Текст книги "How to Fall"

Автор книги: Rebecca Brooks

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter Fourteen

Down where Ipanema curved into Copacabana beach, Julia sat and brushed her skirt over her knees, burying her toes in the sand. To either side of her were Rio’s distinctive mountains stamped against the blue-black sky. Behind her the city was coming alive in the night, but Julia hardly seemed to notice. From somewhere down the beach they heard laughter, the swish of a car up the street, and then silence again.

They’d been walking along the beach since they finished dinner, and it was nice now to sit and let the night wash over them like a wave. It was hard to see any stars from the moon and the city lights, but far out over the ocean, where the black of the sea became the black of the sky, she could make out a twinkling where the earth curved and dropped away forever.

Blake sat with his legs bent up, arms around his knees, and looked out over the water. He’d seemed agitated that evening, and Julia couldn’t figure out why until he’d confronted her out of the blue about why she’d been looking for more information about him. She’d been surprised—and embarrassed. And then angry that he’d gotten so mad over something that wasn’t a big deal.

But she also liked discovering that he wasn’t particularly good at keeping secrets, or even keeping things to himself. He was easy to talk to. There was no sitting there silently seething, stewing over things for days or weeks or months, building up an army of resentments until the whole legion attacked.

Once they’d talked about it, Julia had at least been able to clear up what she’d been looking for, which really wasn’t much.

She sat in the sand and thought about her chat with Liz. She hadn’t meant to say anything about Blake, but it hadn’t taken Liz long to figure it out. Like Blake, Julia was a terrible liar. She could practically hear Liz’s ear-splitting shrieks through the computer screen as she typed into the chat, “Tell me EVERYTHING.”

Williams. At least Julia knew his last name was Williams.

That wound up not being that useful, but Joshua Blake Williams—now that was another story.

She hadn’t known what she’d been expecting to find, but a whole lot of gossip about someone named Kelley Fielding wasn’t it. She didn’t know every single detail, but she certainly knew enough. Your best friend winding up with your girlfriend… No wonder Blake had wanted to flee the country, the continent—everything he knew of the world.

No wonder he didn’t want to get too close.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Blake smiled, and she sighed and brushed her cheek against his shoulder, resting it there while she twirled a strand of her hair.

“I was thinking about how much my friends would like it here,” she said wistfully.

“Liar.” Blake smiled.

She grinned back at him. “Okay, you’re right. I was thinking about how nice it is to have a break.”

“From them?”

“From everything.”

“Now that sounds more like the truth.” He leaned back, propping himself up on his forearms. “Tell me about them. What was it—Danny and…”

“Liz. Liz’s my age, Danny’s three years older.”

“And this guy spent his whole childhood hanging out with his little sister and her pals?” Blake raised an eyebrow skeptically, and Julia gently shoved him for teasing.

“No, he didn’t know I existed until later.”

“Yeah, until you got smoking hot and he realized he’d better stick around if he knew what was good for him.”

“No, before that.” She stuck out her tongue, glad her face was bathed in shadow because the blood was rushing to her cheeks…and elsewhere. Hot? Really?

“Wait.” Blake held up a hand. “You said you never dated this guy, and yet you have patently not denied that he knows you’re a fox.”

“I never said we didn’t date,” Julia said carefully. Lying and selectively omitting were two totally different things when it came to avoiding the whole tangled history of her best friend and her ex.

“You did! You told me—”

“I told you he wasn’t my boyfriend. As in, present tense. As in, I am plenty single and available.”

Am I single? A voice in her head wondered. Am I available, if I’m sitting here with you? But he hadn’t given any sign that their relationship—that their thing—was anything more than these few days. In fact, he’d already shown that he had no trouble packing up and heading out of town when the time came. Clearly she was single. So was Blake. They were just having fun.

She tried to focus on the task at hand, which was getting the subject off of Danny. But Blake was persistent.

“Explain,” he commanded in that voice he used for sex, for telling her what to do with a throaty bite that seemed to always bring her to her knees. Literally, in fact.

Explain? How could she explain? They were friends, and then they dated, and now they were friends again.

But Blake wasn’t buying that at all.

“Tell me,” he said, softer now. “Tell me about you.”

That was his other voice, the one so tender it made her feel like they were the only two people in the world, and everything was finally safe to say.

Julia swallowed hard and fixated on the pale white foam where the surf broke and broke and broke. She had nothing to tell. She was like the ocean. She was just there, that was all.

“There’s nothing to it,” she tried to say, but her voice cracked and that, she knew, was her tell. Like Blake’s frown, it was the way anyone who knew her well enough could see that she was withholding.

Liz could sniff it out of her before she ever opened her mouth. It was like she sensed it—even when they were chatting online, thousands of miles between them.

It was one of the things Danny had never figured out, because he was so sure he knew her and so sure that he always got it right.

But then he had asked her, begged her, honestly, to let him know if he should stay. And she had said yes, stay, but he had packed and left her anyway.

So maybe he did know. Because she never would have said she wanted him to go. Until he did, and it felt like she’d known that was the right thing all along. Known ever since they started that the only thing they both knew how to do together was end.

Blake gave her the silence between them, letting the stillness stretch and grow. But it wasn’t stretching thin. It was a fullness that gathered and swelled. In their own private world on the beach, their faces were veiled and all they knew for certain was the feeling of skin against skin. At night, under the great dark bowl of the sky, two people could talk freely, knowing they never had to see one another again.

Blake touched her hand and lay back in the sand, one arm bent to hold his head in the crook of his elbow, the other hand reaching for hers.

She brushed the sand out of her skirt and lay down with him, resting her head on his chest, feeling his heartbeat somewhere inside her own chest and the steady swell of his breathing alongside hers. A finger twirled absently in her hair. A reassuring touch that he was there.

It was, she thought with a thud in her heart that ricocheted up to her throat, perhaps the most intimate she had ever been with another being. Not having sex. Not even lying naked with him. It was like their clothes didn’t matter, because they were naked in another way. In the night, on the beach, she looked up at the black, heard the waves, knew that elsewhere there was a city. There were worlds upon worlds upon worlds. But the only world she was in right now had Blake in it. And the touch of his hand and the rise of his chest and the catch in her throat as she tried to think of what to say.

“Don’t plan it in advance,” he whispered. “Just tell it from the beginning. Tell me about your friends.”

Julia took a deep breath and found herself sort of smiling, thinking back. “I guess like most stories, it started with a boy.”

“Danny?”

She shook her head against his chest. “His name was Mark. He was a dick.”

“Okay.”

“And Liz was in love with him all through high school.”

“Even though he was a dick?”

“Are you going to let me tell my story?”

“All quiet from the editor.”

“Yes, she was dating Mark, and yes, he was a dick, and yes—everyone knew it but her.”

They had fought about it, actually. Their first real fight in all the years they’d been friends. Julia wasn’t being “supportive enough.” Julia didn’t know what she was supposed to be supporting. Liz had cried. Julia had stood there, stunned. Liz had called her heartless. Said she didn’t know what it felt like to be in love.

Julia, of course, had nodded. She had absolutely no clue. That she acquiesced to Liz’s superior authority on the matter at least helped smooth things over. Julia didn’t know about love. Therefore her opinions were not to be trusted.

So she kept her opinions to herself. A safe move, one that had always worked successfully and continued to come through for her then.

Mark was a year older and Julia was relieved when he graduated high school and went off to college. But their break up was worse than their dating. The tears, the fights, Liz sobbing hysterically curled up on Julia’s bed. How could she lose her virginity to this guy who just left, like college meant he no longer knew how to drive or operate a phone? Secretly, Julia was relieved that he was out of their lives. But she was wrong about that.

It happened the night of the bonfire. Julia tried to describe it to Blake. It was tradition for the graduating seniors and the college kids back for the beginning of summer to throw an enormous party out in the woods, where they wouldn’t attract any cops. Maybe some people knew. Maybe they thought it was campers, or hunters getting an early start. Nobody worried. It was just the bonfire, and once they had joined the ranks of Easterbrook High Alumni, they were officially allowed in.

“Drinking?” Blake asked.

“Hammered. Everyone.”

“You? I’m shocked!”

Julia twisted to face him as much as she could while lying down. “Absolutely not! I was way too good for that. Liz dragged me along because she wanted to find Mark. And so I was officially on Liz duty. Making sure she didn’t get so drunk she’d puke in my parents’ car. I still had to drive her home.”

“And then?”

“And then somehow I lost her.”

And then there was screaming, and she’d found her again.

“Mark tried to pull something out in the woods and I got Danny, because I knew he was there at the party. I knew he could help. We took Liz home and that was when we all started hanging out. Liz swore off men for—for a long time. And we stuck pretty tight together, the three of us, that summer. Danny and I started dating the following winter. It lasted eight years.”

Blake let out a low whistle.

“In the end, mostly what we had was our friendship and looking out for Liz. But Liz is all grown up, and she doesn’t need us to take care of her anymore.”

Blake spun a lock of hair tight around his finger. “I get the feeling there are some major gaps in this story.”

Julia lay still, wanting to curl up beside him and bury herself in his skin. Wanting to turn away and run down the beach until her legs couldn’t keep going. Until she never had to see him again. It felt like an enormous weight was crushing down on her, paralyzing her with pain. There was no way the words could squeeze through all that pressure. No way they could come out without ripping her to shreds if she spoke.

But this was her one chance to tell someone who wasn’t Danny or Liz, who wasn’t in it from the start. And if she could say the words, the relief might crush her as much as all those years of accumulating silences, keeping Liz’s secret safe. And so keeping Mark safe as well.

“In the woods, that night. She went to find him and he wanted to take a walk, said he wanted to see her again.”

She could feel Blake’s stomach tighten as he stopped breathing.

“It was like he thought that because they’d had sex before, they could always have sex again. So hey, you know, in the woods after almost a year of not talking? Sure!”

She barked out a bitter laugh. He had kept slurring out obscenities as she and Danny had pulled Liz away, trying to patch together her torn dress, carrying her instead of bothering to look around for the sandal she lost. You wanted it before, so what the fuck?

“She was lucky to have you as a friend looking out for her that night.” Blake’s voice was soft, and deeply sad. She wondered if he was thinking about his own friend, the one who would have stood by his side but was now lost to him for good.

But Julia shook her head against his chest. She always felt like it was somehow her fault. Like she shouldn’t have let Liz go to the party, knowing Mark would be there. Like she should have been able to do something besides tie the strap of Liz’s dress up and drive, stone cold sober, knuckles white on the steering wheel, shaking with rage.

She hadn’t said anything to Mark. Not one single thing. Hadn’t yelled. Didn’t raise her voice. Didn’t use her voice at all. How many kinds of useless was she? Who couldn’t even defend her own friend? Who brought her into the lion’s den and wandered around making inane conversation while she was mauled?

“It wasn’t your fault,” Blake said slowly, as if reading her mind.

“I know,” Julia said, but her voice cracked as she lied.

They had stayed up all night. Well, she and Danny had. Liz had fallen asleep, bruised and bloodied from where branches had whacked her shins. But Julia had been shaking too hard to sleep and Danny was ashen, gripping a coffee mug in the kitchen so hard she thought it might crack.

Liz’s parents had been away, and Liz refused to tell anyone what had happened. She was afraid no one would believe her. She didn’t know what she would say. She thought because she hadn’t been “raped,” it didn’t count. Maybe she really believed what Mark had said, that somehow she owed it to him. Mostly, she felt ashamed.

Julia and Danny stayed up all night drinking coffee because they didn’t know what else to do, until they were wired and strung out on nerves and no sleep and caffeine. After that, they were united in taking care of Liz, helping her through the aftermath, spreading her burden across three backs instead of one.

“I think that’s the only all-nighter I’ve ever pulled,” she said with a forced laugh, rolling onto her stomach so that she could see Blake.

He was incredulous. “Only? Ever? Not even for something fun?”

Julia shook her head. “That’s the part of the story you find shocking?”

“Jesus, no.” Blake exhaled through his teeth. “That’s the only part of the story I can wrap my head around without exploding.” His arm was around her and his grip tightened protectively. “I don’t know how you three got through that.”

“I feel like I spent so much of my twenties under water. Sometimes I wonder what college would have been like if I wasn’t—” She stopped abruptly, biting her tongue. The last thing she wanted was to say anything bad about Liz. So why was she talking like this, so free with someone she’d known for a matter of days when these were things she’d been holding onto for over a decade, alone?

“If you weren’t what?” he asked, and she knew then why she was talking. Because he would listen and cared what the answer might be. He didn’t know it in advance or have his own version to tell. He wanted to know her story, because it was hers.

She thought about the things she could say. About the time she and Danny spent looking after Liz, who retreated so deeply into herself that sometimes Julia wondered if the girl who dressed up in sequins and bossed her dolls around at tea parties would ever come back. Or how vast and terrifying her world became, and she so small and alone, that long night listening to Liz cry herself to sleep only to wake up still crying, and keep crying for years before she was finally able to stop.

But instead she said simply, “It wasn’t a great introduction to sex.” And in that one wry line, her lips pursed and frowning, she felt like she’d summed up pretty much all there was to say.

“You were…?” Blake trailed off.

“A virgin,” Julia finished his question. “Danny, too.”

“And did you…?”

“It took us a long time to work up to it,” Julia admitted. “Longer than it probably otherwise would have, in normal circumstances.”

“You were afraid.” It wasn’t a question.

It wasn’t something she normally talked about with people. There were so few men besides Danny that she would have had a reason to share anything about her sexual history with, and she always felt it was something she would have been judged for. For taking her time, for thinking sex was something that wounded more than it salved, for needing to know from whomever she was with that it didn’t have to be violent.

“It took so long for us to finally do anything. We were around each other nonstop and yet for him to first kiss me was epic. But I knew it had to be him. It was like it could only ever be with him. Because I always felt like…like he was the only one I knew I could trust. What if everyone harbored a secret Mark inside, and I’d think I knew who I was with but then one day I’d turn around and see this whole other person come out?”

“But you already said you didn’t like Mark,” Blake pointed out. “I mean, not like you can tell that about someone. But you knew there was something about him that was bad news.”

“I know, and it’s not like I can go around assuming that everyone is a Mark until they prove they’re not, or assume that even if I think I trust them, there might still be this dark side lurking around. But it was hard not to feel that way for a long time. Danny was a good big brother. Yeah, he mostly ignored us when I was over, but I knew what he was like in the family. He was protective, the kind of guy who looked out for his kid sister. He was devastated by what happened, not just that it happened to Liz but also that people were capable of these things at all. Some people who knew or found out later tried to rationalize—oh, Mark was drunk. Oh, he thought Liz still wanted to go out with him. But Danny knew that was bullshit, and he couldn’t understand.”

She paused for a minute. “He’s a nice guy, Danny. He really is. But it was like we were afraid of each other. Afraid of what sex might do.”

Blake stroked his hand down her cheek and rested his forefinger lightly on her lips. She bit the pad of his finger lightly. It was nice to see him smile, after she’d made the evening so heavy instead.

“And now?” he asked quietly.

Julia swung one leg over him so she was lying on top of him, her hips straddling his, her dress cinching up toward her waist as she felt the front of his shorts press between her legs. “There are good thing about growing up.” She kissed him like she’d been wanting to all night, as though they were alone in the world, the only two souls on the beach.

“Is Liz okay?” Blake’s voice was pained.

Julia thought for a minute. “Liz is busy getting back the years she lost. She calls it her ‘second adolescence.’ Really it’s her new college years. I think she’s making up for the fun she didn’t have, the sex she never experimented with, the dates she didn’t go on when she was young.” Julia laughed. “She’s having more fun than anyone else I know, that’s for sure.”

Blake’s hands were sliding down her back now, getting progressively lower as she spoke. “When did you start making up for lost time?”

“I think I just started this week.”

“I hope you’re having fun.”

She inhaled the scent of him, the salt on his skin. “Maybe this is what you do all the time, but I guess it’s okay to admit to you that it’s a little new for me.”

“Mmm, which part?” he asked, teasing the fabric up her skirt to expose her thighs to the moonlight.

“Let’s see…fucking a stranger, fucking a stranger in Brazil, no wait—fucking an Australian stranger in Brazil. Fucking in a pool. Fucking under a waterfall. Hopping a bus to an incredible city and wandering around with no set itinerary and—oh yes—fucking some more.” She lowered her voice, loving how delicious it sounded to say everything they’d been doing. Loving even more how much Blake seemed to obviously delight in her saying it.

“Are we about to fuck some more?” he whispered, sliding his hand under her skirt to feel—yes, she’d put on thin lace panties, black this time, and it made her pulse quicken to feel his fingers pause at the fabric and then hook under the band, groaning and pulling her toward him.

“God, I hope so,” she whimpered, not sure how she could go from pouring her heart out to unspeakably horny in a matter of minutes. Was that, too, what intimacy was? Not just being without clothes but being without boundaries, moving fluidly from one state of openness to another, following the conversation wherever it turned?

“I’m not sure this counts as new anymore—I’m not a stranger, am I?”

“Not since I Googled you,” she teased, and he yanked on her panties in response.

“I still want to be a little new,” he breathed. “I still want to excite you.”

“Let’s admit that fucking is new, and so everything you do to me is exciting.”

In one swift motion he flipped her over so she was on her back in the sand and he was pressing his weight into her, making sure she could feel his cock through his shorts.

“You didn’t fuck Danny?” he said, his face in the shadows but his eyes alight.

“Danny didn’t fuck.” She looped her fingers through Blake’s empty belt loops and pulled his hips to her. “Poor Danny.”

“What did Poor Danny do?”

Julia bit her lip. “Poor Danny made love. He was always so sweet. He would never, ever fuck me.” She pressed her lips to his ear and whispered, “No matter how badly I begged him to.”

“You begged for it?” he asked, his voice catching, his cock rock hard against her hip.

She shook her head. “You’re the only one I beg to fuck me.”

That did it. His hand was up her skirt in a matter of seconds, his thumb pressing against the crotch of her panties to feel her wetness seeping through.

“Inside,” he said. “Now.”

When they were back in their hotel room, their clothes were off so fast Julia couldn’t believe nothing ripped. Blake paused for a moment to enjoy her in her panties, but even those were off before she knew it as she lay back to take him in, feeling his mouth hot and searching where his cock soon followed.

He fucked her like she’d always wanted, hard and fast and slow and sweet and dangerous all at once. He fucked her until the sweat poured off their bodies. He fucked her until she was completely gone, her body a fire that knew nothing but how to consume.

When it was done, she slept as though she’d forgotten everything—who she was, where she’d been, even her own name.

She slept like she was ready to wake up new.