How We Fall (17 page)

His mouth was tight and demanding. This was not the slow, patient kiss from our picnic. Every muscle in his body tensed and his hands trembled where they touched my face. He knew.

He shuddered and pulled away, just an inch. He leaned his forehead on mine. “Don’t change, okay? You’re not as different as you think you are.”

I leaned my forehead on his chest, feeling his harsh breathing and hearing his trip-hammer heartbeat. Claire said I would move on, but I couldn’t move on from this. Marcus wrapped his arms around me and in all the heat and cold water I barely noticed my own hands shaking.

He pulled away to look at me, but I shook my head and his body came back, his lips back to mine. We stood together in the creek while the black water whirled downstream away from us.I couldn’t do it. I’d tell Claire we’d broken it off and we’d be more careful than ever. Both of us wanted this, and that was what mattered.

I pulled away. “Claire was talking about exes.”

He looked at me and then downstream, his jaw set, his face expressionless.

I could hear my own breathing. “I kind of panicked, because I—I don’t want you—” I started over and slowed down. If I could just get this out, if I could just tell him, then we’d be fine.

“I don’t want you to be an ex. I think I love you.”

His arms fell away from my shoulders. He stepped back.

Water rushed between us. “Love me?” His voice was tight, 120

Kate Brauning

strained. Echoing off the water and against the dark. “Love me how?”

My words came out a whisper. “You said you wanted me. I want you.”

“But you don’t. You think it’s wrong.”

“Not wrong. I think it’s—” My voice cracked. “I think it’s hard. But it’s you, and I don’t care.” I stepped toward him so he was against me again. I found his hands, put his arms around me. Looked into his face.

Watching me, he took my hands and pulled them away from him. “You’re shivering,” he said. One hand still holding mine, he walked toward the bank and we climbed out of the creek.

I shook out our towels and he sat down next to me. Not a single star shone through the leaden sky and the air lay like a heavy blanket over us.

He said nothing, so I moved to his lap, one knee on each side of his legs. Both of us were dripping wet. “Did you hear me?” I gripped his bare shoulders. “I said I love you.”

The vein in his neck thumped against my hand. Drops of water collected on his skin and slid downward. His breathing turned harsh.

I was fifteen again, and nothing mattered except getting him to react to me. My hands slid down to his chest. I pushed him backwards, and he let me. I stretched out my body on top of his and touched my lips to the cool, wet skin of his collarbone.

His chest rose and fell beneath me. I brushed my mouth over the vein that beat in his neck.

His arms gripped my ribcage and hauled me upwards. My mouth connected with his and the air left my body. Arms wrapped around me, he rolled us over so he was on top of me and his shoulders blocked out the sky. His hair brushed my forehead. He linked his fingers behind my neck, his thumbs pressing into my jawline, asking me to open further to him.

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I did, and I couldn’t stop, because I didn’t want to.

His lips, the heat of his tongue with mine. My hands were all over him, every part of him familiar but so different from me. His weight was safe and thrilling and mine.

Limits were for people who were afraid.

He was sucking in air, still kissing me, his stomach pressing into mine and a hand tracing up my thigh. I tipped my head back, letting him kiss down my neck, one hand over his heart, fascinated by how hard it beat. My own made me dizzy. He slipped his hand under the side string of my bikini bottoms, over my hip. The fabric pulled tight.

“It’s okay,” I said. People couldn’t stop us. Not if they didn’t know.

He pressed against me, made a sound low in his throat when I slipped my hand under the band of his wet shorts. His stomach muscles contracted. He nodded.

I raised my arms over my head and untied the string around my neck. His lips paused on my skin. His hands skated up my body, over my bikini, to the strings that lay loose on my shoulders. Without moving the fabric, his fingers traced all the way across me from my right shoulder to my left, his eyes burning a trail I could feel.

And then he moved on top of me again, over me, and something about his chest and stomach right there against mine was perfect, and I knew I could never be like this with anyone else, because he belonged to me. He moved up, pressing against me, his hands in my hair, and my mouth went to his neck. Smooth, warm, the edge of sweat and his blood in a slow beat right there. My lips and tongue moved against his skin, but also my teeth, harder than I meant to.

He held still, and then his breath left him in a rush and a half-laugh. “You’re going to kill me,” he whispered. “I love you.”

For a moment I thought he’d lower his head to my neck and 122

Kate Brauning

his lips and teeth would be on my skin. But then his eyes met mine, and went wide, and then he closed them for a second. “I don’t have—”

No, no, no. Shit. I knew exactly what he didn’t have. It didn’t matter. Yes, it did. It had to. We stared at each other.

He grunted and rolled off me, staring at the sky that was too dark to see. He sounded hoarse. “Can you fix—tie your—”

Somehow this had ended, and now he was over there away from me, and the space that had been so safe just a moment before had cracked and split open.

I retied my bikini and rolled toward him, trying to close the distance, but he stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

“Gimme a second.”

We lay on our backs on the towels and I watched a sky I couldn’t see and hoped the cloud cover meant it couldn’t see me, either. When his breathing evened out, I rolled over on my side toward him. I could barely make out his face in the pale wash of the moon. His mouth was drawn tight, and his face was set when he opened his eyes.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

My stomach sank. “We don’t have to. We can wait.”

“I mean, I can’t do this to you.” He spoke to the sky, not to me. “I’m screwing up your life. I’m the reason you have to sneak around and half of why you think you don’t fit in. I’m tying up all of high school for you in a dead-end pseudo-relationship.”

I said nothing because anything I said wouldn’t be the right thing.

“I love you, Jackie. People are going to find out, and you’re going to get hurt, and it will follow you around for the rest of your life, and it will be my fault.”

I closed my eyes. Loving me was not a reason to leave me.

“You’re going to move on to some other guy, eventually, and he’ll be the real thing. And when you have that awkward 123

How we Fall

exes talk, you’ll have to tell him your first relationship was with your cousin. Your first kiss. Your first everything, if we hadn’t stopped.”

“Yours, too, though,” I said.

“I don’t care about that.”

“Then why would I?”

He rolled toward me and touched my hair. “But you do.

Maybe if it was just us, we could. But someone at school would find out. Senior year would be horrible for both of us. Chris and my sisters would get bullied over it. Teachers would find out, and since—it’s not normal, so they’d call social services.”

He was probably right. A case worker would come to the house and talk to all of us, make sure our home was a healthy environment for children. The official stamp we were abnormal.

Who knew what social services would decide.

And everyone at school would hear about it.

My parents would be so ashamed of me, and they’d blame Marcus even though it was almost entirely my fault. My family would leave. I’d have split up our home. And we couldn’t last through that kind of guilt.

But he was wrong about me finding the real thing with some other guy. I touched his face and did what he always did to me: I brushed my thumb over his cheekbone. The hardness in his eyes faded a little, and when he sighed, it was so heavy.

We hadn’t broken any of our rules, but somehow we’d leaped right over them and off the edge of something much worse.

Every bit of pain on his face was something I’d put there.

We never should have started this. I’d been so wrong to push him.We lay there on the towels by the creek under the heavy night sky, and his hand touched my face and slipped through my hair, and at that moment I wouldn’t have noticed if the world had fallen in on us. It wouldn’t have made much difference.

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Morning was a little cooler than the night. I slept in until Mom woke me, asking me if I was sick. I told her sort of.

Marcus and I had stayed out all night and snuck back in before dawn. I’d fallen asleep for a bit wrapped in my towel, my head on Marcus’s chest, but every time I moved, I’d felt him lying there awake.

After Mom left my room, I rolled over and my gritty hair scraped my skin. Creek water. I heaved myself out of bed, hoping a shower would wash away the both the grit from the creek and the awful feeling in my stomach.

We had new rules. We’d talked them over for hours last night. No more making out, no movies just us, no walks or trips alone. As much as possible, we’d only see each other when other people were around. I’d treat him like he was Chris. He’d treat me like I was Claire.

I let the pounding water beat on my skin for longer than usual.

I dried off, pulled on my jean shorts and a yellow tank top, then headed out to the kitchen. Mom handed me coffee. “We aren’t going to work outside today,” she said. “There’s a heat advisory. You could get sick. We’ll make sure the animals have water and then stay inside.”

“We have to turn on the air conditioning. At least knock the house down to eighty degrees.” I shoved my feet into my sneakers and went outside. I turned on the water to the garden, filled the chickens’ waterer, and pushed them aside to get the 125

How we Fall

eggs, even the old hen who refused to leave her nest. Chickens weren’t going to be my undoing today. The duck’s pool was getting silty, so I tipped it over and refilled it while she stalked around, quacking her worry at the muddy water draining into the ground.

Chris and Angie stood by the calf fence feeding the bottle calves, giant strands of slobber stringing down from the bottles as the calves noisily sucked down a half gallon of milk each.

Marcus showed up while I was rinsing Heidi’s water bowl. He poured dog food into her bucket and opened the garage door to make sure she had shade.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but we had to push each other away. I stood at the row of three washing tubs, industrial sinks on PVC legs, near the garage and washed radishes and carrots for an hour while he finished watering the garden. Even though Mom had said we didn’t have to do all the chores today, having my hands in the cold water made the temperature bearable, and I couldn’t follow Marcus around right then.

What I’d almost done last night tied my stomach in knots.

Heat crept up my neck. So I was in love with him. And so what if he loved me, too?

If I had a wish, I’d undo all of that.

I picked a few ripe tomatoes before I went inside, then curled up on my bed. After a minute, I pulled out my phone and texted Claire.

Marcus and I are pretty much done now.

A moment later my phone buzzed.

Yeah? Good. Sorry though.

I pulled my laptop off my desk and took it back to my bed.

Acting normal around everyone wasn’t even possible.

Just to prove to myself that getting over Marcus really was 126

Kate Brauning

the best thing to do, I Googled “first cousins marrying.” The hits showed up purple and blue—most of these links I’d already clicked. The first was a list of states in which it was illegal. It was legal in half the states, including California. Maybe I’d go back to California for college.

I closed my computer, annoyed with proof that being in love with my cousin was a bad idea, and picked up
Where the
Red Fern Grows
again. I knew the dogs were going to die, but I hoped they wouldn’t.

The dogs did die. One died of wounds and the other died of heartbreak. I cried on my bed and ignored whoever knocked on my door at lunchtime. I heard Sylvia giggling mid-afternoon, which meant I wasn’t coming out of my room, so I turned up the BBC-Colin Firth version of
Pride and Prejudice
because it was six hours long. Twenty minutes into the movie, I realized that in
Mansfield Park
, Fanny and Edmond are first cousins who get married, and that did not improve my mood or the likelihood of me emerging from my room.

I was getting hungry, however, so I dug around in my desk and found a candy bar. Under the junk in the drawer lay a photo of me and Ellie at the pool. I picked it up. We both were making silly faces, sucking on straws buried in a giant plastic cup of lemonade slush.

The photo was from before she moved, before my deal with Marcus started, before I had any idea what my seventeenth year was going to be like. I tucked the edge of the photo between my mirror and the frame so it lay pinned against the glass.

Sylvia was not going to be the reason I skipped lunch, so I paused the movie and went to get actual food. From the racket going on upstairs, I guessed the twins were playing in their room and Angie and Candace were banging around up there with them. Dad was in his office and Mom was probably at the library. Relative peace, for once.

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Chris sat in the living room reading a graphic novel on the couch opposite Marcus and Sylvia, probably trying to annoy his brother with his presence, but Marcus didn’t seem to care.

He was telling Sylvia about the truck that ran us off the road, and she was frowning dramatically and sitting too close to him.

Little red boots, this time.

“You didn’t find out who he was?” she asked.

“Nope. Some guy from Kansas City owns the truck, but he’s not the guy who was driving it.” He stiffened when I walked through the room, so he knew I was there, but he didn’t look my way.