by S. L. Naeole
Table of Contents
PREFACE
GRACE EXPECTATIONS
POSITIVE
ERICA
SO WE MEET AGAIN
SECRETS
A SMALL KINDESS
LOST AGAIN
WELCOME BACK
HERO
ADMISSION
BEGINNINGS
BLIND
BODYGUARD
SOLILOQUY
FIGHT
FAMILY
THE CALL
BREAK A LEG
FACE OFF
SHIFT
MIST
91
PREPARATION
MIXED COMPANY
THE FUDGESICLE AND DAFFODIL EXPERIMENT
STRANGE HAPPENINGS
SHORTCOMINGS
GROUND RULES
THREE
SENSE
CHANGE
LIFESONG
POE-TRY
REVELATION
RETRIBUTION
IMMORTAL FAILING
EPILOGUE: FESTIVE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About The Author
FALLING FROM GRACE
By: S.L. Naeole
© 2010 by S.L. Naeole
All rights reserved.
All of the situations and characters in this novel are fictional. Any similarities to actual people or situations are completely coincidental and wholly unintentional.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
S.L. Naeole
Visit my website at www.SLNaeole.com
Visit the official website for Falling From Grace at www.GraceSeries.com
Bird Song, Book Two in the Grace Series Coming Out July 2010
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copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
For my wonderful husband, who gave me support.
Even when I probably didn’t deserve it—you are my rock.
And for my mites, who give me just about all the reason I need
to write and laugh and write about laughing.
“Thus, in discourse, the lovers whiled away
The night that waned and waned and brought no day.
They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts
Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.”
Al Aaraaf—Edgar Alan Poe
PREFACE
His beauty was painful to take in, even as his passion pulled from me a cry of agony. Captured in his frozen eyes was the light of every star ever born, and every wish ever made. His beautiful smile stretched cruelly across his face as he took in the panoramic of my fear.
There was lust in his eyes that begged him to be quick, but there was no need to rush; he had all the time in the world, while I had only the time he spared me. His beautiful smile grew as my breathing quickened.
A comforting caress as he leaned into me, a promise of nothing but suffering and death on his lips as he said my name lovingly. I was pinned to my fate—this was to be my last embrace—I welcomed it as the bitter flood began.
GRACE EXPECTATIONS
I dread Mondays.
And the incessant buzzing of my alarm clock heralded it like some newly crowned king. What idiot had set that thing for—I peeked from beneath my pillow at the clock sitting on my dresser, mere inches from the foot of the bed—five-thirty? It couldn’t have been me; not in a million years. I wasn’t ready, not for today anyway, and I definitely wasn’t ready for it to start at five-thirty. The darkness of early morning still blackened my window.
As a rule, Mondays don’t start until the sun comes out. Oh, who was I kidding; it was September…in Ohio. There wasn’t going to be any sun for another hour at least, and in less than three, I’d have to face the world again. Summer was over and my senior year was starting, just as my life was ending.
It was unavoidable, this first day of school after a lifetime of memory making; all those whispered secrets and shouted declarations between friends were as permanent as time. And yet, nothing could be as permanent as broken promises, or my shattered heart, broken by my best friend. In truth, my only friend; the only person in the world I trusted, who knew me inside and out and who looked past what the others saw as freakish.
Graham Hasselbeck wasn’t just my next door neighbor. We grew up together. He had been my childhood playmate, the two of us inseparable all our lives, from diapers to puberty. It goes without saying then that we had the same tastes in just about everything two friends could share. Even fate seemed inclined to throw us together when we started school, with the both of us being assigned to the same classes from kindergarten through high school.
Our life’s milestones seemed to run in time together as well, since we learned how to ride our bikes together, broke bones together, even got sick together. We were beyond close, our bond too strong and significant to break.
Even when he grew taller than me and everyone else, when he took off the braces that straightened imperfect teeth while mine still displayed that heinously embarrassing childhood gap, when he became popular with everyone while I lagged behind, when all of the girls noticed his dark blonde spikes and green eyes, and no one noticed me at all—Graham had remained my best friend.
And this summer together, like all of the previous summers before, had been spent hanging out, just being with each other, just being friends…up until two weeks ago. That was when he stopped taking my phone calls, and when he started leaving his house before I got up, only coming home long after my curfew kept me indoors.
That was after I broke the cardinal rule of friendship and told him I was in love with him.
It sounded reasonable enough, telling the person you’ve known since forever that you’re in love with them, especially since I was. And why not tell him? After all, he knew everything about me. Every secret, every obvious and invisible flaw, and every screw up were all well documented in our memories, if not in photo albums created solely for blackmail use at a later date. I had been nothing if not unbearably and unfailingly honest with him.
And perhaps that was where I had gone wrong.
With a dismayed groan I thought back to that moment, that crucial blip in time when I’d finally found the courage to tell Graham how I felt. We had been sitting on the hood of his Buick Skylark, which used to be his dad’s. The rusty green coupe with the dented passenger door had been our home away from home when Graham’s parents were fighting—which seemed to happen on a daily basis now—or when my dad had his girlfriend over to visit.
The car was a birthday present his dad had told him when he’d given it to him two years ago. Graham had just made captain of the football team—the youngest ever at sixteen—and had also just passed his driver’s test. It was a defining moment for him, and receiving that car was like being given the world. Of course, it didn’t go unnoticed that Graham’s dad had also just bought himself a brand new truck right around that time.
Richard Hasselbeck wasn’t exactly trying to hide that fact from his son, but he also didn’t come right out and say it either. I had called it tacky, but Graham had gone on and on about the freedom we now had to go to t
he mall—which we never did—or go to the Indian Mound park to throw the ball around—which I could never quite do without him complaining that I “threw like a girl”—or go to the cemetery to visit the graves of my mother and his grandmother—a monthly ritual for us.
But at that moment, right then and there that car was my platform, where I stood as the executioner put the invisible noose around my neck—and released the trapdoor.
“Graham,” I started, my voice quivering from the chaos of my nerves. I took a few deep breaths to calm them while I braced myself against the windshield. Its smooth, sloped surface did nothing to comfort me or give me any real sense of stability; I was just fearful that without it, every word that came out of my mouth would send me flying backwards in retreat—rocket propulsion via the pouring out of my heart.
He glanced over at me and smiled cockily. Call me a simpering little girl stuck in Cinderella mode, but I loved that smug smile of his. Then again, so did every girl over the age of twelve within a five mile radius. The way his cheek dimpled ever so slightly, teasing me with the promise of its depth never failed to make me forget just what it was that I had wanted to say
“What’s up, Grace?” he asked in a stunted tone, taking note of my awkward tension and adjusting his posture in kind. He leaned back, as though bracing for the emotional upheaval that he could sense was on the brink of breaking through my awkwardly feminine defenses.
I started to speak, but my tongue grew heavy and dry in my mouth as doubt began to slip in. I had replayed the speech over and over again in my mind, imagining what I’d say and what his reactions would be. But I’d never vocalized them, never stood in front of a mirror and said them out loud just to hear what they sounded like, and now it appeared that the internal fuse that existed solely for this purpose had shorted out on me, causing me to stare at him dumbly.
“Grace? What’s up?” he asked again, sensing my caution and frowning in response. When had I ever held back from telling him how I felt, he’d probably wondered. His confusion was warranted; I knew that I wasn’t acting like myself and that was putting him off.
If this was going to go well, I would have to put myself back together otherwise I’d never make it beyond just sitting there. After taking several more calming breaths, I swallowed my doubts and decided right then and there to wing it. Seizing my moment of renewed strength, I took the first hesitant step towards my running leap of faith. Olympic medal of openness, here I come.
My mouth opened, and the words tumbled out.
“Graham, I love you-”
I quickly bit down everything else that wanted to join those four words, a jumbled mess of disclosure catching in my throat and nearly causing me to choke.
I wasn’t that brave…yet.
For one agonizingly long moment he said nothing, and the silence felt like it would strangle me. Or it could have been that I was just holding my breath while waiting for a response.
His face was an ever growing map of emotions, and though I professed to know him better than anyone else ever could, even I had to admit that I couldn’t see just where exactly he was going to land. This was the first time that I had said those three words to him in a tone that wasn’t playful or mocking—the way you’re supposed to say it to your best friend—and I knew that it had caught him off guard completely because he’d never been at a loss for words before. In one fell swoop, I had managed to do the impossible and silence Graham Hasselbeck.
After what could have been a lifetime or perhaps seventy-two seconds—give or take a minute—he sighed…somewhat reservedly. “Ditto, Grace.”
The ground rumbled beneath me, opening up a hungry chasm that awaited my next move.
And then Graham smiled.
So I leapt. “I’m also in love with you,” I whispered, just loud enough for him to hear. Maybe too loud. Out of habit, I had closed my eyes when I had begun to speak, but at that moment I needed them to be open, needed to gauge his reaction. I didn’t want to miss anything; I needed to see his face, see his eyes when he heard my confession.
And I didn’t recognize it at all.
He was looking past me, avoiding eye contact as his face held on fast to a blank expression, though I could see a slight puckering between his brows as he struggled with some inner turmoil. I wasn’t used to this, to seeing him so aloof, and it was one of the most terrifying moments in my life. For reasons unknown I began see my life flash before my eyes—Graham was in almost every scene, filling them up like the sun fills up a frigid morning with its warmth—and those images were slowly being eaten up by hungry flames of doubt that clawed at my heart as it beat slowly, almost painfully in my chest.
He carelessly shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans in some vain attempt to keep them occupied. “Grace…” he sighed.
Maybe he muttered it. I don’t remember which because the next few minutes destroyed me to my very core and prevented me from being able to distinguish anything apart from how dark and desolated my world was becoming. The sudden feeling of loss as all the blood in my body started to drain away to some unseen place was causing an acute buzzing to flood my ears. It blocked out everything but the sound of my entire world being knocked off of its foundation—the very thing that kept me from falling into that chasm that waited patiently for me to stumble—and crushing my hopes as it landed on my heart.
“Grace, I…I don’t know how exactly to put this without hurting your feelings…but I don’t feel the same way about you.”
He paused for a minute, the blank expression finally cracking, revealing a very incredulous, very angry scowl upon his face. I was taken aback by the sudden shift in his emotions as he barked, “You should have known better than to be so stupid! We’re in two different leagues, Grace. We run with different crowds—or, at least I do. You’ve been struggling to keep up since the sixth grade and I’ve been weighed down with this friendship for too damn long. You’ve been holding me back, and now you gotta tell me you’re in love with me, like that’s supposed to mean something? What are you thinking?”
He shook his head, muttering to himself as he ran his fingers through the crisp spikes of his hair over and over again, frustration wracking him in ways I had never seen before. He slid off of the hood, landing on the sidewalk with very little grace, too upset to care, and started pacing, his hands alternating between jamming themselves into his pockets and running through his disheveled hair.
I watched him, unable to say anything, unable to find the strength in me to argue in my defense because I knew that he was right. I had been holding him back, and we were in different leagues. We always had been. I just didn’t think that any of that had mattered to him before.
After several minutes of pacing, his head bobbed down once with such finality that it made my heart skid to a halt. It was as though he had just won some silent argument he’d had with himself and was agreeing with the outcome, and I knew that whatever that outcome was, it wouldn’t bode well for me.
He lifted harsh eyes to mine, his mouth opening just wide enough to let the words tumble out as quickly as they could, if only to keep from prolonging the inevitable, or perhaps from saying something worse. “This has got to end now. We can’t be friends anymore, Grace. We can’t be anything anymore.”
And so my future had been decided, I realized, and he had been the one to make the decision.
I didn’t know what my face read at that point, if it showed anything at all because in that moment I embodied what the proverbial “they” meant when they said they felt numb. It’s how you’re supposed to feel after your heart takes an emotional beating and then decides to escape, abandoning you, leaving you to fend for yourself without the aid of love and hope to keep you going.
Whatever it was that Graham saw in my face then, it gave him enough reason to pound that final nail into my coffin, sealing it shut from everything that was good, everything that had been us up until that point.
“I didn’t know how to tell you this when school was o
ver—didn’t want to, really—but I got accepted to NC Prep. They’ve got an amazing football team, and the only way I’m going to get scouted is if I’m playing for a ranked school. It’s my one shot out of here, so that means I won’t be going to Heath this year.”
He paused to reach into his jacket pocket with a clumsy hand and pulled something out, shoving it towards me with such blatant disgust I could almost taste it. “Here, take it,” he said to me as he pushed it against my hand, never once reacting to the way I flinched at the contact.
Call it being childish, call it just plain stubbornness, but I refused to accept whatever it was he was trying to force into my unwilling grip, clenching my fingers so tight I knew my knuckles were turning white from the effort.
My head turned from side to side in utter refusal; I didn’t want parting gifts, as though I was the second runner-up on some game show. This was my life he was destroying, my heart he was breaking—couldn’t he see how humiliated I was? How horribly and hideously inadequate he had made me feel now that not only had he reminded me that I wasn’t popular or pretty—or even liked—but that he’d also reinforced that fact by informing me that he couldn’t even stand to be in the same school as I was?
“Take it, Grace,” he demanded as he pried open my fist and pressed the small object against my palm, closing my stiffened fingers around it. I took it numbly, my arm dropping dead at my side in defeat. I didn’t even bother to look at it; I was too busy staring at the stranger standing before my eyes.
“Grace,” he continued, his voice softer now, his gaze drifting downwards toward some unseen object that had no real purpose other than to keep him from having to look at me, from having to see the hurt he had caused me.
“I guess I should have told you this a while ago, but I suppose now’s as good a time as any, and I don’t want you to find out from anyone else because I know that that would be worse than finding out like this. See, I’ve been dating Erica Hamilton for the past six months. I didn’t want tell you about it because…well, I guess I kinda already knew how you felt, and didn’t want you to get hurt.”