Break My Fall (No Limits) (18 page)

I let the bra fall from my body. Drew’s hand shot out and caught it. He held onto it
as his eyes drifted from mine…down to my neck, over to my right shoulder and then back across to my left, down to the upper part of my chest, then to my right breast, where his gaze froze for a moment before sliding over to my left one.

I swallowed hard, the nervousness subsiding with each passing second.

He didn’t have to touch me. His eyes were so intently fixed on me, I could almost feel where his focus was.

There was an
unusual mixture of vulnerability and security stirring within me. Two completely opposing emotions, oddly in perfect tune, and I knew it was because of who I was with.

Which is why I didn’t object when Drew slowly reached for me
, taking over. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my underwear, pulled me closer to him until I was standing just inches in front of him. He leaned forward and placed a kiss just below my navel.

I looked down and saw him looking up at me. Our eyes trained on each other’s as he slipped my panties down my legs. I stepped out of them.

Having explored my body with only his eyes, now he was looking and touching. I watched his fingers roam over my stomach, stopping on my left side.

“You have a birthmark.” His voice was just a whisper.

He looked at it closer. It was about the size of a quarter, irregularly shaped, and it was light pink. It never tanned, so it stood out against my browned skin. Drew traced the outline of it, then moved on.

Up to my breasts where he gave them a light squeeze, slightly plumping them up as his thumbs grazed over my nipples. He leaned forward and took one into his mouth.

I wrapped my arms around his head and held him there, not wanting him to release it.

He did, though, just for a second, as he said, “You need to lie down.” His arms around my waist, he stood, lifting me. My legs wrapped around him. He lowered me a little so our faces were together. His breath was hot against my lips as he playfully nipped at them with his teeth.

We turned and suddenly I was on my back, Drew hovering over me, holding himself up with his hands.

“You used to be scared,” he said.
“Look at you now.”

My mind flashed back to that
morning on the boat, the first time we had sex, when he told me I was afraid and that I acted weak because I had no idea how strong I really was. It seemed like forever ago, but in just a matter of weeks I’d gone from timidity to boldness—choosing to make myself vulnerable to him, trusting him, and then, on my terms, ceding control to him.

As he lowered himself onto me, I reached for him and grabbed two handfuls of his shirt, pulling him harder against me,
then tugging his shirt upward. He lifted his arms and I pulled his shirt off, and he was instantly against me, the heat radiating off his body and warming my skin.

Drew pressed his lips to mine, prying them open with his eager tongue.
I put my palms against the taut skin of his chest. His tongue swept through my mouth, making stroking motions against my tongue, then along my teeth, my lips, and I could almost taste the urgency between us.

I felt his excitement through his jeans and I slid my hands down his chest, to his stomach, my fingers hurriedly finding the button, then the zipper, and I freed him from the denim restraint, feeling his hardness against me as I locked my legs around his waist and we rocked our hips rhythmically together.

I trembled, and he noticed.

“Okay?” he asked, his irregular breathing allowing only one word.

I nodded. “Uh huh.”

The shiver that ran through my body wasn’t negative—quite the exact opposite, actually—but he was just making sure.

“God, Leah, I can’t take much more of this, but I don’t want to stop, either.”

“Don’t.”

Our mouths devoured each other’s for several more minutes as our bodies writhed together, his erection slipping along my wetness. We were teasing the hell out of each other.

Drew halfway stood, dropping his jeans to the floor after retrieving a condom. I watched as he quickly rolled it on.

Then he was on me again. Nudging me up the bed toward the pillows, his tongue fluttering across my nipples as we moved.

As I
got farther up the bed, he stopped, his head level with my thighs. He lowered his face, kissed the insides of my legs before moving his mouth between them, then up my body.

He looked into my eyes. His voice hoarse, he said, “This has already been amazing for me, but I want it to be the best ever for you.”

As he pushed into me, I knew it would be.

And it was.

Chapter Eighteen

Drew and I stayed up most of the night and then caught an early flight back to Charleston.
The next week was relatively uneventful, filled mostly with work and low-key evenings with Drew. We didn’t talk at all about my departure day approaching. That was probably for the best. There was no way to work around it, and not bringing it up meant less stress on the time we still had together.

I got to work just before noon
one day and found Rick and Marla there. They’d been out of town for the better part of a week. Chad and Warren were leaving for lunch. I asked where Rebec
ca was.

“Called in sick
,” Rick said. “That’s unlike her.”

“Did she say what was wrong?”

Marla shook her head. “No. I didn’t get a chance to ask. She left a voicemail around six-thirty this morning.”

Rick was right—it was extremely unlike Rebecca to call in sick. I had a feeling she would have called me if she’d gotten into some kind of trouble, and since she hadn’t, I was pretty sure she was okay. My curiosity was piqued, though.

“I’ll try to find out what’s up with her,” I said. Before they could ask if I knew anything that had been going on with her lately, I redirected the conversation. “Oh, by the way, I have the rest of that money I owe you.”

“You sure?” Marla said.

“Yep, got it right here.” I reached into my purse and took out the cash. I knew they weren’t going to ask how I got it, but in the off chance they did, I was going to tell them my parents sent me some money, rather than tell them that I’d been in Atlantic City several nights ago and had won over two-thousand dollars.

.  .  .  .  .

After several unanswered texts and voicemails, I finally heard from Rebecca around four o’clock. She sounded awful. “I had to go to the hospital.”

“For what? Are you okay?”

She was trying to talk through her sobbing, but I couldn’t make out much of what she was saying.

“I’m coming over there,” I said.

She lived just across the bridge to Isle of Palms, and I had to fight the late afternoon tourist traffic to get to her apartment. When she answered the door, she was wrapped up in a blanket. Her hair was a mess, some of it stuck to her cheek that was damp from tears.

She let me in and I
hugged her, looking over her shoulder. Her apartment was dark. She’d shut the blinds in the den and didn’t have any lights on. The place reeked of cigarette smoke, so I surmised that she wasn’t going to tell me she found out she was indeed pregnant. Or at least I hoped so.

We stood like that for a few moments until I broke the silence. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I didn’t want to bother you.” She let her arms fall from embracing me, and turned to walk over to her couch.

I followed. “I told you it was okay to call me.”

“I know.” That’s all she said, and I let it go. It wasn’t the most important issue at hand. She picked up a pack of cigarettes off the coffee table, took one out, put it between her lips and lit it.

I sat down
beside her, noticing the ashtray on the table. It was full and a thin stream of smoke was rising from the center, clearly from a cigarette she had failed to fully extinguish. I had a flash of fear, a vision of her in the apartment alone, depressed, and accidentally starting a fire.

“I wonder if a person can get dehydrated from crying too much
,” she said, looking straight ahead at the wall.

I watched her puff on that cigarette, several quick ones in a row. I reached out and put my hand on her back and lightly rubbed it. “
So what happened?”

She was silent for a solid minute before she told me.

Waking up from a nap the previous afternoon, she had severe abdominal pains. She got scared again that she might be pregnant and that something was going wrong. She called Kyle who, much to my surprise, rushed over to her apartment and brought her to the emergency room.

“I was so scared
. The pain was so bad I wanted to die,” she said. “It turns out I have an infection in my uterus. I know, it’s gross. Whatever. So, anyway, after a while I asked for Kyle and the nurse said she would check. Then she comes back and says there’s nobody with that name in the waiting room.”

Rebecca
had texted him and he had answered a short time later, telling her that he had to get to work.

“I told him I needed him
to take me home. He said he’d come get me. But then I waited an hour, then two hours. By then, I was in the waiting room, sitting in a wheelchair, pretending that I wasn’t upset every time one of the nurses stopped to ask if my boyfriend was on his way. Fucking humiliating.”

If she hadn’t been so depressed already, I would have taken the opportunity to strongly encourage her to get rid of Kyle, once and for all, and just forget about anything good ever coming from knowing him.
But she knew that.

“Let me guess,” I said, “
he never showed up.”

She looked at me, her eyes flooding with tears again, her face all sc
runched up in a heart-breaking expression. “He did, but I was already gone.” She paused for a moment. “The longer I waited for Kyle, the more I started to think he might not even come back.” She reached for another cigarette, lit it, and blew out a plume of smoke, adding to the bluish haze that occupied her entire apartment. “I called Connor.”

My eyes shot wide open. “Wow.”

“Yeah. I just couldn’t sit there anymore and Connor immediately popped into my mind. But I couldn’t tell him why I was there. I mean, who wants to tell someone that, especially a guy? Then I started to feel guilty because I had to lie to him. I told him I had really bad cramps and that’s what the medication was for. But you know something? I think he knows it was more than that.” She looked at me as if waiting for my view on it.

“He might,” I said.
“He’s not stupid, but I’m not sure how many guys would think to question that.”

“He was so good to me, stopping to get me something to eat on the way home.” She picked up the
McDonald’s cup. “That’s where I got this. And some fries. I can’t believe I could even eat, but I devoured them.” She cracked a smile for the first time.

“So…Kyle?”

“Right.” She put her cup down. “Connor brings me home, gets me inside—that’s when I think he knew more had happened—he says he needs to get back to work but that he’ll check on me throughout the day, and I can call him if I need anything, and also that he’ll come over tonight and bring dinner.”

“Nice.”

“I know. So, yeah, I’m done with Kyle.” She sat up quickly. “Hey, were Rick and Marla mad?”

“No. More worried than anything else.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Good, because I feel bad about it—I’ve never done anything like this to them—and I don’t want to lose my job there.”

I laughed. “It’s Rick and Marla. They’re cool. They wouldn’t fire you for calling in sick. You’re worrying too much.
”

She leaned toward me, wrapping her arms around my neck. I hugged her back.

She started crying again and said, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

“I’ll miss you, too.”

“What’s going to happen with you and Drew?” she asked, sitting up and sucking on her straw rather than a cigarette this time.

I shrugged. “I really don’t know. But I have to go back to school, and he’s…well, you know
, he won’t leave his grandparents. I can’t blame him. As much as I’d like him to move down to Tampa, there’s just no way it’ll ever happen.”

“Maybe you’ll find a way
.”

“Yeah.”

Probably not
, I thought.

Chapter Nineteen

Looking around my apartment, I thought about how little I had brought with me to Charleston. Aside from my clothes and surfboard, all my stuff was back in Tampa, yet over the last three months this place had come to feel more like home than my actual home did at this point.

As I sat there
thinking, dreading more and more the thought of going back to Florida, my phone rang. It was Liz. What a coincidence.

“Hey, roommate,” she said. “Or should I say
possible
roommate…I didn’t get the lease.”

“Crap. I forgot.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. I thought maybe you changed your mind or something.”

“Are you kidding? You’re the only person I would live with. There’s just been so much going on…” I filled
her in on the latest with Drew, including telling her about the trip to Atlantic City, but instead of telling her about the blackjack, I made it sound like it was just a little jaunt up the coast.

“Nice. Romantic,” she said. “Did you tell him you love him yet?”

“I…” My voice faded out. I was about to deny any such feelings, but trying to deny that the first hint of love was there would have meant lying to myself, never mind Liz. “No, I haven’t told him.”

“
Maybe if you do, you guys will find a way to make this happen.”

“
Doubtful. Actually, impossible. I told you about his grandparents.”

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Time to change strategy. Forget all that shit I said about not saying anything and letting him be the first to bring it up.
Make him talk about it. It’s 2013. Bitches gotta take control.”

I laughed. “Is that your new motto?”

“I think it might be.”

“Well, Drew isn’t exactly the type of guy to let bitches control him—”

“Whoa, hold on,” she interrupted. “I don’t mean control
him
. I mean control the situation. Tell him what you want. Lay it out there. See what he says.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

“You’ll thank me later,” she said. “But, hey, I have some bad news and some bad news.”

“
Oh, great. Usually people have good news and bad news.”

“Yeah, not this time. The bad news is that Travis hasn’t proposed, so I think maybe I was reading too much into it, just like I thought.”

I walked into the kitchen. “It’s only been a few days, right? It’s not like there’s a time limit.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” She sounded truly disappointed. I thought she should relax, give it time, chill out a little because it was clearly going to happen.

“Now give me the other bad news,” I said.

“All kidding aside, this is pretty bad. Kevin wants to talk to you.”

I had been reaching into the refrigerator for some grapes, but froze when I heard those words. “When did you talk to him?”

“I didn’t. Travis
saw him earlier today. He said Kevin told him he needed to talk with you, that it was important, and he asked for your number.”

“Travis doesn’t have it, though, right?”

“Right. I didn’t give it to anyone. Just like you said.”

I had changed my number when I left Tampa. Not because I needed a South Carolina number, but because I didn’t want to get calls and texts from all my friends all summer asking me how I was doing, when I was coming back, or anything else for that matter. I had sought something as close
to isolation as I could manage. Only a few select people knew how to get in touch with me, and I intended to keep it that way.

“And he didn’t say what this was about?” I had been staring into the open refrigerator,
but finally got the grapes out and went over to my couch.

“
Believe me, I asked Travis about it different ways for about ten minutes, trying to get any clues I could, until he asked me if he could be excused from the witness stand.”

I managed a little bit of a laugh
through my nervousness. “You’d make a good lawyer.” I popped a grape into my mouth. “Now I’m curious what he wants to talk about.”

“Me, too.”

“Maybe I’ll call him and use star-six-seven so he can’t see my number on the Caller ID.”

“Do it,” she said. “And don’t forget to send me the signed lease.”

.  .  .  .  .

I spent the next several minutes sitting in silence, chomping nervously on grapes. The curiosity about why Kevin wanted to talk to me was unsettling. I had gone three months listening to Liz’s sporadic updates about him, but
never once did I experience even a slight tug of interest in talking to him again.

Maybe this new feeling was the result of knowing I would soon be returning to Tampa
, and perhaps there was some value in exploring what it might be like to interact with him again. Avoiding him entirely would be nearly impossible, and I hadn’t yet thought about how I’d handle it.

Despite knowing it would be best not to, I caved to the curiosity and called him, remembering first to block my new number.

I listened to five rings, followed by Kevin’s voicemail message. It was the automated kind—an electronic announcement of his number—so I didn’t have to hear his voice. I wasn’t going to leave a voicemail. It would have been pointless since I wasn’t giving him my number.

Ten minutes passed
as I wavered again about whether I should call him, but came to the same conclusion: I was too curious to let it go.

He answered the second time I called.

“It’s Leah.”

“New number?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not letting me see what it is.”

I wasn’t going to be guilt-tripped into giving it to him, so I ignored his comment. “Liz says you needed to talk to me. What is it?” My voice came out much colder than I had planned. I didn’t feel badly about it, though. It was exactly the type of tone that reflected my feelings about him.

“Hear me out,” he said.

“I’m listening.” Again, my sharp tone surprised me.

“I know I’ve said this over and over, and you’ve probably heard from other people that I keep insisting I didn’t send the pictures, but it’s true.”

“Kevin—”

“You said you would hear me out. Please. Just give me two minutes, if that.”

I sighed heavily. “Go ahead.”

I heard him take a deep breath
. “Yesterday I was going through the Sent folder in my email on my phone, looking for something I had sent to Professor Ulrich, and needed to forward to him again. That was back in May. I was scrolling through the sent emails and saw an email that was addressed to Kim.”

He stopped there for a moment.
I found myself holding my breath and had to take a deep one. Hearing the name of the girl he had cheated on me with shouldn’t have had that effect on me at that point, but it did.

“She sent
the pictures to herself,” he said. “Using my email. She saw the pictures on my phone, sent them to—”

“I know what you’re trying to say.” He’d been stammering around the point a
nd it was starting to frustrate me.

He picked up where he left off. “So she did it. She’s the one who posted your pictures on that website.”

There was a moment of silence as Kevin waited to see how I took the news.

“Kim did it,” I said, flatly.

“Yes. I’ve been saying all along that I didn’t do it, but I couldn’t prove it until yesterday.”

“Why would she do that?” I asked, skeptical of his whole story. My nerves were almost calm again
. I took a sip of water, then reached for another bunch of grapes.

He sighed. “
I don’t know. Jealousy? Trying to break us up? Leah, I swear to you, this is the truth. She did it.”

I knew what Kevin sounded like when he was telling the truth. After being together as long as we were, I used to think of myself as something of an expert on Kevin’s different tones of voice. That is, until he denied cheating on me. That was a new tone. One I’d never heard before. So I knew what he sounded like when he was
lying. And this sounded like the truth. At least I thought it did. How could I be sure anymore?

I couldn’t figure what Kim’s motive might have been. Maybe Kevin was right—she’d been jealous of us, wanted to break us up…and then I realized that making it look like Kevin sent the pictures would have hurt him, too, among his friends, classmates, just about anyone who knew us and heard the story.

“Why would Kim make you look bad?”

There was a pause. Total silence. He was trying
to come up with an answer, but it took him a moment. “She’s not the sharpest person in the world. Maybe she wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I don’t know. Do you want me to text you the screenshots of my Sent folder?”

“Nice try.”

“What?”

“No, Kevin, I’m not giving you my number so you can text me the screenshots.
It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“I could email them.”

I huffed. “
It doesn’t matter
. None of this matters, whether she sent them or you sent them, it’s your fault.”

“How so?”

“
Really
?” The anger was rising in my tone. “You’re not stupid. You don’t need me to tell you how it’s your fault, but you know what? I’m going to, anyway. No matter who posted the pictures online, it’s your fault because even if it was her, she never would have had them if she didn’t have access to your phone, and let me guess—she had access to your phone when you were sleeping in her bed, or while she was in your bedroom and you went to use the bathroom or get something from the fridge. Something like that, right? In any case, this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been fucking her. End of story. No, wait. That’s not the end of the story. All of that applies if she was the one who sent them. I have no idea what the truth is.”

It took me a few seconds to catch my breath after that rant. It felt so good to say it, and it felt even better t
he longer Kevin stayed silent. He had no response, stunned by my firm rebuke of his pathetic plea for absolution…

Until he said:
“I’m sorry, Leah. I’m really sorry.”

“You’re a liar,” I continued, almost on
autopilot, letting the words rush out of me. “After all we had, you cheated, you lied, and now you want me to…do what? Forgive you? Come running back to you because you didn’t post the pictures, but your fuck-buddy did? Guess what—that doesn’t make any of this any better. I’m over it. I’m over
you
. I’m going to come back to school, finish my degree, be with my friends, and I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Got it?”

I could hear him breathing heavily. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

“Yes. Goodbye, Kevin. I mean it.”

I hung up, my heart pounding in my chest. Not from nerves. Not out of fear. This time, it was the physical rush of triumph.

I was certain I’d made the right decision in calling him. Now we both knew where we stood, and best of all, I had settled it before going back. It would be easier now.

A little easier, anyway.
I still had to come to terms with leaving Drew.