Lessons in Gravity (Study Abroad #2)

LESSONS IN GRAVITY

Study Abroad #2

By Jessica Peterson

Published by Peterson Paperbacks, LLC

Copyright 2016. Peterson Paperbacks, LLC

Cover by Elizabeth Bank of Selestiele Designs

ISBN: 978-0-9971613-2-8

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at
[email protected]
.

All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. 
www.jessicapeterson.com

Prologue

Maddie

August

Atlanta, Georgia

I crank my cranky old Volvo into park on the driveway. Looking up, I see my dad’s BMW parked in front of the garage, gleaming beneath the hot stare of the Georgia sun.

That’s weird. He’s supposed to be at work. Dad rarely, if ever, gets home before seven on weeknights. What is he doing home at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon?

I look at our house through my grimy windshield. It looks the same as it always does: an enormous, graceful sweep of limestone and shutters and cedar shake. The prettiest house in the neighborhood. A dream house, where my parents made their dreams come true. It’s actually what spurred my interest in architecture. I dream of designing a smaller but just as perfect house for the family I’ll raise there someday.

Everything
looks
fine. But as I duck out of my car, the heat gripping me in its oven-like vise, I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.

That something bad is about to happen.

Stop it
, I tell myself. It’s just leftover nerves from a manic summer internship. Today was my last day at a small residential builder. I wasn’t crazy about it, to be honest. But for the most part, the really good internships—the ones at the big architecture firms—are reserved for rising college seniors, and I’ll only be a junior this year. Luckily my dad has contacts at a few firms here in Atlanta, and he’s promised to help me land a primo internship for next summer.

That kind of internship will help me stand out when I apply to grad school. So will a really solid thesis—a thesis that explores historic preservation, maybe, or sustainable development. The more esoteric and complex the subject matter, the better. Most of my peers are focusing their research on sites here in the states, but I want to focus on something much different—a site I really, really hope to find during my upcoming semester abroad in Madrid. I mean, what’s cooler or more complex than a city that’s close to a thousand years old?

I enter through the side door. The house is cool and quiet. Too quiet.

Holding my breath, I creep down the hall. Past the cavernous butler’s pantry, the wine room, the powder room with the hand-painted French wallpaper that landed our house on the cover of
Beautiful Homes and Gardens.
I see two crystal tumblers, one empty, the other filled with a few fingers of brown liquor on the kitchen counter.

Huh.

I look up at a muffled thud from the floor above, followed by a trill of female laughter. My parents’ bedroom. They must be doing—ew, ew,
ew
—only God knows what.

Apparently dad came home for a little afternoon delight. A quick drink and a quicker you-know-what.

Seriously ew.

I hurry down the hall to the family room, plopping on the couch and digging my phone out of my bag. I can’t shove the ear buds into my ears fast enough; the laughter has devolved to muffled moaning. I was unaware my mom could make sounds like that.

I mean, I get it, it’s probably a good thing my parents are still doing it. Their marriage
is
pretty perfect.

Still. The ick factor of hearing your parents go at it is a million times many more millions. So until they…uh, finish…I will be downstairs, and not in my room just down the hall from their bedroom door.
 

Blasting some country music, I catch up on texts, social media stuff, some emails about Madrid (I leave in less than a week!). I’m more excited than nervous, but I feel a little bit like I did the summer before I started my freshman year at Meryton University. I’m anxious to know what my new life is going to be like; I’m uneasy about leaving behind a pretty sweet and cushy life here.

I glance up from my phone, blinking, and see my dad making his way down the back staircase. He’s tugging at the fly of his khakis.

I blink again when I see a dark-haired woman following closely behind him. She’s buttoning up her shirt.

She is not my mother.

My heart kicks against my ribs, a hollow, panicked beat as the realization hits me. Someone was definitely doing it upstairs with my dad.

That someone wasn’t my mom.

My dad is sleeping with a woman who is not my mother.

The saliva in my mouth thickens. Holy shit.

He draws up short when his eyes catch on mine.

“Maddie,” he says.

“Oh, Christ,” the woman mutters, and turns to scurry back up the stairs.

“Dad?” I say. My voice trembles. I feel like I’m getting sucked into the hole that just opened up inside me.

He hooks his belt through its monogrammed buckle as he descends the last step.

“It’s not what you think,” he says. “Before you misunderstand what you just saw—”

“What is there to misunderstand?” I rip the ear buds from my ears with fingers that shake. “What the fuck, dad?”

His eyes narrow. “Don’t you dare talk to me that way—”

“Who is she?” I say. “How long? I don’t understand.”

I don’t. Our friends call my parents Barbie and Ken. They are perfect in every way. Even their meet cute is perfect: they met at a tailgate at the University of Georgia, when dad’s fraternity and mom’s sorority set up camp beside each other in a parking lot outside the stadium. Dad proposed the day after they graduated on the fifty-yard line.

“Like something out of a fairy tale,” my grandmother said.
 

A fairy tale I believe in. Deeply. Passionately.
 

A fairy tale I want for myself—the happy marriage, the pretty house, the two kids and the dog and the white picket fence. Say all you want about true love and how it only exists in the movies, but I disagree. My parents share that kind of love.
 

Only they don’t, I guess. Maybe they never did.

My dad is sleeping with someone who isn’t my mother.

My dad levels me with his gaze from across the room. The look in his eyes makes my pulse run cold. He doesn’t look repentant, or embarrassed; he doesn’t show any of the emotions you would expect to see in a man just caught cheating on his wife of twenty-five years.

He looks
angry.
Disgusted even—not with himself, but with me.

He’s never looked at me like this before.

“You listen to me, Madeline.” His voice, like his eyes, is cold, calm. “This is an adult matter. It has absolutely nothing to do with you. Forget what you saw. You won’t speak of it again, understand? You are not to tell anyone.”

I am frozen, stuck shaking on the couch. Who is this man? I don’t recognize him. The man looking at me like I’m dog shit on his shoe—saying such horrible, mean things to me—he’s not the man who raised me.

He’s not my father.

“Are you serious?” I manage. “You really think I’m not going to tell mom?”

Dad takes a step toward me. We’re still a couple of feet apart, but that one step makes a world of difference. I feel like he’s hovering over me, pinning me to the couch with his quiet, confident anger.

“If you tell your mother, you’ll ruin everything she loves. Everything she’s worked for—you and I both know this family is her life. You take that away from her, and she’ll be left with nothing.”

I bite my bottom lip to keep it from trembling. I won’t cry in front of him.

I won’t cry
. I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing how terrified I am. How confused that he’s putting me at fault for his mistake.

“Who do you think pays her bills?
Your
bills?” he continues. “Don’t you forget that I’m paying for your education. You’re getting the money for your semester in Spain from
me
. Don’t screw all that up by opening your mouth.”

He takes another step closer. “You tell your mother, and you’ll destroy this family. You’re a smart girl, Maddie. I know you’ll do the smart thing.”

Chapter 1

Maddie

November

Madrid, Spain

Tucking my chin into the collar of my jacket, I step inside Ático. A pleasant shiver arrows up my spine as the heat inside my favorite discoteca hits me. The potent smells of liquor and cologne, along with a hint of sweat, fill my head. Considering the week—the semester, really—that I’ve had, a drink sounds downright heavenly.

I take a deep breath. My heart feels heavy and sore. Par for the course these days. Considering I was the one who basically caused it, I can’t get past my parents’ divorce. Mom’s depression and my dad’s newfound cruelness have left me reeling. Of course I told mom about dad and that woman—how could I not?—and she kicked his ass to the curb that night.

I offered to stay home this semester. You know, help mom figure everything out, be a shoulder to cry on. She is the backbone of our family. She quit her job when I was born and has done the mom thing ever since; she sacrificed everything for us, and our family is all she has.
Had
. All she had.

She really fell the fuck apart when I told her about dad. Like.
Really
fell apart. Some days it’s so bad even a team of shrinks and a potent cocktail of antidepressants can’t get her out of bed.
 

Still, she insisted I go to Spain.

“The trip is already paid for, and we may not be able to count on your father for that internship you want for next summer,” she’d told me. “You’ll need to fall back on your grades, and maybe your thesis, for that. And it might be good for you to get away for a while.”

The whole thing sucks. But Saturday nights at Madrid’s infamous discotecas make the heaviness I carry around inside me a little bit lighter.

 
Shrugging out of my coat before I check it with the girl at the counter, I spot the cute couple tucked in the corner of the bar right away. Sipping on their Cuba libres—rum and Cokes—they’re leaning toward one another, the girl grinning as the guy murmurs Spanish nothings to her that are probably more saucy than sweet. The bar’s red lights gild their profiles, catching on their eyelashes, making haloes of their hair.

It’s such a pretty picture, my best friend and the guy we both fell for—the guy who’s now her boyfriend—that I wish I brought my camera to capture it.

My heart clenches. Not because I’m jealous that Vivian got the guy, and nabbed such a hot foreign piece. It took a while for us to get here, for Vivian and I to forgive each other, and ourselves, for the awful, stupid things we did while embroiled in our little love triangle with handsome Spaniard Rafa Montoya. They suck with a capital S, those triangles, despite what the vampires and werewolves would have us believe. I haven’t exactly been myself these days—not that that’s any excuse—and watching Vivian’s dreams come true while my parents crushed mine was not easy.

But now, more than a month after our friendship almost imploded, I can honestly say I’m happy for Vivian. Genuinely, deliriously happy she found a guy as excellent and delicious as she is.

No, I’m not jealous.

My heart clenches because I miss,
I
miss
, the kind of home Vivian and Rafa have obviously found in each other. Home doesn’t exist for me. Not anymore. And after I found out my dad was sleeping with his secretary of eight years, I wonder if my happy, wholesome home ever did.