How We Fall (37 page)

Lines creased his forehead and his lips made a thin line. “I’d want us to last, Jackie. This would be it for me.”

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Kate Brauning

I nodded. No way did I want to go through that again.

We didn’t have to be a doomed romance. We weren’t some cosmic mistake. We were us, and we couldn’t be stopped by anything but ourselves. We’d both changed, and we knew what we wanted. All we had to do was figure out how to make it work. “I want to do it right,” I said. “No secrets, no hiding.

Everything real and no limits.”

He pulled me closer. “I really want to kiss you,” he whispered into my hair.

“Then do it,” I said.

And he did. His lips were familiar, but kissing him with no guilt and no secrets and him knowing what I wanted was so new.When he pulled back, we sat there for a few minutes, his hand in mine. A breeze filtered through the hills and teased my hair.

Someone yelled from the yard. It sounded like Chris. “It’s probably dinner time,” I said. He couldn’t see us from here, but we should go back anyway.

“Right.” Marcus got to his feet, a little stiffly. His brushed the bandage on my arm with a finger and took my hand again.

Dinner was on the table by the time we went inside. Marcus sat in his usual place across from me, and kept bumping my foot under the table as we ate. Everyone was there, but no one noticed how Marcus seemed unable to stop looking at me and I couldn’t quit smiling. The parents talked on about the coach and when they thought the trial would be and whether we’d have to testify. Dad kept saying yes, but not for a while, and the twins banged their spoons on their plates.

Will occupied Claire at the other end of the table, and for once, she wasn’t the one talking. He turned to look at me, and when I nodded, he winked and went back to Claire.

After dinner, the parents told us they would take care of the chores, saying we could probably use a break after last night.

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No one argued. I was sore, and still exhausted, and after spend-ing so many hours soaked to the skin, I was permanently cold.

Chris went up to his computer and Will and Claire said they were going outside. Claire gave me a guilty look, but I grinned and texted her.

No worries. Have fun.

Marcus came up behind me in the living room while the parents got the twins down from the table and cleared the dishes. He moved my hair aside, and his breath warmed my neck when he whispered. “I have an idea.”

I turned around. “Tell me.”

He glanced toward the kitchen. “Not here.”

“Take me out.” Now that I’d thought of it, I couldn’t let it go. “Let’s go, right now.”

He must have thought it was a good idea because he grabbed his keys and beat me to the door. The parents would know we were leaving together, but that was okay. He opened the door of his truck for me, then jogged around to the driver’s side.

He slammed his door and started the truck. A slow smile spread over his face. “So, is this a real date?”

I laughed. Nearly two years after I’d kissed him, a year after I’d loved him, we were going on our first date. “It’s totally a real date.”

He took me to Todd’s in Manson for ice cream, and got us sundaes. We took them over to one of the picnic tables in the corner of the lot and sat on the top of the table, resting our feet on the bench. People milled around us; couples, parents, friends hanging out on a Sunday night. It was a very normal date, and I wouldn’t have changed anything about it.

“So what’s your idea?” I swirled my spoon through the chocolate sauce.

He watched me, not touching his ice cream. “I figured we could get the parents out of the house. Talk to all four of them 292

Kate Brauning

at once, both of us. And start with telling them that I’m moving out.”

I stopped swirling the sauce. “What? No. You can’t—”

“Listen. It makes sense. They’re far more likely to be okay with us if we’re not living together while they get used to it.

And teachers and social workers would have no reason to get involved if it’s not a home environment issue.”

It sounded like he’d researched this. The living together part did make everything that much more awkward. “I could move out. It doesn’t have to be you. I could move in with Claire.”

A smile tugged at his mouth. “You are your parents’ last child. My parents have five more.”

Fair point. “Okay,” I said. “You’ll move out. We’ll tell them about us. Then what?”

“Then.” He finally took a bite of his ice cream. “I’ll transfer for the rest of this year to a different school.”

Absolutely not. “You can’t leave your senior year.”

“I’ll still see my friends. But this will be so much easier for both of us if we’re not giving people daily opportunities to be weird about it. And after that, we’ll go to college where people won’t know us and it won’t matter. We’ll handle it one thing at a time.”

I could handle people teasing and gossiping, but it wouldn’t be fun. If people weren’t seeing us come to school together in the mornings, weren’t seeing us in the halls together, it would be easier to adjust. Plus, if it wasn’t happening at the school, the grades my other cousins were in might not even hear about it.

It might not be an issue for them.

“Besides,” he said. “At a new school, I could tell people all about this awesome girl I’m dating.”

“Well. You’re not dating her yet.” I kept my attention on my ice cream.

He set his down. “You’re going to make me ask you, aren’t you?”

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I ignored him and licked my spoon. We weren’t normal, whatever that meant, and that was okay. But the traditional crush and first date and first everything that other people got still sounded pretty good.

He sighed, but I heard the smile in it. He slid off the table and stood up. “Hey,” he said. “So, I think I’ve seen you around somewhere.”

I shaded my eyes against the evening sun and looked up at him. He stood awkwardly, his hands shoved in his back pockets. I grinned and played along. “You look familiar, I guess.”

“You here by yourself?”

I tilted my head. “Not anymore.”

“I thought I’d come see if I could convince you to go out with me.”

Not the world’s greatest pick-up line, but I’d give him points for being direct. I raised an eyebrow. “Like, a casual pizza and a movie date?”

“No.” He leaned down and put one hand on either side of me on the table. “Like a serious, make-you-my-girlfriend date.”

For no reason at all, a shiver ran through my stomach. I leaned back a little. “That sounds pretty intense.”

“It would be.”

“You’d have to meet my parents. I don’t know if you can handle that.”

He rested his forehead on mine. “I bet I can.”

“I like to get to know a guy before I go out with him,” I said. “Tell me about yourself.”

We had to try, or we’d lose who we were. The last two years had been a long, hard fall, but some people took the risk because the safe choice would always leave them missing something.

The rest of this year and the start of college and the fallout with our families would probably have many little ending 294

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points, a lot of tiny resolutions our lives could hang from, and like in film, maybe one of them would be something people would use later to interpret how we lived the rest of our lives.

But a fade to black was only the point where other people stopped looking in. Ilsa’s plane went up into the sky before
Casablanca
’s credits rolled, but somewhere, that plane would have to land, and her story would keep going.

Marcus sat down next to me on the picnic table. “What do you want to know about me?” He reached for his ice cream. I’d eaten pretty much all the toppings off mine immediately, but he was working through his evenly across the container.

“Well, where do you want to go to college?”

He shrugged. “I have a few ideas. Some place with a good engineering program.”

I actually hadn’t known that about him. “Engineering.

Okay.”

He pointed his spoon at me. “A couple of them, actually, are in California.”

I scraped the last of the fudge off the top of my ice cream.

“I think you’d like California,” I said. And there on the picnic table, in front of everyone, I reached between us for his hand.

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