, though, right?”

  “Right. I didn’t give it to anyone. Just like you said.”

  I had changed my number when I left Tampa. Not because I needed a South Carolina number, but because I didn’t want to get calls and texts from all my friends all summer asking me how I was doing, when I was coming back, or anything else for that matter. I had sought something as close to isolation as I could manage. Only a few select people knew how to get in touch with me, and I intended to keep it that way.

  “And he didn’t say what this was about?” I had been staring into the open refrigerator, but finally got the grapes out and went over to my couch.

  “Believe me, I asked Travis about it different ways for about ten minutes, trying to get any clues I could, until he asked me if he could be excused from the witness stand.”

  I managed a little bit of a laugh through my nervousness. “You’d make a good lawyer.” I popped a grape into my mouth. “Now I’m curious what he wants to talk about.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Maybe I’ll call him and use star-six-seven so he can’t see my number on the Caller ID.”

  “Do it,” she said. “And don’t forget to send me the signed lease.”

 
; . . . . .

  I spent the next several minutes sitting in silence, chomping nervously on grapes. The curiosity about why Kevin wanted to talk to me was unsettling. I had gone three months listening to Liz’s sporadic updates about him, but never once did I experience even a slight tug of interest in talking to him again.

  Maybe this new feeling was the result of knowing I would soon be returning to Tampa, and perhaps there was some value in exploring what it might be like to interact with him again. Avoiding him entirely would be nearly impossible, and I hadn’t yet thought about how I’d handle it.

  Despite knowing it would be best not to, I caved to the curiosity and called him, remembering first to block my new number.

  I listened to five rings, followed by Kevin’s voicemail message. It was the automated kind—an electronic announcement of his number—so I didn’t have to hear his voice. I wasn’t going to leave a voicemail. It would have been pointless since I wasn’t giving him my number.

  Ten minutes passed as I wavered again about whether I should call him, but came to the same conclusion: I was too curious to let it go.

  He answered the second time I called.

  “It’s Leah.”

  “New number?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re not letting me see what it is.”

  I wasn’t going to be guilt-tripped into giving it to him, so I ignored his comment. “Liz says you needed to talk to me. What is it?” My voice came out much colder than I had planned. I didn’t feel badly about it, though. It was exactly the type of tone that reflected my feelings about him.

  “Hear me out,” he said.

  “I’m listening.” Again, my sharp tone surprised me.

  “I know I’ve said this over and over, and you’ve probably heard from other people that I keep insisting I didn’t send the pictures, but it’s true.”

  “Kevin—”

  “You said you would hear me out. Please. Just give me two minutes, if that.”

  I sighed heavily. “Go ahead.”

  I heard him take a deep breath. “Yesterday I was going through the Sent folder in my email on my phone, looking for something I had sent to Professor Ulrich, and needed to forward to him again. That was back in May. I was scrolling through the sent emails and saw an email that was addressed to Kim.”

  He stopped there for a moment. I found myself holding my breath and had to take a deep one. Hearing the name of the girl he had cheated on me with shouldn’t have had that effect on me at that point, but it did.

  “She sent the pictures to herself,” he said. “Using my email. She saw the pictures on my phone, sent them to—”

  “I know what you’re trying to say.” He’d been stammering around the point and it was starting to frustrate me.

  He picked up where he left off. “So she did it. She’s the one who posted your pictures on that website.”

  There was a moment of silence as Kevin waited to see how I took the news.

  “Kim did it,” I said, flatly.

  “Yes. I’ve been saying all along that I didn’t do it, but I couldn’t prove it until yesterday.”

  “Why would she do that?” I asked, skeptical of his whole story. My nerves were almost calm again. I took a sip of water, then reached for another bunch of grapes.

  He sighed. “I don’t know. Jealousy? Trying to break us up? Leah, I swear to you, this is the truth. She did it.”

  I knew what Kevin sounded like when he was telling the truth. After being together as long as we were, I used to think of myself as something of an expert on Kevin’s different tones of voice. That is, until he denied cheating on me. That was a new tone. One I’d never heard before. So I knew what he sounded like when he was lying. And this sounded like the truth. At least I thought it did. How could I be sure anymore?

  I couldn’t figure what Kim’s motive might have been. Maybe Kevin was right—she’d been jealous of us, wanted to break us up…and then I realized that making it look like Kevin sent the pictures would have hurt him, too, among his friends, classmates, just about anyone who knew us and heard the story.

  “Why would Kim make you look bad?”

  There was a pause. Total silence. He was trying to come up with an answer, but it took him a moment. “She’s not the sharpest person in the world. Maybe she wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I don’t know. Do you want me to text you the screenshots of my Sent folder?”

  “Nice try.”

  “What?”

  “No, Kevin, I’m not giving you my number so you can text me the screenshots. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “I could email them.”

  I huffed. “It doesn’t matter. None of this matters, whether she sent them or you sent them, it’s your fault.”

  “How so?”

  “Really?” The anger was rising in my tone. “You’re not stupid. You don’t need me to tell you how it’s your fault, but you know what? I’m going to, anyway. No matter who posted the pictures online, it’s your fault because even if it was her, she never would have had them if she didn’t have access to your phone, and let me guess—she had access to your phone when you were sleeping in her bed, or while she was in your bedroom and you went to use the bathroom or get something from the fridge. Something like that, right? In any case, this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been fucking her. End of story. No, wait. That’s not the end of the story. All of that applies if she was the one who sent them. I have no idea what the truth is.”

  It took me a few seconds to catch my breath after that rant. It felt so good to say it, and it felt even better the longer Kevin stayed silent. He had no response, stunned by my firm rebuke of his pathetic plea for absolution…

  Until he said: “I’m sorry, Leah. I’m really sorry.”

  “You’re a liar,” I continued, almost on autopilot, letting the words rush out of me. “After all we had, you cheated, you lied, and now you want me to…do what? Forgive you? Come running back to you because you didn’t post the pictures, but your fuck-buddy did? Guess what—that doesn’t make any of this any better. I’m over it. I’m over you. I’m going to come back to school, finish my degree, be with my friends, and I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Got it?”

  I could hear him breathing heavily. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

  “Yes. Goodbye, Kevin. I mean it.”

  I hung up, my heart pounding in my chest. Not from nerves. Not out of fear. This time, it was the physical rush of triumph.

  I was certain I’d made the right decision in calling him. Now we both knew where we stood, and best of all, I had settled it before going back. It would be easier now.

  A little easier, anyway. I still had to come to terms with leaving Drew.

  Chapter Twenty

  I immediately called Liz and told her what happened.

  “That fucker’s blaming it on Kim?” she practically yelled.

  “That’s what he said, but who knows? He could just be blaming it on her.”

  “Probably.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” I said. “He cheated, he lied, and after all this there’s no way I could be around him. And he thinks I’m going to be okay with that and forgive him? Forget it.”

  “I don’t blame you. If Travis had done that, I’d cut his balls off and hang them on his wall.”

  “His wall, not yours, like some kind of trophy?”

  “Yeah, they’re not going on my wall. I wouldn’t want to see those things hanging there everyday.”

  “There’s one way to avoid that,” I managed to say through the laughter. “Never pose naked for anyone.”

  “No shit. Nudity is better in person anyway. Speaking of that, are you seeing Drew tonight?”

  “Ha. Funny,” I said, flatly. It was almost ten and I was getting ready to get in bed and watch something on Netflix. “No, I might see him tomorrow.”

  Drew had texted earlier and asked if I wanted to spend the night on the boat. I did, but after the convers
ation with Kevin, I was in no shape to be around anyone, especially Drew.

  “You have…let’s see…five days left there? Why aren’t you making the most of it?”

  It was a good question. One I hadn’t asked myself. But as I thought about it right then, a sick feeling invaded my gut and I said, “I think the more time I spend with him, the more I’ll miss him.”

  “Tell him you can’t live without him. Tell him you refuse to.”

  I couldn’t see myself doing that. “Considering the circumstances, that would be pretty bold.”

  “Get bold.”

  I got into bed and slid my legs along the cool sheets. “Maybe you should do the same thing. Get bold and ask Travis to marry you.”

  “Oh, you bitch.” She laughed. “That’s playing dirty, turning it around on me like that. But you know, at this rate, maybe I will. Goddam, I can’t believe Kevin. If I see him again, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself from going off on him. I can’t wait to tell Travis about this.”

  . . . . .

  I hit the beach early the next morning before work. A few people were out there, casting lines into the water. The sun was still climbing over the Atlantic, throwing golden rings through the haze of the August morning. It was tranquil out on the water, which meant small waves and not such great surfing, but it was a good morning all the same. I did a lot of thinking and decided I had to come to grips with the fact that there was no possible way to make this work with Drew.

  By the time I got to work, Rebecca had already opened up. She looked like she hadn’t slept much, but the fact that she was at the store instead of cooped up in her dark, smoky apartment was probably a good sign that she was going to be okay.

  We had a busy day, and I don’t think I rested for more than five minutes until one o’clock, when Chad and Warren said they were going to pick up some subs and asked us if we wanted anything. We gave them our orders and when they left the store, Rebecca and I had enough privacy to talk.