Like Gravity (19 page)

I’d never cared much
about what a guy might be thinking after sex – usually, I’d simply assumed he was happy to have gotten some action and didn’t want to talk any more than I did. But in that moment, I’d have given up caffeine for a month –
okay, not a month, that would be torturous… maybe a week
– to know what was running through Finn’s mind.

I really didn’t want to be
that
girl – you know, the one who can’t even enjoy her post-orgasmic bliss because she’s so busy dissecting what the sex
means
, or how this
changes
things? The post-coital, over-analyzing, neurotic mess?

Crap. I am so becoming that girl.

And what were we supposed to do now?
Cuddle?
The thought was so incomprehensible, so foreign, that I didn’t know what to do with it. So, per usual, I pushed it from my mind and decided not to think anymore. I tried to force my body to relax into Finn’s chest and let my eyes drift closed.

They quickly shot back open when I felt Finn’s chest rumbling beneath my cheek. Was he
laughing
?

Full-blown chuckles were now escaping from him.

The bastard was laughing!

I propped myself up on an elbow and glared down into his face.

“You’re
amused
by this?” I accused scathingly. No guy had ever laughed after having sex with me. Left pathetic voicemails and staged ‘accidental’ run-ins at places he’d known I would be? Yes. Laughed at me? No. I was good in bed – this was unheard of.

His laughter abated somewhat, and he managed to gasp out, “Yes, the
amount of overanalyzing that’s going on in that mind of yours right now is highly amusing. If your brain is about to implode or something, a warning would be nice.”

“
Excuse me?” I glared at him some more. He stopped laughing and brought one hand up to graze my temple, his blue eyes tender as they met mine.

“I
can literally feel you freaking out and getting ready to make a run for it,” he said, rolling over onto his side so we were lying face to face.

“How?” I didn’t like the fact that he could read me so well.

“Because every muscle in your body is tensed and your face looks exactly like mine does after I sleep with a girl and am trying to think of the most-effective, least-dramatic way to extract myself from her bed.”

I smacked him on his arm and jerked my head out of his gr
asp, refusing to meet his eyes after that comment. Was that really what my face looked like? Worse, was that the look on
his
face right now? I couldn’t look at him – I’d happily live in the dark, never knowing the answer to that question so long as it meant that particular insecurity wasn’t confirmed.

“Brooklyn,” he said, turning my reluctant face back
to look at him. I tried to fight his grasp, but denying him anything was nearly impossible when those cobalt eyes were locked on you. “You wouldn’t make it two feet before I hauled you back in here with me.”

“This is ridiculous! It’s
my
room!” I huffed. “If anyone is leaving, it’s you.”

“Bee, do me a favor?”
Finn asked, ignoring my complaints. “Stop thinking.”

I opened my mouth and prepared to ream him out. The cocky asshole had not only brought up all the
other girls he’d nailed in the past when we’d
just
had sex – which violated just about every girl rule on the planet – but also was spot-freaking-on about my impending freak out – which violated just about every
Brooklyn
rule on the planet. I hated that he was right.

Before I could get out even a single word, however, he leaned in and kissed me firmly – a no-nonsense, deliberate kind of kiss that told me he knew everything that was going on in my mind and didn’t
give a shit about any of it. The kiss was shorter than I’d have liked; just as I was beginning to kiss him back, he broke away and pressed a quick peck to my forehead.

“Look at us,” he murmured, eyes full of mirth as he slowly examined our paint-covered bodies. I glanced down at the smears of paint that coated our limbs and couldn’t help but laugh.
Small round blue fingerprints spackled his forearms, marking the places I’d gripped; there were smudged handprints around my hips and thighs where he’d held my body against his. 

“
A work of art,” he whispered, tracing one blue fingertip along the curve of my breast.

My eyes met his and I suddenly couldn’
t breathe, seeing the emotions his held locked away in their depths. It was remarkable how expressive they were, how rapidly they could fluctuate from playful to sensual to tender, and right now, they were full of a look so soft, so
loving
, I nearly had a panic attack at the sight of them.

It wasn’t a look you gave a
one-night stand. It wasn’t a ‘just sex’ look. It was a ‘forever’ kind of look. Desperate to return to safer waters, I slid off his chest and began to stand up.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing his hand and trying to pull him up with me. With a sharp tug, he pulled me back down and I sprawled across his chest
with a squeak of protest.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

“Well, jeeze, caveman – I
was
going to suggest we take a shower and clean each other up…” I drifted off. “But if you’d rather stay here alone, that’s fine with me, I guess.” I grinned mischievously at him, our faces only inches apart.

He sat up faster than I would’ve
thought possible and abruptly scooped me into his arms, stalking toward my bathroom door. I laughed at his impatience as he roughly yanked open my shower curtain and stepped into the tub. Within seconds the water was pouring down on us, and I gasped at both the frigid temperature and the torrents of blue paint that were pouring off our skin and swirling down the shower drain.

“Finn! Turn the lever! It’s freezing!” I ordered, shivering as the arctic water fell on us. “No turn it to the left! Jesus!”

He was laughing, cradling me to his chest with one arm and fiddling with the shower controls with the other.

“This is supposed to be sexy,” I grumbled, giggling at the ridiculous situation. “In the movies, the water is never too cold, the shower is always big enough for two, and they’re never covered in so much paint that
the bathtub will have a slight blue sheen for eternity.”

Finn finally found the right lever and the water began to warm up. His other arm returned to hold me against him, and his lips grazed mine. I could feel every contour of his
hard body pressed against me, and suddenly realized that we were, in fact, very naked. I stopped talking as his lips captured my mouth, and after a few tantalizing moments he pulled away to stare down at my dazed expression.

“You were saying?” he whispered, amused.

I couldn’t remember my own name, let alone whatever nonsense I’d been spouting less than a minute before. Clearly, I had no idea what I was talking about – showers with Finn could never be anything
but
sexy.

Putting me down to stand on my own feet, he gently scrubbed my skin clean
with my apple-scented body wash, removing every trace of paint from my body in a slow, sensual perusal. After he’d shampooed my hair, painstakingly massaging each dark curl until I was nearly purring like a kitten, I forced him to bend down so I could return the favor and wash his unruly mop. We reluctantly emerged from the shower only when our skin was no longer spackled cerulean and the water had run so cold I’d started to shiver.

Finn shut off the water and grabbed
one of my large fluffy green towels, swathing it around me like a shroud before scooping me up into his arms and carrying me out of the bathroom. He unceremoniously dropped me onto my bed and slid in behind me. Pulling the comforter up over us, Finn adjusted my body so we were spooning, my back pressed fully against his front and every curve of our still-wet bodies perfectly aligned.

“Are we seriously
spooning
right now? Finn Chambers
spoons
?” I teased.

Finn was
silent for a full minute, breathing quietly into my damp hair, and I again found myself wishing I could know what he was thinking or even just see the expression on his face. When he finally spoke, his voice cracked with restrained emotion.

“
Finn Chambers doesn’t spoon unless it’s with Bee Turner,” he whispered, so quietly I nearly didn’t hear him. I couldn’t help it – my heart turned over in my chest at his words. He made me feel special, like all of this was a first for him as well. Like he wanted me for something more than just my body.

When he said things like that, it was impossible to push him away
– even though a big part of me still wanted to. Normally, I’d have put up a fight about a guy trying to spoon with me – it was far too coupley, too affectionate, for my taste. In the past, I’d never have even brought a guy back to my apartment, let alone allowed him to sleep in my bed afterward. I’d always specifically chosen to follow guys to their places for sex, rather than bringing them here.

I
hadn’t wanted them to know where I lived, what my room looked like. I hadn’t wanted them to know
me
, in any way except that most basic, physical way two people
can
know one another. As a general rule, I’d done everything possible to discourage future interaction and affection.

At the moment,
though, I was too tired and far too satisfied to argue with Finn about our sleeping arrangements. Silencing the small part of my brain that was shrieking about boundaries and the dangers of commitment, I smiled and closed my eyes. Melting into Finn’s warm embrace, I was asleep within minutes.

Narcissistic Asshole

Stepping out onto the porch, my small hand slipped into his larger one immediately. He was there on the steps, just like he’d been every night since the first time we’d met – the night he’d told me the legend of Andromeda.

My eyes sought his, and when they met I was comforted for the first time all day. He was the only thing that made the group home bearable; when he told me stories or simply held my hand and talked to me, I could forget about the older girls and their teasing comments. I could forget about the bad man, the police officers, the hospital, and even
about Mommy.

I
t’s not that I
wanted
to forget her. I just missed her so much – too much. When he told me stories, though, I could pretend it had never happened. When I left my room, scared after a nightmare, he was always there to make me feel better. On those nights, he’d tell me silly stories, tales to make me giggle or smile, and I wasn’t an orphan anymore; I was back in my princess room, surrounded by brave knights and magical fairies. I was in a world of magic and happy endings, where things like murder and death were impossibilities. Where mommies didn’t get taken away to heaven when their little girls needed them.

“Hi, Brooklyn,”
he said, a small smile in his sad eyes.

I didn’t reply,
I simply looked up at him. I still wasn’t speaking – not to my foster mother, not to the other kids, not even to the lady who called herself a ‘therapist’ and came twice a week to see me.

I knew they wanted me to. Sometimes, the adults got angry at me – even though there were smiles on their faces, I could see the frustration in their eyes and hear it in their voices when they talked to me. The other kids
didn’t get angry – they just got mean.

Except
for him.

He never yelled, or teased, or tried to get me to talk.
He just let me listen to his stories, hold his hand, and forget. Sometimes we’d just sit in the darkness, staring into the backyard or up at the night sky together.

“Brooklyn, look,” he whispered, pointing into the dark,
toward the tall grass at the bottom of the steps.

I looked at him questioningly; I didn’t see anything unusual in the yard.

“Fireflies.”

I turned back and peered into the night, trying to catch a glimpse of them. I’d only seen them once before, at the beginning of the summer. Mommy and I had gone on a picnic at our favorite park one
night, and when the sun had started to go down we’d seen hundreds of the glowing bugs flying all around us. Mommy had laughed and said maybe they were really fairies, like Tinkerbell, and if some of their fairy dust fell on us we could fly away too.

Mommy
had flown away, after all – but she hadn’t taken me with her.

The boy sta
rted to tell me a story about the time the hero Perseus killed a monster named Medusa – a woman so ugly her hair was made from snakes and her gaze turned people into stone. I liked to listen to the sound of his voice. He was still a boy, but his voice was deeper than the other foster kids voices – slightly raspy and so different from Mommy’s. Her voice had sounded like music all the time, whether she was singing or talking or shouting.

I waited until he
’d finished his story, watching the fireflies as they weaved between the tall grasses. When he fell silent, I looked up at him expectantly.

“What?” he asked me
, as if he didn’t know exactly what I wanted.

He knew, he just wanted me to ask
for it. I stared at him, waiting – just like I had every other time he forgot to say the ending.

“Oh,
all right,” he sighed. “‘And so, after Perseus beheaded Medusa, there was celebration throughout the land and everyone lived happily ever after.’ Happy now?” The boy rolled his eyes at me.

I
was
happy. Stories weren’t finished without the happily ever after, everyone knew that. Mommy had always said it was the most important part of any fairytale.

I smiled.

“Real life isn’t like the stories, Brooklyn,” the boy said, the sad look back in his eyes. Sometimes when he was telling me a story, his eyes would lose that look – but it always came back eventually. “There aren’t any white knights or glass slippers or second chances,” he whispered into the night, not looking at me. “People don’t wake up after eating poisoned apples. They don’t live again after an evil a witch curses them. They just die.”

I looked at the boy with the sad blue eyes
, and I saw it – he wasn’t a kid anymore. Whatever had happened to him, whatever brought him here to live in the foster home, had made him stop believing in happily ever afters.

 
I wanted to tell him that I understood. I recognized the sad look in his eyes – I’d seen it in my own every time I looked in the mirror. I knew why he thought this way; he was protecting himself.

Sometimes, it was easy
to feel sad or angry about what had happened to Mommy, but then I’d think about all the fairytales she’d told me. In all of those stories, the princesses had moments when they’d thought they would never get their happy endings, or that the bad guys would win. But eventually the dragons got slayed, the princes came to the rescue, and the princesses
did
get their happily ever afters.

I wanted to tell him that
Cinderella hadn’t believed either, until her fairy godmother showed up the night of the ball. And of course Snow White would’ve stayed dead, if Prince Charming hadn’t believed in the power of true love’s kiss.

I wanted to make him believe
we could have happy endings again, even in a world without mommies or daddies to take care of us.

Mommy used to tell me, “Bee,
a very smart man named John Lennon once said, ‘Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’ Remember that, sweetheart. Tuck it away and keep it with you when you’re having a bad day.” Then she’d kiss my forehead and hug me, her long fingers lightly tickling my sides and coaxing a laugh.

I slipped one hand back into his and squeezed.

“You can call me Bee,” I whispered, my voice trembling as I used it for the first time in months.

It wasn’t what I
’d wanted to say, but it was a start.

His head whipped around at the sound of my voice and
when he looked down at me there was surprise, not sadness, in his eyes.

“Bee,” he whispered back, smiling.

***

“Bee,” Finn whispered, shaking me awake. “Come on,
love, wake up. You’re trembling. I think you’re having a nightmare.”

I peeled open my eyes and looked up at him. He was leaning over me, beautiful in the faint moonlight trickling through the window at the end of my bed. His hair was tousled,
his voice was rough with sleep, and his tired eyes were slowly clearing and coming alert. Our limbs were still entwined; in sleep I’d turned over to rest my head on his chest, with one arm thrown across his abdomen and my right leg hooked up over his thigh. He had one hand looped around my back, holding me tightly against his side, and the other resting on my hip.

I was typically an active sleeper. My nightmares
were always vivid and I’d toss and turn while caught in their throes, waking up with my sheets a tangled mess around my legs. It seemed that tonight with Finn, though, I’d been happily immobile, pressed against his warmth until he’d woken me.

When my gaze met his, a soft look replaced the anxiety that filled his eyes and the lines of tension
started to ease from his face.

“Hey,” he whispered, bringing a hand up to touch my
cheek. “You okay?”

I thought back to my dream – it hadn’t been frightening, just confusing. I wasn’t sure where these memories were coming from, or why they had started to reemerge now, so many years later.
Maybe between my therapy sessions with Dr. Angelini and playing music again, I’d stirred things that I’d been repressing for over a decade. While I was happy to be regaining some memories from that fuzzy time of my life, it was still an unsettling experience; it felt like my mind was unraveling like a spool of yarn, revealing long-buried people and events I hadn’t even known existed. Finn had been right – I
was
trembling.

“Hi,” I whispered back.

Finn brushed a curl back from my face and tucked it behind my ear. “Was it a nightmare?” he asked.

I nodded, not wanting to explain
or knowing how to begin to.

“Do you want to talk about it?” The
gentle look in his eyes told me that I could’ve shared anything with him at that moment, even the story of my mother’s death and the twisted path my life had followed ever since. But I knew, once I told him, the soft look would leave his eyes – replaced by sympathy or, worse, pity.

I shook my head no.
I wasn’t ready to see that look in his eyes. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready for that.

“Okay,” he said, leaning down to kiss my forehead gently.
I snuggled into his side and felt his arms tighten around me. When his hands started to wander down my body and his mouth found mine, I allowed my mind to go blank and forgot all about my strangely vivid dreams. And as Finn made slow, achingly sweet love to me, the boy with sad eyes, who’d given me the happy endings he was far past believing in, disappeared from my mind altogether.

***

When I woke, the first thing to enter my consciousness was the pungent, unmistakable scent of paint fumes. Cracking open an eye, I saw that it was already midmorning and bright rays of autumn light were streaking across my bedspread. The second thing my bleary mind registered was the fact that I was still naked, and Finn was no longer in bed next to me.

So h
e left. That’s good – great, even. It’s what I wanted all along.

Isn’t it?

My inner voice sounded unconvincing even to myself, and I couldn’t quell the disappointment that was beginning to bloom in my chest like a cancer – a sharp pain radiating quickly from my heart out through my limbs.

I was an idiot.

Sex with Finn had been so different for me
– more intimate and so far removed from what I’d experienced in the past – that I’d simply assumed he’d felt it too. Apparently he hadn’t. Maybe last night had been nothing to him; maybe
I’d
been nothing to him. No different from any other girl he’d –
how had Lexi termed it so eloquently?
– hit-and-quit.

This
is fine. This is better, in fact. Now, things can go back to normal and I’ll forget all about the emotional, tear-ridden months I’ve had with Finn in my life. I’ll go back to having
fun
– who wants to cry all the time, anyway? He’s just a boy, nothing special. It isn’t like he took my virginity, for god’s sake. This will be no different from any of my other hookups. Snap out of it, Brooklyn.

They were paltry consolations, but they were all I had left. I clung to them desper
ately, my lifeline in a storm – unwilling to be dragged out into the endless ocean of my disappointed hopes. Breathing deeply into the pillow I clutched tightly to my chest, tears immediately prickled my eyes as Finn’s scent washed over me. I wondered how many other stupid girls’ empty pillows had smelled like the warm breeze of an early fall day, and how long they’d waited to wash them after he’d left. A day? A week?

I groaned
at the ridiculous thought. I was being such a
girl
– what the hell was happening to me?

Don’t get me wrong, I was fu
lly aware how hypocritical it was for me to feel this way. After all, hadn’t I pulled this exact maneuver on countless one-night-stands of my own? I was the expert at it; so good, I could probably teach classes at the university–
How to Escape Your Awkward Morning-After: Avoiding the Coyote-Ugly and Sneaking Out the Window 101
.
I had no right to expect anything different from Finn; in fact, I was naïve for thinking it could have ever meant something more to him than just sex. He was Finn Chambers, after all.

Two months ago, I would’ve balked at the idea of sex meaning anything other than the mind-cleansing fulfillment only an orgasm can deliver. Now, here I was, brought down by the idea that sex
hadn’t
been meaningful – that I’d been nailed-and-bailed on.

Damn, karma really is a
snaggletoothed, hairy bitch.

I took another deep breath, through my mouth this time, and decided to s
top being a whiney, pathetic, doe-eyed little girl. I had things to do, like finish painting my room.

When memories of painting with he-who-must-not-be-named
began to play through my mind in vivid high-definition color, I did my best to shove them way down into my triply-reinforced mental box labeled
Narcissistic Assholes.
He finally fit in the box, I realized with a despondent, detached sort of acceptance – a pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.