Falling into You

by Abrams, Lauren

  She had said something about a…“The combine?” I ask, puzzled.

  “The NFL combine?” She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Football.” I’m surprised for a second.

  She stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk. I hear a couple of groans from people who have to step around us. She murmurs an apology to them, but she doesn’t move.

  “You’re not telling me that you don’t like football,” she squawks, incredulous. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a guy who didn’t like football.”

  “I’m more of a baseball guy myself,” I say sheepishly. I had played basketball and baseball in high school, but the only thing I followed with any regularity was my team, the Yankees. It probably had something to do with my dad not being around and the fact that sports bored Diana to tears. The only football game I had ever been to was when I was six. Thanks, Dad.

  “That’s it,” she says, turning around. “I cannot spend the day with you. It’s over.”

  She starts walking away and I’m too stupefied to do anything. Was she really about to cancel our day just because I didn’t know what a combine was?

  She turns back to me, laughing. “Totally kidding, by the way.”

  She must have seen the look on my face, because she stops laughing. “I really was. I’m actually more of a baseball girl myself. Kind of. I have split loyalties.”

  Relief. “Team, please?”

  “Cubs.”

  I shake my head, disgusted. “Fairweather fans.”

  “I have been a Cubs fan my whole life,” she adds proudly. “Of course, they always suck and I’ve seriously thought about switching loyalties at least ten million times.”

  “Let me tell you about the Yankees,” I tell her, opening the door to Sarabeth’s for her.

  We had to wait in line for about an hour even though it was a weekday. I spent the whole time trying to convince her that the Yankees were the only team that mattered.

  “Sell-out.” She smirks at me.

  “I actually live in New York. It’s only the Yankees fans in Arizona who are the sell-outs.”

  “All they have is the Diamondbacks. So, I would argue that it completely fair to jump ship. It’s the Yankees fans in Atlanta who only think the cap looks cool that are total sell-outs,” she counters.

  “Fair.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by an angry-looking hostess waving menus at us. After apologizing profusely, we make our way to the table.

  “Perfect,” Hallie says with a satisfied sigh after looking over the menu. “I would kill for a good omelet.”

  “They make the best ones here. So how did you…”

  The waitress comes back quickly, and I put the words aside. I had been about to ask about her trip to New York, about her friendship with Sophia. But I suddenly realized that I didn’t care and I definitely didn’t want to talk about Sophia. Not now and maybe not ever.

  The waitress looks at us expectantly, pen in hand.

  “Black coffee, please. And an omelet with bacon, onion, and green peppers. And hash browns. And toast,” she says finally, looking up at me guiltily.

  “Same.” Of course she had nailed my usual order. Of course.

  The waitress dashes off and Hallie smiles at me.

  “Copycat.”

  “You can ask anyone. I always get the same thing here.”

  “Me, too. I mean, at any breakfast place. Not here, obviously. But when I order things for breakfast. Toast is essential. I mean, actually the jam is the essential part, and the toast is just something to put it on. I have this condiment fascination…”

  The way her hands move as she expounds on the merits of jam makes me hungry to know what else she’s fascinated with.

  Chapter 9

  HALLIE

  We’re halfway through breakfast before I remember that Sophia had tried to set me up on a recon mission. I was in the midst of a story about when I was seven and tried to shoot the puck into the goal at one of those halftime hockey contests. I happened to miss the puck entirely with the stick before falling flat on my face. Most of the time, the crowd tries not to laugh at the little kids when they’re shooting, but in my case, they made an exception.

  Most of my stories involve some kind of embarrassment. I made a decision a long time ago to own the awkwardness (it’s pretty much the only choice when you’re basically a walking disaster), and I can usually tell the stories without flinching. However, as I got to the point in the story where I fell down from the momentum of my swing, I did ask myself why everything I said seemed to just shine the spotlight on my total incompetence as a member of the human race.

  Chris is leaning back and laughing, so the momentary humiliation (both then and now) is worth it. We had been jabbering away for the past two hours, talking about everything and nothing all at once. The only character flaw I could find was that he didn’t seem to be a huge football fan. I mean, I could work with that, but what kind of red-blooded American male didn’t love football?

  “Like, a total whiff?”

  “A total whiff,” I confirm. “And a wipeout to boot.”

  “They really shouldn’t have laughed at you,” he says, barely able to cover the fact that his own voice is shaking with laughter.

  “Nah, it’s ok. I would have laughed at me, too.”

  He was still trying to stop laughing when it shot like a bullet through me—the look in Sophia’s eye when she had asked for her “favor.” Did she like him? If she did, there was no way I could ever compete. The only time I had ever halfway tried flashed through my head.

  Todd. He was cute in a nerdy way. We were lab partners in chemistry, which was a totally hopeless subject for me. I was always mixing the wrong things together, and it was nothing short of a miracle that I hadn’t blown up the lab. Fortunately for me, Todd wanted to be an engineer and seemed to take pity on my disastrous attempts to create chemical compounds. We spent a few weeks flirting back and forth.

  It was nothing serious, of course. He did seem to touch me more than was strictly necessary and he had even kissed me one night when we were staying late at the library. He had backed off immediately, murmuring sorry and looking contrite. But then he asked me to a party at the frat that he was rushing, and I had spent quadruple my usual time getting ready. I had even borrowed one of Sophia’s little sparkly dresses.

  When I walked into the party a couple of hours late (to keep the mystery, you had to be fashionably late, Sophia said), Sophia was draped all over the arm of Todd’s chair. In the midst of the crowd, Sophia had taken his glasses off and was posing with them, causing him to laugh at her and skim his hands down her arms. She hated glasses. Why was she flirting with Todd, when there were two dozen guys, better-looking, more popular, and more Sophia’s type, staring her down? Why had she picked this one?

  I had watched them together for the first few minutes after I walked in the door, and all it took was a little small talk and a few extra touches of his chest and arms and lower torso before he had completely forgotten that anyone existed outside of her.

  Maybe she hadn’t known it was the same guy because she had too much to drink or something. But I didn’t think that was it. Sophia never drank too much because she always wanted to be in control of herself, which she had told me the time she laughed at the girl who stumbled on her heels walking across the quad during one of our morning-after sessions. Besides, I had pointed him out to her earlier that day, and she had replied, “He’s cute. Totally not good enough for you, though.”

  If he hadn’t been good enough for me, he certainly wasn’t up to the caliber of guys that she usually seduced. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she was testing me. I knew that she didn’t have many female friends, that she played games with boys and that she usually won. She would probably do the same things with her girlfriends, my brain warned.

  The next morning, I got myself a coffee and went through the motions of running down the past night’s events wi
th Sophia over breakfast. “Let’s grab some coffee. Tell me everything,” I said, whispering so I didn’t wake up our third suitemate, who spent at least 97% of her time at the library and 3% of the time listening to some terrible country music.

  “You do know that you hooked up with Todd from my chemistry class last night, right?” I asked, watching her face for any sign of deception.

  “Oh, that was Todd?” she said to me, her face crestfallen. “I’m so sorry, Hallie. I really didn’t know. But it’s a good thing anyway. He was total crap in bed. He kept licking my chin. It was seriously the funniest thing ever. It was like he didn’t know how to find my lips or something. And I’m telling you—he’s like four inches on a good day. You never would have wanted that.”

  There was something behind her eyes that told me that she wasn’t giving me the whole truth and that bothered me more than the whole Todd situation, but I let it go. No friend is perfect, I told myself. And it’s not like you’re going to find the love of your life at Greenview anyways.

  While I told myself that it didn’t matter as long as I never introduced her to Ben, the way in which she had thrown herself at the only person I had ever expressed any interest in wasn’t totally forgotten.

  Sophia had asked me to come out with Chris, right? I try to remember exactly what she had said. An old friend…interested in what he’s been up to…That didn’t mean she wanted to date him, right? Right?

  Ok, Hallie, stop.

  Why are you even thinking about any of this? It’s not like you’re on a date. You are his charity work for the day. He is only here because Sophia asked, and God knows what she promised him. Just take this for what it is, and have a nice day and a good time, like you’ve been having all morning, and then chalk it up to a good adventure. He happens to be incredibly sexy and thoughtful and you have a million things in common, that’s all, the other part of my brain yelled.

  I make a quick decision. Obviously, this little New York tour wasn’t a sign of his interest in me, but it didn’t mean that I couldn’t have a perfect New York day. I decide irrevocably that nothing he had said or would say to me would be shared with Sophia. I would just tell her that he was perfectly nice and that we had a good time and I wasn’t able to find anything out. Telling her anything would be a betrayal of this time with him.

  “Are you ok?” Chris asks, concern in his eyes. I had apparently stopped the story while I had been lost in thought.

  “Sorry. Just remembered the booing of tens of thousands of fans. Bad memories.”

  He laughs. “At my first premiere, I was sitting next to this girl who kept telling her friend that the guying playing Evan was absolutely the worst actor that she had ever seen and that she couldn’t figure out why anyone thought he had any talent. I was laughing right along with her until I realized that she was talking about me.”

  “You didn’t even realize that your character’s name was Evan? I may need to retract my statement that you will become a movie star. I think goal number one is for you to start remembering your own name.”

  We laugh for a minute and I’m putting butter on my toast as he reaches across the table to brush the hair out of my face. Every other sensation goes away and the only thing I can focus on is the touch of his fingertips on my face. There it is again—the volts of electricity running up my body.

  He looks guilty for a minute and then winks at me. “We wouldn’t want you to get jam in your hair now. That would ruin our whole day.”

  Oh. I was about to pull a classic Hallie by getting jam all over my face in front of the most beautiful boy in the world. I had already spilled a little bit of coffee on my pants—I almost never made it through a meal without getting some sort of drink or food on my clothing or face. Of course he didn’t want to touch me. He was just protecting me from the jam. “I wouldn’t let a little thing like jam stop me from enjoying my first real day in New York,” I say, slightly deflated.

  “Then, you’re already different from, oh, one hundred percent of the girls here. Jam would be considered a serious emergency worthy of a clothing change.”

  “I think we established my differences last night when I was put in social pariah territory,” I say without thinking.

  “I happen to like social pariahs.” He reaches up again to brush my hair away for the second time. While I’m pretty sure that the jam is gone now, I wipe my face with a napkin anyway. “Sorry,” he says, brushing his own hair away. “Just wanted to make absolutely sure.”

  There’s a glob of jam on my lips and I try to pass it off like I meant for it to be there. “This could totally be the new lip gloss.” I wipe it away again. I am such a moron.

  He smiles at me, and it spreads all the way across his face. “You’re the next lip gloss millionaire.”

  There’s an uncomfortable silence for a minute. He’s definitely trying to figure out how to get rid of me, and he’s just too polite to say anything.

  I’m not sure how to decipher his next words. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter 10

  CHRIS

  I had wanted to touch her again from the first moment that I had stepped into the apartment. And over omelets, coffee, and toast, she had been laughing and the guarded look in her eyes was almost totally gone, and I just hadn’t been able to stop myself.

  She looked at me like I was some kind of perv. I had passed it off as nothing more than trying to save her from the embarrassment of getting jam all over her face, but then she had laughed again, a bright, clear sound that sounded like bells and mentioned something about being a social pariah. She was just so cute, so unselfconscious that I did it again. She was probably thinking about whether she was going to have to use her pepper spray to get rid of me.

  Jesus, what was wrong with me? Even Sophia had never twisted me up in knots like this. I wanted to beat Sophia at her own game, wanted to conquer the feeling of her skin next to mine that had haunted me for too long. The feelings I had for her were tied up in envy and anger and lust and bitterness. But the way I was feeling about Hallie was something else entirely.

  I had never met anyone who was so comfortable in her own skin, who made me feel like everything I had to say was meaningful and fascinating. There was no pretense to her; it was like she had never thought about being anyone other than her most authentic self. Being with her made me feel like maybe there was an authentic me hiding somewhere inside, too.

  I throw some money down on the table as she grabs her coat.

  “Look,” she starts, hesitantly. “It’s been great, I mean, last night and this morning. You probably saved me from talking to myself all day, and that wouldn’t have been a pretty sight, but I should be okay now and I know you must be busy. I need to go to the museum anyways, to get a start on this art history project for next semester and…”

  I cut her off. “I’ll come with you.”

  She’s startled. “What?”

  “I don’t have too much going on today, so if you don’t mind, I’ll come with you. Where do you want to go? The Met? MoMA? The Cloisters?” I was personally hoping she would pick the Cloisters, because it would guarantee a long train ride, but any of them would work.

  “Are you sure? You don’t have to do that or anything, I mean…”

  She would come up with an excuse unless I cut her off again. “I want to.”

  “Well, ok, then.” She stutters slightly, stumbling over her words. “I say, let’s go for MoMA. I like modern art as much as anyone else, I guess.”

  Forty-five minutes later, after an intense debate over whether or the subway tunnels would collapse if enough zombies decided that they wanted to ride the train (she claimed yes; I countered with the fact that the subways basically contained a number of zombies on any given day), we were standing in front of a giant Cubist painting.

  The museum is crowded with people, but we’ve managed to find a nearly empty room. The only other patrons are a white-haired couple holding hands and a few students sketching in the corner.
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  “I could totally paint that,” she says, after giving the atrocious orange and purple monstrosity a long look.

  “Ahhh…another talent.”

  “Oh, no, I struggle with stick figures.” She giggles. “Seriously, they’re a challenge for me. But I mean, come on. This guy is practically painting stick figures anyway. If he added some little guys in the corner, someone would probably say that he’s making a statement about the crushing weight of modern life on the human psyche or something.”

  “That’s a profound statement.” I glance at her out of the corner of my eye.

  “Oh, I’m just getting warmed up. Everybody’s a critic, especially when they have zero talents of their own.”

  “What about that one?” I point to a gigantic sculpture that seemed to contain nothing but a bunch of candy wrappers.

  “I think that one is all you.” She looks back and forth between the sculpture and me, nodding her head. “You could make the next piece in the series. I think it would require the consumption of a ton of candy, though, which would be the major challenge.” We walk closer to the sculpture, and she leans close to me, whispering.

  “Uh oh. I just found a major problem with your new career. You know, in case the whole movie thing doesn’t work out.”

  “What?”

  “The entire sculpture is composed of those wrappers come from that awful Halloween candy. You know, the brown taffy stuff that is never stretchy? It’s the kind that’s always left in the bottom of the bag and you only eat it when you get really desperate and all the good stuff is gone? Worst Halloween candy. Ever.”

  I laugh, because I do know. She’s right; all of the wrappers are orange and black, the tell-tale sign. “Do you think he actually ate all of that candy?”

  “No way! He just hunted through the garbage bins the day after Halloween. If he did eat it, he would be dead.”

  I’m staring dubiously at the enormous pile of wrappers. “There’s no way I would even be able to unwrap all of that candy. It would take years.”

  “Sure, you would. You’d just spend all day unwrapping and you might have to enlist a few of your admirers to do some of the really dirty work, but it would get done. I do think you’d have to avoid the revenge of the candy blob, though. I have no idea what kind of chemicals they have to put in that crap to make it taste that bad. It would probably cause some reaction at some point. I was never very good with chemistry, but there’s probably some Frankenstein thing that would happen eventually. You know, evolution into a living, breathing, candy monster. My money’s on the morphing of the candy into a giant blob that chases you around your apartment.”