Don't Fall

by K. S. Thomas

  My eyes follow his nod and land on Dick. I notice they do that a lot around here lately. “Drea bring him by?” I ask, doing a weird skip walk thing, as if that could possibly hide my limping, to get to Dick and give him a proper hello.

  “Nope. Just slipped in through the open balcony door and refused to leave this time.” Michael grins, coming around the counter to take a seat at the breakfast bar beside the second sandwich. The one he made for me. I haven’t really had a chance to take that reality in just yet.

  “Yeah. That pretty much sums up how he became my cat in the first place.” I sigh and back it up as smoothly as I can until I reach the bar stool beside Hot New Sandwich Making Roommate.

  Nope.

  Too long.

  Won’t stick.

  There’s an awkward moment where he’s staring at me while chewing. Finally, he swallows. “What? You don’t like turkey?”

  “Turkey’s good.” I nod.

  “You’re not hungry?”

  “Starving.” That shit pizza at Drea’s hardly curbed my appetite. Mostly, it just made me miss real food.

  He places his half-eaten turkey on wheat back onto his plate, brushes the crumbs from his hands and leans sideways into his elbow to get a better angle at me. “Is this one of those moments where I shouldn’t assume that you know I made a sandwich for you?”

  “I mean, I sort of figured,” I admit, climbing onto my own stool, “but given my poor conclusion drawing process the past twenty-four hours, I think it’s best if we both just agree to spell everything out for one another until we really have a grasp on this new arrangement. And each other.”

  He smirks. He’s amused by me. At me. I don’t know. Whatever

  “I present to you, turkey, swiss cheese, avocado, tomato and a little mustard, layered neatly between two slices of fresh whole wheat bread. It’s yours. Because I was hungry. And eating in front of someone is rude.” He picks up his sandwich again. “And also, because eating alone sucks. Which we’ll both be doing if you don’t hurry up and take your first bite before I take my last.”

  He doesn’t need to tell me twice. One ginormous bite later and my belly and taste buds are equally impressed with my new roommate. Michael. Mike? Professor McMichael?

  I can feel my lip curl up involuntarily. And it’s not even for a good reason, other than I’m entertained by my own silly contemplation of his name and why it’s so clearly not...his name. “What is it that people really call you?”

  He doesn’t laugh. Or smirk. But his eyes light up with something new. Intrigue? Surprise? I don’t know, but it’s a new version of the usual steady gaze he keeps on me that makes me feel like I’m a caged animal in his personal lab somewhere. “What do you mean?”

  I take another bite, to stall. Now that I’ve opened this can of worms I kind of wish I hadn’t. “I just figured you had a nickname.”

  He chews way longer than he needs to before he swallows. “Like Mike?”

  I shake my head. “I think we both know you don’t go by Mike.”

  He holds the last of his crust within an inch of his mouth, and for a moment I think he’s going to eat it, chew for five minutes and really make me sweat it out. Then he grins and the crust drops back down an inch. “I don’t look like a Mike?”

  My nose and mouth scrunch up before I can stop them. It really bothers me that much. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not even sure I’m buying that his last name is McMichael.

  “You don’t have the right hair for Mike.”

  This time he laughs. Loudly. Delightedly. A pleased laugh. Which, would be odd if this conversation wasn’t already so dumb.

  “I don’t have the right hair for Mike? Wow. Well, then. Do I have the right hair for Max? Doug? Or maybe Jason?”

  “You’re just throwing names out there now.” Annoyed, I abandon ship and jump face first into the sandwich in front of me, resigning myself to calling him Michael for all eternity.

  He’s still staring at the side of my head. I can feel it, but I refuse to acknowledge it.

  “Well, if I don’t have the right hair for any of those names, I guess I better stick with Lane then.”

  Lane.

  Slowly, I turn back to face him. “You totally have Lane hair.”

  He grins broadly, all of his shiny white teeth peeking out. “Apparently. Who knew!?”

  FORMERLY HOT NEW SANDWICH Making Roommate...now simply known as: Lane.

  So much for making changes and taking time out from being me. It should have been so easy. Middle name out, real name in. Voila. New me. While I’ve never used my first name around friends or family, no one professionally has ever questioned it. Not once. Not even given the ridiculous combo of Michael and McMichael. But then along comes Tessa. Tessa the crazy girl with the umbrella. The flustered chick in nothing but a towel. The coffee addict with all the grace and strength of a circus performer.

  My new roommate.

  My student.

  “So, weird coincidence this morning, huh?” I point out, sliding my plate out of the way and reaching for my water instead.

  “I don’t know. Can anything between us still be categorized as weird? Haven’t we graduated past that yet? Onto something else, like...what’s weirder than weird?” Her left brow arches thoughtfully as she continues to contemplate the answer to her own question. “Kooky? Freaky? Ominous?”

  “Ominous? Are we headed for danger? Is one of us still planning to kill the other with an umbrella when they’re naked and unarmed?”

  She’s so caught off guard, she nearly spits avocado across the room. Fighting her way through laughing and choking she somehow manages to put words together. “Maybe ominous was a bad choice.”

  “Maybe.” I smirk. She’s funny. And, I’m back at the beginning of my original train of thought. “Anyway, if you’re not too busy planning my murder, there is one small hiccup in our current plan to room together.”

  She nods. She’s figured it out as well. “The whole student – teacher thing.”

  “Exactly.” I spin my seat around to face her full on rather than twist. “How comfortable are you with secrets?”

  She frowns. “What kind of secrets?”

  I’d thought that part was obvious. Apparently, we’re still doing the spelling things out bit. “The kind where neither of us tells anyone that we’re living together.”

  Her confusion only grows from here. “Not telling isn’t exactly going to hide anything. I’m sure someone, somewhere in admin will notice eventually that we share the same address. Provided there isn’t some sort of search engine already in place to pick up on such things.”

  She’s a wee bit on the paranoid side, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For me. In this case in particular. “Our addresses aren’t the same.”

  “Come again?”

  “I got the job before I got the condo. And, I never updated my info.”

  Her eyes narrow slightly. “You don’t feel like this may become an issue at some point down the road? You know they only forward your mail for like six months. What are you going to do after that? Just hope they don’t mail you anything important? Like your W2’s for example?”

  “I bet you get told to relax a lot.”

  Her jaw stiffens. Her mouth all but disappears and I now know what she would look like should she ever decide to grow a unibrow. “You’re right. I don’t know why I even care. Not my job on the line. Not my mail getting lost. Not. My. Problem. AT ALL.”

  There’s a zip of her stool spinning and the breeze she leaves in her wake as she makes every effort to stomp off in a huff, but can’t quite pull it off because she’s polite and considerate, and takes the time to clear both our plates, rinse them and load them in the dishwasher before muttering a ‘thanks for the sandwich’ and continuing her dramatic exit.

  This is the point at which I stop her. “I’m not going to lose any mail because I still own the house it’s being sent to. And, frankly, this job is...just a job. I have no intention o
f building a career around it. So, if it doesn’t pan out, oh well.”

  Her exit successfully halted, I’ve topped my initial expectations and managed to stump her. “Huh?”

  I release a long, worn out breath of air. My intentions were to keep things simple. To create a disconnect. To change course abruptly and not look back until I was so far ahead, looking back didn’t fucking hurt anymore. But those plans clearly only applied to life in a bubble. Blissful solitude which didn’t include people or their prying questions. All of which disappeared the second she came crashing in, swinging her dead aunt’s umbrella at my head.

  Relenting to the situation such as it is, I get to my feet and approach her.

  “I was supposed to get married end of May. The date was set two years ago. The wedding was paid for. Everything was ready. Except the bride.”

  Her eyeballs sweep from one side to the other, presumably in search of an escape. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. That’s pretty much what I said too when I found out she wasn’t as keen on getting married to me as she was ready to trek through Europe with my best man.”

  Her jaw drops and her eyeballs stop scanning the room, freezing instead. Directly on me. “Wow.”

  “Uh-huh.” I hate telling this story. Which, I figured I would. This is the first time I’ve had to tell it. Considering it’s September, I guess I held it off for a pretty long time. “With the wedding being canceled, it kind of put a damper on our other plans as well.”

  “Your other plans?” Fear. Definite fear in her voice. Hell, I’d be scared to ask as well. Curiosity though, it’s a killer.

  “To buy a far greater house than we could possibly need, directly on the beach so we could use it as a home office and combine our practices to run a joint couple’s therapy center.”

  The corners of her mouth jerk briefly as she wards off the instinct to laugh. “I can see where having your marriage be a bust could sort of cast a shadow on couple’s therapy.” I have to commend her for keeping a straight face through that one.

  “Yep.”

  Silence sets in as I give her time to piece the rest together for herself.

  Eventually, her expression turns neutral. There’s a softness in her eyes when she nods and says, “I’m pretty comfortable with keeping secrets.”

  Chapter Four

  Tessa

  “I see we share a common fondness for the balcony,” his warm voice meets me in the dark. I’m not sure how he even knew I was out here. I’m tucked into the hammock and I left the light out on purpose.

  I sit up and move from the shadows I thought were keeping me hidden, swinging back and forth a little. “I guess so.” I want to say a million other things. Some to apologize for making his shitty situation even shittier before I knew how shitty it was. Some to explain myself and just how much I can relate to shitty situations. But instead I open my mouth and say, “At least we’re both getting better about showing our fondness for clothes as well.”

  He chuckles. It’s dark and gooey and sweet. And now I want brownies. “I will definitely be showing off my fondness for clothes from now on.”

  I’m almost disappointed to hear that. Then I notice the cup in his hands. “You found the coffee.”

  Even in the dark, I can make out the shape of his perfect face as it tilts up and down in a nod. “Another fondness we share.”

  I figured. It’s why I made a whole pot. Even at this time of night.

  Silence sets in for a while. It’s not awkward. Which becomes awkward when I think about it. The two of us, sitting out here in the nearly pitch black, not speaking. Just, existing. Comfortably. There’s an odd sort of familiarity about it. One I wouldn’t ordinarily feel for someone I’ve hardly known for twenty-four hours. But then, we’ve been busy. Crammed a lot of the initial growing pains a friendship usually takes months, or ever years, to accumulate into a very short period of time.

  “Lane?”

  “Hm.”

  I lean back, a burning desire to hide again now that I have his attention. Guess the whole comfortable thing only applies when I can pretend he doesn’t know I’m out here, watching him.

  “How old are you?”

  A quiet chuckle. That’s a good reaction, right?

  “You better be asking because I look way too young to be a professor.”

  I laugh. The comfortable thing is kicking in again. It helps that he makes it so easy. “Yep. Way too young. But then those pleated khakis you had on today kind of threw me.”

  “What was wrong with my pants?”

  I shrug. “They were old dude pants.”

  He gasps. Dramatically. Now I’m trying not to laugh again. “Those were not old dude pants. I would know, because I’m not an old dude. They were grownup pants. If you’re not familiar with those, then you’re not as old as you look.”

  “Wait.” That wasn’t funny. “How old do I look?!”

  He doesn’t answer. Instead, he gets up from where he’s sitting in the wicker loveseat across from me and walks over toward the hammock. My heart begins to race. When he sits back, tucking his spectacular ass (I’ve seen it, it is) into the hammock beside me, the racing stops and an all-out drumroll, shoots into my throat.

  He kicks off softly with the balls of his feet and then both our legs just dangle as we sway back and forth in the moonlight, the weight of both our bodies drawing us to the middle where my arm lies directly against his and our thighs touch.

  I can really see him now. His eyes. His mouth. All of his mannerisms are clear as day under the moon. He’s grinning. A subdued, sexy grin that’s making me break out in a sweat. For a man I found exceptionally annoying this morning, he’s having an entirely different effect on me tonight. If I thought being roommates was going to present a problem when we were just strangers, what the hell am I going to do I with all of...this?!

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “I look twenty-nine?!” Forget it. He’s not hot anymore.

  His hand moves to my knee, squeezing it ever so slightly. “No, crazy. I’m twenty-nine.”

  “Oh.” Yeah. He’s hot. “I’m twenty-two.”

  “Figured. Just based on the class you’re taking. Last year, right?”

  I nod. “Unless I decide to go back and get my Master’s.”

  His weight shifts back, settling in all the way. “What are you studying?”

  I lean back to meet him face to face. “Journalism.”

  His eyes take me in, study me for a long minute before he speaks again. “You’re taking a really heavy psyche class for someone who isn’t studying psychology,” he muses.

  “I am studying psychology. It’s my minor,” I counter, enjoying the air of mystery I’m suddenly shrouded in. Guess he can’t figure me out just by staring holes into me after all.

  “You’re going to make me work,” he mumbles, trying to sound frustrated to hide his rising level of amusement. He’s having fun. We both are.

  “Nah, I just liked the growing confusion on your face. You’re so...together all the time. And it was bad enough feeling like the hysterical mental case in the room before I learned you were a therapist. Now anytime I think about running in here screaming, swinging an umbrella at you, I thank my lucky stars you didn’t have me committed right then and there.”

  He doesn’t laugh out loud, but it still escapes through his eyes, twinkling like the stars above us. “If it helps, I didn’t think it was an issue of sanity. I just assumed you were drunk like the rest of them.”

  I close my eyes thinking about the usual alcohol induced shenanigans Drea and her friends must have exposed him to last night and shudder. I love her but we couldn’t be more opposite. Sometimes I don’t mind being fun and carefree by association, other times I cringe with shame at the thought of not being perceived as the responsible, straight laced bore that I am. The burden of being a goodie-two-shoes, I suppose.

  “I was actually working last night before I busted in on you. Not partying.”

  “You were working
at two in the morning?” His eyes narrow and his tone sounds somehow disapproving, like he maybe thinks only prostitutes and drug dealers operate at those hours. “In that outfit?”

  My first instinct is to react affronted, and possibly run inside for Aunt Edi’s umbrella. Then I think back to what I was wearing and I’m starting to see why he’s drawing such insulting conclusions. “First of all, what happened to listening while people spell things out for each other? Huh? Have my past assumptions taught you nothing in the last two days?” I shake my head at him, in case he’s not picking up on the scolding in my voice. But, then I carry on, no longer trying to hide the fact I find this funny. I thought he was a psycho stalker this morning. Lack of sleep has been very unkind to both of us. “Second, I bartend at the basement downtown. Tip tops help.”

  “Tip tops?”

  “Yeah.” I widen my eyes, leaning forward and shimmying as much as can be shimmied with two people in a hammock and my limited cleavage. “You know.”

  He averts his gaze. “I do now.” His mouth distorts in a distasteful way. “Really wish I hadn’t seen that.”

  “Excuse me?” I get that I’m no Sexpot Barbie, but my breasts aren’t barf worthy either.

  Fully aware of how asshole like he’s sounding, he throws his hands up in a helpless surrender. “It’s just...so not you.”

  I’m less pissed off and back on intrigued. “You really think you know what is and isn’t me?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  Well, no. But I’m not saying that out loud! “Nu-uh, my question first.”

  He sighs, dropping his head back over the fold of the linen and staring up at the sky. “I think you’re forgetting that I’ve been living in your home for the last two months. Now that I have a person to connect everything to, I just may know you better than you think.”

  Damn. I hadn’t thought of that. “Not everything in this place is a representation of me, you know,” I mumble a lame rebuttal.

  “I know. Some is your Aunt Edi. But, I think a lot of what I thought was hers, is actually yours. And I think we both know what that means.”