The Fall (The Siren Series)

by Higginson, Rachel

  Basically, he wanted me to stop putting up with Nix’s shit and listening to my mother.

  He made a lot of great points.

  But the truth was I had been raised in a broken environment that tore at my self-esteem and self-worth from the moment I was born. I was utterly and royally screwed up; my mind was an epic hot mess and my hope for a better future hung on by just a thread. I willingly gave myself to Ryder’s encouragement, but the doubt that anything would improve me or my situation constantly overshadowed any progress Ryder made.

  I wondered if this was another “exercise” or if this was a bonus to Ryder’s plans for my birthday.

  He seemed to read my mind or my silence and gave me an embarrassed smile. “Ivy, I just want to spend your birthday with you. I’m not trying to prove a point.” He released one of my hands so he could tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. The gesture revealed a gold dangly earring and he fingered it gently between his thumb and forefinger. “I just want to give you a birthday memory that you’ll enjoy… that you’ll cherish. I want to be selfish with you. I want to have these memories, too. And I don’t want to share.”

  Well, obviously I couldn’t say no to him after that.

  “Fine,” I sighed. “But you have to deal with the fallout.” I met his gunmetal gaze and inched closer, unable to stop myself from the gravitational pull that pulsed from his chest and caught me so wholly.

  His fingers left the earring and ran across the line of my jaw. “Always,” he promised.

  We sat there staring at each other until a group of people passed by laughing loudly and shoving each other. Ryder stared after them, his eyes following them as they made their way to the concert hall.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I nodded and then joined him on the sidewalk. He locked up the Bronco, although I didn’t think it made a difference… nobody wanted that thing. He took my hand and we headed to our favorite of all the music venues in Omaha.

  Ryder had a running gig here on their under twenty-one nights and that was usually when we congregated with our friends. Tonight we were alone. Actually, it was one of the only times we were alone. Most of the time we hung out in a group with our other friends; well, his friends Chase, my ex-ish boyfriend, his other friend Phoenix and my friends, Sloane and Exie.

  Sloane and Exie were as much a part of my circle as I was, but they had less severe curses and were able to move more freely in humanity. It could get dangerous when all three of us were together, at least for men, but Ryder remained unaffected by all of us. Chase had already gone through the curse with me and only suffered from being slightly tainted by my poison and Phoenix was irrevocably head over heels for Exie. We made an interesting group.

  And I loved every second of it.

  Ryder took my hand and pulled me along. This section of Omaha was lovingly called NoDo, short for North Downtown. It was close to Creighton’s campus and so hipster I felt like my hair was going to spontaneously combust into braids and glasses were going to appear on my face as if from divine intervention.

  We joined the line waiting to pay covers and flash IDs and stood buzzing with the anticipation of concert-induced excitement. I didn’t even bother asking who was playing. I trusted Ryder’s amazing and eclectic taste in music but mostly it didn’t matter to me. The band was just a fun pretext compared to spending the night with Ryder alone and away from Nix and my mom.

  Ryder said hello to the bouncer and ticket-taker in the entryway and they nodded us through. I looked around at the ballooning crowd and realized he must have pulled some strings to get us in here without being carded. This was definitely an over-twenty-one crowd.

  He smiled at me over his shoulder and pulled me down to the pit where an opening band was already belting out decent harmonies and strumming incredibly loud rifts. They were an all-girl band that had a great drummer and an even better lead singer. A smile lit my face that seemed to originate from some secret place inside of me. My entire body felt like I could glow from the feeling.

  I loved being here.

  I loved being with Ryder.

  I loved…

  I shook my head, hoping to shake those thoughts completely out of my head and let Ryder tug me through the pressing crowd. He pushed us through the swarm of sweaty bodies and right into the middle, just beneath the screaming lead singer.

  He leaned in so he could shout in my ear to be heard, “They’re pretty good!”

  “Yeah!” I shouted back. Our heads were close together and I let my body press against his. He seemed to notice the movement and turned to face me so that we could dance together while the music played on.

  He looked up at me from under his thick lashes and silently asked permission to touch me. We had this strict rule about not falling for each other and he was really great about keeping distance between us.

  But distance, in the literal sense, was impossible to maintain in this crowd and so I just gave in to it… gave in to Ryder.

  I was breaking all kinds of rules tonight, why not this one, too? It was my birthday after all.

  This would be my gift to myself.

  I had so many feelings for Ryder; I couldn’t even sort them out into any logical order. Sometimes I would think about them for hours, trying to put them into some kind of categorical system. Sometimes I just ignored them completely and prayed they would go away.

  Tonight I wasn’t going to do either. Tonight, I was going to let them all in and then let them all out and deal with the fallout later.

  Ryder promised he’d be there to help me.

  So why not?

  I put my arms in the air and threw my head back, completely immersing myself in the music and the moment. Ryder didn’t hesitate to lay his hands on my hips, gripping me with a possessiveness that I could feel through our touch. He yanked me the remaining inch to his body and there we danced, wrapped around each other and absorbed in an experience that felt beyond reality.

  I should have moved away from him. I should have reclaimed the friendship both of us worked so hard to keep.

  But I didn’t.

  The opening band melted into a second opener and by the time the headliner took the stage I was sweaty, buzzing with sound, Ryder’s constant touch and the dangerous, wild excitement that could only come from perilous rebellion.

  I was feral with energy tonight. I’d thrown all of my careful inhibitions away and traded them for primal feelings and carnal desires. I wanted to touch Ryder, so I did. I wanted to skip the birthday party, so I did.

  I wanted to throw my hands over my head and dance blindly to music that thrummed through my veins with a life I rarely got to feel and pumped in my lungs with breath that never touched them. I wanted to be young, careless and uncontainable.

  I abandoned everything that sought to tie me to a fate I hated and people that controlled me, and I just let myself be.

  Ryder melted his body into mine and I noticed the difference immediately. I opened my eyes and met his heated gaze, the force of it stealing the breath I had just celebrated. The music reverberated on our skin with a heavy sexiness that sunk into my boiling blood.

  In a lull in the music, when the soprano singer’s voice dipped low to glide over an opening lyric, he said, “You look different.”

  I let the unrestricted smile light my face and confessed, “I decided not to care about anything tonight.”

  Ryder’s sandpapery voice scraped over my skin and dug into my chest. “Not anything?”

  I shook my head and wrapped my arms around his neck. Our bodies clung together, each damp with sweat, each vibrating with the base pumping out of the speakers.

  “Good,” he growled.

  And then he kissed me.

  I was as surprised as I was expectant. I was as reluctant as I was anxious.

  His tongue dove into my mouth with an eager hunger that should have been unattractive, but was anything but that. He devoured my mouth- consumed every piece and part of me. I kissed him back desperate and
insatiable to take him into me.

  We had only kissed once before, after I learned that he was no longer dating Kenna Lee. I had been furious with him for not telling me and confused about the blooming friendship that felt so incredibly raw and razor sharp. I still couldn’t be sure who initiated that kiss in the kitchen of Delice; but it didn’t really matter. We had promised never to do it again. And more than six months later we had kept our promise.

  That didn’t mean I didn’t think about it all the time.

  Because I did.

  But like I said before, my insignificant, little crush on Ryder was my cross to carry.

  Ryder’s mouth moved against mine with no lessening of enthusiasm or desire. Our bodies swayed with an agonizing slowness as we moved to the music; the crowd around us didn’t notice or hardly cared about our moment of intense illumination as our forbidden connection pushed us to places neither of us were ready for nor willing to leave.

  This kiss sunk into my corporeal body and kept going, sifting through my ethereal places, my hidden psyche, my detached soul… my coveted spirit. Ryder touched his tongue to mine, but that small place of connection spread out wings and bloomed inside me like a sunflower coming to life with the morning sun. My petals lifted to the warmth of the early morning light, my blossoming heart shivered with vivacity, my chest ached with the pressure of so many foreign feelings.

  He kissed me for minutes, hours… eternity, until I could only feel his body against mine, hear his elevated breathing, smell his coconut shampoo and masculine sweat. He owned a part of me already with his constant friendship, but in this moment he’d reached inside of me and claimed all that I was and would ever be.

  When he finally pulled back I stared up at him completely dazed and blissing with lust. There was a heat in his eyes so palpable my entire body felt singed from the fire of it. He stared at me just long enough that I knew that in this moment I should keep my mouth shut. When a hundred excuses and apologies bubbled up inside me with the slowly dawning reality of our situation, Ryder’s expression locked them tightly within me and I decided it was much better to be quiet.

  Slowly, the inferno dimmed from his gray eyes, turning them from liquid silver back to a warm slate. He flashed me a crooked smile that made my tummy tremble and then he turned his head back to the band and kept dancing with me.

  What the hell just happened?

  I had three options at this point. I could address that mind-blowing, earth-shattering kiss and ruin our friendship forever. Doing that would mean I would have to cut ties with him in a valiant effort to save both of our souls and eradicate him from the poison of my life. I could pursue that kiss until my lips were swollen, my mind muddled and his hands permanently glued to my body. But that was just asking for a whole cauldron full of trouble.

  Or I could ignore anything had happened, just like Ryder had.

  That would save our futures and our friendship.

  So really, I only had one option.

  Ryder gave me his profile while he watched the band on stage and I took the moment to drink him in. His hair was mussed to a new height, his jaw strong and rugged in the flashing stage lights. His t-shirt clung to all the dips and grooves of his arms and chest. A lone bead of sweat trickled down from the back of his ear, around his neck straight to the hollow of his throat. Lastly, his tattoos were on display.

  He was going to kill me.

  One more second with this god of a man-child and I was going to die.

  I let my attention drift to the tattoos that were always covered up at school. Since the summer, I’d had plenty of time to ogle them. And while I didn’t think of myself as allowing attraction-points to the male race based solely on tattoos… Ryder got them anyway.

  I seemed to break every one of my rules with him.

  It couldn’t be helped.

  One arm was a half-sleeve of intricately interwoven infinity symbols. Sporadically, there would be a sugar skull centered in the loop of the elongated figure eights. On other ones, the curve of the symbol would become words that said, “One day soon.” The elegant script was a promise to his mother who had died when he was younger.

  I’d given him crap at first for being so cliché, but then he’d taken the time to explain each arm and I wanted to swallow my words back and make them disappear from the world as if I’d never said them.

  One arm for his deceased mom and one for his music: his past and his future.

  What I learned about Ryder over the last few months is that he had a really hard time after his mom died. And during middle school and the beginning of his high school, he did the whole wrong-crowd thing for lots of years. It was music that pulled him out of that and music he wanted to stay focused on so he never goes back there.

  I could respect that. I could respect everything about that.

  His second tattoo weaved all kinds of musical symbols into each other to make a solid half-sleeve: treble clefs, bass clefs, music notes, staff lines and some of his favorite song lyrics from bands that had inspired him since he was a child. The coolest part about it though, was that on the inside of his forearm, in the spaces and not actually drawn out obviously, was the head of a guitar. You had to know what you were looking for, but the six strings were there, along with the head and neck, the tuning keys and the frets. It was so elegantly done that sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from tracing my finger along the expertly crafted ink. It had the effect of a puppy getting his back scratched on Ryder and he would let me trail my fingers along his skin for hours if I wanted to.

  Ryder glanced back over his shoulder and caught me staring. I offered a sheepish smile but the attraction in my expression had to be unmistakable. Heat flashed across his face and my tummy rolled with butterflies.

  Something was obviously different between us tonight and neither of us seemed capable of denying the power of it.

  His tongue swept across his bottom lip and he watched my mouth as I watched him. He was too much tonight. Too much.

  I was thirty seconds away from attacking his mouth again when he wrapped his hand around my bicep and yanked me in front of him. He set me up so that I was comfortably leaned against his chest and his hands rested on my hips. We both faced the stage, but his head dropped to my shoulder. I felt his breath as it left his body and fanned down the back of my silk dress. A shiver followed quickly behind it as he cooled the sweat that trickled down my spine.

  “If you keep looking at me like that, Ivy, you can’t hold me responsible for my actions,” he shouted over the music into my ear. My heart pounded in my chest and my stomach dropped to my toes. He wrapped his arms all the way around my waist and held me tightly against him. “Watch the band,” he ordered roughly. “Before I decide to stop being friends with you.”

  I bit my bottom lip in an effort to control my happy smile, but there was no hope. My entire body hummed from Ryder’s touch. My heart felt full and my lungs felt released from the iron claw that seemed to squeeze the life out of them on a daily basis.

  In the middle of this huge crowd of people where I could drown in anonymity and Ryder’s arms, I wanted to stay here forever. This felt right.

  This felt healthy.

  For the first time in months, I felt like a girl that wasn’t lost, that wasn’t enslaved.

  I felt like me.

  And even if I didn’t know exactly who that was in this moment, I had started to feel like it was possible to find out.

  Ryder had given me the best birthday present I had ever received. It was so epic in my mind that I knew there would never be a way for me to thank him enough or pay him back. And so giving up on even attempting to do so, I snuggled back into him and enjoyed the sweltering heat of the concert hall and our joined bodies, the crush of the crowd around us, the ear-splitting music that resounded through my blood and the promise of a future that wasn’t so dismal as long as I shared it with Ryder.

  I would face hell tomorrow when I saw Nix and my mother again.

  But tomorrow w
asn’t my birthday and today was. It just felt right that I should spend the rest of my birthday with the person I cared about the most and ignore everything else.

  So that’s exactly what I did.

  Ryder and I danced the rest of the night like that. I never left him. And he never let me go.

  In my head, this became a promise and an oath. I promised to let him rescue me from every day forward.

  And I let him promise to hold onto me forever.

  As long as we had each other, I could fight hell and I could survive.

  Chapter Three

  Sunlight streamed through my window and warmed my back. I stretched out on my massive, four-poster bed and craned my neck to see my clock. I could tell that it was not early. There was that innate knowledge of time that my body seemed in tune with.

  Oh, no.

  It was late morning and I had been allowed to sleep in. This was not a good sign.

  After crawling into the apartment in the wee hours of the morning, I’d slunk to my room undetected. I wasn’t naïve enough to think my mom didn’t know when I arrived home, but I held enough hope to believe she’d let this rest until morning.

  I had been right about that. But best case scenario would have been her waking me up first thing in the morning to scream at me until my ears bled.

  Letting me sleep in could only mean that Nix was on his way and that my mother wasn’t going to even bother starting her furious show of outrage and disappointment until he showed up.

  I contemplated testing how long they would let me drag this out. If I lay in bed the whole day, would they leave me alone?

  Highly unlikely.

  But maybe worth a shot.

  In the end, I dragged myself from bed and put my legs into motion. I was still buzzing with the energy from last night’s show and Ryder’s affection. I knew I was minutes away from facing a firing squad; but right now, with the heat of Ryder’s touch still searing my skin and the impression of his body melted into mine, I felt invincible.