Don't Fall

by K. S. Thomas

  “So then what? They freaked out?”

  He laughs, but it’s resentful. “Um, sure. We could say they freaked out. It was kind of a shit storm, and the tattoos were only the beginning. Turns out they pretty much hated everything I was about. My father couldn’t stop telling me how disappointed he was in the man I was becoming. How I was his only son, and how I better step up and make the right choices, because I’m the legacy he leaves behind and as it stood, he’d rather have told people I died, than claim me as his own.”

  “Holy shit,” I mutter. “I thought I had bad parents.”

  His arm curls around me again, holding me close. “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not even a little bit.” I lift my head, chin propped on his chest so I can see him. “So, did you?”

  “What?”

  “Make the right choices?”

  He squints, staring off across the room, “For a while. In the end what’s right for him, might never be what’s right for me. And I haven’t figured out yet how to make that work us.”

  I almost press the issue, follow my desire to dig deeper into the past he’s so set on ignoring. Thankfully, there’s a loud knock before I can open my mouth again and Lane scrambles off the sofa to pull on a pair pants and get the door. Saved by the Chinese Takeout Guy.

  Lane

  When I notice Tessa get up and leave the room to go put clothes on, I’m almost sorry I told her eating together was a roommate thing. Then, when she comes strolling back out of her room, hair tied loosely in a messy braid over her shoulder, a worn out, nearly see-through white tee-shirt casually hugging her curves until they meet the waistband of her leggings, I’m not so sorry anymore.

  Tessa’s natural beauty is breathtaking at any given moment of the day, even though she rarely smiles unprovoked. Truth is, I think it’s my favorite thing about her. She makes me work for it. Makes me earn that smile, and God, it’s so worth it.

  “You must really like egg rolls,” I tease, soaking in the genuinely pleased expression on her face and fully taking in the knowledge that I put it there. That I have the ability to do that.

  She shrugs, a mischievous flare flashing in her bright green eyes. “Sure. It’s the egg rolls.” Then she just stands there, taking in the scene before her.

  It’s right around now, I start wondering why I laid out all the food on the floor, as if we’re kids about to have some sort of picnic. It seemed natural in the moment, plopping down here in the center of the room, where all of her stuff is still spread out. “We can move to the table,” I point out, already reaching for the closest takeout box to get moving.

  “Why?” She plops down across from me, legs crossed in her lap, and starts to examine her choices. “This is perfect.”

  I watch her one handedly track down the box of lo-mein she ordered, while using the other to snag an egg roll, which she proceeds to move to her mouth, holding it there with her teeth temporarily until she gets one of her large textbooks situated in her lap and can make use of her egg roll hand again. She fascinates me. The way she does everything to her own liking, never caring what’s expected and striving only to meet her own standards, which ironically are higher than most.

  “Are you going to eat?” she asks, pointing her half-eaten egg roll at me.

  “Is that your subtle way of letting me know there won’t be much left if I don’t hurry?” I joke, picking up a set of chopsticks and a random box of food before I lean back against the inside of the sofa.

  “I’m not nearly as concerned about you getting your share of dinner as you might think, roomie. Mostly, I just want you to stop staring at me,” she mutters, eyes sweeping over the pages of her open textbook while she blindly stabs away at her noodles.

  “Worried I’m psychoanalyzing you again.” I pop a piece of orange chicken into my mouth and wait for her next comeback.

  “Not as worried as you should be about becoming the star of this assignment if you don’t quit.”

  “Why, what’s the topic? Sexy professors? Hot casual hookups? Roommates you want to see naked?” I can keep these coming all night.

  She looks up, clearly fighting a smirk and definitely losing. “Famous Psychopaths in History.”

  I take a second, rolling my lip over my teeth while I decide how I want to take that one. “Think I have what it takes to be famous?”

  She shakes her head, laughing, then returns her attention to the book she’s reading. Guess we’re calling that round a tie.

  “So, this the stuff you want to write about when you’re a journalist?” I ask, apparently incapable of entertaining myself when she’s sitting right across from me and far more interesting than anything else I can think of.

  She peers up at me, lifting only her eyes to meet mine. “Psychopaths specifically? Not so much. But, people, yeah.”

  That explains the few hundred biographies she has stashed around this apartment. “How long have you known this was what you wanted to do?” Because I’m several years older than she is, and I still haven’t got that shit sorted out.

  She sits up taller, abandoning her research efforts for the time being and I internalize the satisfaction of knowing I rate higher than school work. “When I was nine I had to write a paper on my hero. I spent all weekend trying to come up with someone to write about only to keep winding up with fictional superheroes I knew weren’t meant to be included. So, Sunday evening, I walked down to the library and asked to see the heroes section.” She grins, remembering her nine-year-old self, “Anyway, I was blown away with the stories I found. Stories about real people. People who didn’t look so special or different from the people I knew in real life, but who had clearly made very different choices. And thus, began my obsession.”

  “With biographies?”

  “With people.”

  I set down my box of dinner, hand resting in my lap while I make no bones about studying her and the story she just shared. “You were nine?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And when asked to write about your hero, you didn’t just...write about your mom? Or your dad?” That’s what I did. Wrote about my father. Though, it’s not a mistake I would make a second time.

  She laughs harshly. “Yeaaah, no. My parents were never my heroes.”

  “That how you wound up living here? With your aunt?” I should stop asking questions. I know that. It’s getting too deep. Too personal. Even if I try to spin it as a roommate conversation, we’re stepping way out of bounds for the second time tonight already.

  Tessa sighs, the sort of sigh that escapes when the moment you’ve been dreading but always knew would come eventually, finally arrives.

  “More or less. My mother was hot mess while I was growing up, mostly still is, though she’s supposedly sober now and I’m told that makes a difference. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. My dad was some UPS dude who would make deliveries at the liquor store she was working at when she got pregnant with me. She never saw him again after that. Social Services tried finding him once but, given all my mother could tell them was, ‘the name on his patch said Steve’ there wasn’t quite enough to go on. So, I was born to a young single mom with four babies already in tow before I ever came along, who had no steady job, no steady home and no steady frame of mind. By the time I was twelve, I’d been bounced around from one family member to the next for four years before landing back with my mom for yet another split second only to wind up getting hauled off by a social worker when someone caught wind of the fact we were all living in a broke down car in the parking lot behind the convenience mart she was running at the time.

  “By then, my two oldest brothers were already over eighteen and living on their own. They petitioned to have my seventeen-year-old and fifteen-year-old brothers move in with them and the judge went for it, which left just us girls. My sister, Riley, hadn’t ever been split from my mom, and my mom finagled a deal to get her back. So then it was down to just me. Me and this really rockin’ social worker who sat
with me until I believed her when she told me, I wasn’t the problem, they were. That I wasn’t too broken to be loved, they were just too broken to know how to love me.

  “She searched hell and high water, and somehow tracked down the only family member, I’d never lived with, other than my dad. My great Aunt Edi. After her, I never saw my social worker ever again. But I guess the seed was planted, you know? She was there in this pivotal moment of my life. It could have gone in so many different directions, none of them good, and there she was, like my real-life fairy godmother, saving me. Sending me home for a happy ever after.” On the outside her smile stretches over her teeth, but on the inside, I know another small part of her is dying, remembering how happy ever after wasn’t nearly long enough. Because her Aunt Edi’s gone. And she was it.

  And I’m a shit trade off. She really should have swung a few more times at me with that umbrella. If for no other reason than it would probably do her some good to beat the shit out of something.

  “So that’s why seeing your sister this morning was so important. She’s still with your mom.”

  She nods. “We only just got in touch a few months ago. Riley hasn’t had it easy and I just want to do the best I can, to do for her what my aunt did for me, you know?”

  I do.

  “What about your brothers?”

  She turns her gaze downward, fidgeting with the corners of the pages in her book. “No idea. They weren’t big on keeping in touch. Not that I blame them. The way we grew up, it was every man for himself, push forward and don’t look back, or else that’s it. You fall, you go under. You don’t come back up.”

  I nod slowly, trying like hell to keep my expression blank, to not show the fury rising inside me, or the ache spreading in my chest as I start to understand the weight she carries with her, the reasons she is the way she is, but it’s damn hard. “So that’s why.”

  “Why what?”

  Our eyes lock and all I can hear is the pounding of my own heart, thundering against my ribs. “You don’t fall.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tessa

  It doesn’t take long for us to find our own groove and before I know it, weeks have gone by and I’m navigating this roommate/sex-buddy thing surprisingly smoothly. It’s quite straightforward really. When we’re naked, we do naked things, and when we’re not, we don’t. It’s as simple as that. No pointless make out sessions when we’re dressed, no deep conversations (anymore) when we’re naked. Though, we have plenty of both within the proper perimeters of our arrangement.

  “Hey, wait up,” Drea calls out just as I’m about to start down the stairs.

  “Where are you going this time of morning?” It’s weird to even have to ask, but there’s still an odd, unacknowledged distance between us that keeps me out of the basic loop and vice versa.

  “Just the parking lot,” she says, catching up to me. “Figured we could walk and talk.”

  “We’re going to do that? Talk about it?” It’s not really our thing. But then, neither is fighting. The usual squabbles we have are easily ignored the next day and then life just carries on as normal. Didn’t quite work out that way for us this time around and it’s been really strange not having her bursting in at all hours of the day and night.

  “Ignoring it and pretending it just went away hasn’t worked.”

  “Weird, right?”

  She laughs, slapping her thigh in exasperation. “Yes! What went wrong, man? That’s how we process! Ten years of friendship have taught us this.”

  “I think we both kind of jumped the rails where the usual process is concerned,” I say, sighing when we hit the second landing. “First, I went all crazy, then you went all crazy, and the crazy was all crazy and so not our usual crazy, I think it’s only natural we screwed it up a bit.”

  She hooks her arm into mine as we hop the last few steps to the bottom the same way we did when we were twelve and she came over every day after school while her parents were at work. “I’m glad I understood all that. Must mean we’re fixed again.”

  We bump shoulders when we reach the pavement, both giggling like neither of us has a care in the world. Sometimes being reminded you still have your best friend by your side is all it takes to feel that way.

  “There’s just one little thing,” I add as we’re about to part ways in the parking lot.

  “Lane,” she groans, “You’re going to make me not hate him, aren’t you?!”

  “He’s not who you think he is,” I reason.

  She rolls her eyes, but it’s more in surrender than anything. “I know,” she mumbles begrudgingly. “I talked to Jules. Well, it was more like she came venting to me. Bitching about how he must be gay because she used all her best moves and not one worked on him.”

  “Did you tell her...?”

  “That he’s not gay?” Her brows rise to meet her hairline. Speaking in code brings out all of her most animated expressions. “No. Decided it was better for everyone if she continues believing she’s got nothing he wants. Which, clearly, is true anyway.”

  I nod, perfectly happy to leave it at that. No need to expound any more on what Lane does or doesn’t want and whether or not he’s still getting it.

  “Thanks.” I give her a hug before I start to walk the last few feet to my car. “I’m glad we did the talking thing.”

  “Me too. But let’s try not to need it again. It’s yucky.” She shudders, as if trying to shake off the ick of feelings and such.

  “Yes, let’s,” I agree, amused with her antics to the point I’m still grinning when I get in my car and take off. Or maybe that’s just the giddy feeling I get when I know my best friend and I are back to normal.

  Normal is a relative term of course, and tends to apply itself so sparingly to my life. Kind of like now, as I’m headed to my first class. Seems normal enough. I come here every week. I like the class. As far as I know, I’m doing well in it. And that’s not counting all the extra credit I’ve been doing.

  Still, nothing ever feels normal anymore about reaching for that handle and walking in. Not even the sight of an empty classroom, which greets me plenty on my day to day life given my inclination to arrive early for things whenever possible.

  Today he takes one look at me and, “Out!”

  “Excuse me?” I’m too stunned to add any sort of feeling to my reaction.

  “You can’t be in here,” he says flatly, very intently stacking up sheets of papers that have been stapled together in small bundles. In other news, I think we’ve got a pop quiz coming at us today.

  “I can totally be in here. And I can sit in the back row. And I can shut my mouth and you can stop talking to me and then neither of us will even know the difference,” I rationalize my way through his ridiculousness.

  His stack of papers hits the desk with an intentional wham. “I’ll know.” He lifts his head just far enough for his eyes to meet mine. “I can smell you. And that’s a problem. Because if I can smell you, I want to look at you. And if I look at you, I want to do other things...things I can’t even think about wanting to do while we’re here, where we’re supposed to ignore each other, except I can’t because I can smell you.”

  I open my mouth to argue, for no other reason than I feel compelled to, probably because he said I smell...even if he meant it in a good way...but he cuts me off before I can even get a word out.

  “No. No more talking. No more standing there, being all...you...get out.” He points at the door. “And don’t even think about returning until all of class is here. In fact, be late. Sneak in the back and sit by those stoner kids that always hang in the right corner. Maybe their stench will hide you.”

  It’s supremely hard to take him seriously, and yet, he does seem to mean it. Eyes wide and a loud exasperated gasp laced with giggles later, I’m backing out of the room, hands up in surrender.

  Shaking my head, I take a few more steps out into the hall, there definitely wasn’t anything normal about that.

  Nevertheles
s, I follow his bizarre instructions, including sitting with Wes and JD in the back, which I may do again, because those boys are funny as hell trying to interpret Lane’s teachings while fully baked. Then, just to be on the safe side, I duck out of class a few minutes early.

  From there the day takes on a bit of a déjà vu vibe, feeling eerily similar to our first day of class and my intense desires to avoid Lane and further humiliation at all cost. Only today it’s not humiliation I’m steering clear of. To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m attempting to remove myself from. His intense yearning from me? My sudden desirability? The way I make men wild with my untamed sexiness?

  By the time I’m done following that train of thought, I’m bent over laughing, looking like a full-blown lunatic in the middle of campus.

  My eyes still watering up despite my efforts to squelch the laughter, I take the long way to the track, just to avoid anyone stopping me and demanding an explanation, or at the very least to be let in on the joke.

  After running my ass off, literally, for over two hours, I’m too exhausted to contemplate the craziness any longer. Gross and wiped out, I stumble into our apartment, grateful to find it empty for once.

  “Shower,” I mutter to Dick who comes strolling out of my room as soon as he hears me walk in. “Shower, then I feed you.”

  He meows loudly, voicing his displeasure, but he knows the routine. On track nights, he never gets fed on time. Doesn’t matter that he sits right outside my shower the entire duration of it, yelling at me. I can’t be swayed. And there are few things I can still claim that about.

  Lane

  “Why aren’t you eating my paella? Do you have any idea what it took to make that? I’ve been in the kitchen for hours!” Alexis nudges the plate a little closer to me, just in case I’ve been too far away from it to grasp the privilege of being served such an exquisite dish.

  “You really think I don’t know Tapas’ paella when I see it? Come on, we ate there every Sunday growing up.” I lean back into my chair, laughing at her. “The woman who can’t successfully scramble eggs trying to pass off restaurant quality Spanish cuisine as her own. That’s fantastic, Lex.”