The Fear of Falling

by Amanda Cowen

  “You are enough for me. You’ve always been enough for me, Ella.”

  “I’m sorry, Ryan. I can’t take that chance,” I tell him. “Please, you need to go.”

  Chapter 22

  Six months later

  It’s another day in LA, and the sun is shining brightly. The studio doors slide open in front of me as I approach. A co-worker waves as I walk down the hallway, coffee in hand, on my way to my cubicle. The animation department’s receptionist greets me with a friendly hello. I greet her back before sitting down at my desk and turning on my computer.

  I’ve made such an impression on Camilla Bright and the animation department head, Anthony Richards, in the past six months that I’ve secured a full-time position as a Visual Development Artist. It’s a dream come true, really.

  On the outside, my life is pretty awesome. My Instagram feed would make anyone jealous. I have a nice apartment, great friends, a cool job. My mom is mentally healthy and doing well. A collection of my paintings will be hung at an art exhibit next weekend.

  Everything should feel as amazing as it appears, except it doesn’t. I am missing the most important person in my life: Ryan.

  I try not to think about it often. I try to tell myself I’ve moved on. More pointedly, Ryan has moved on, too. Jayce and Kale are still in contact with him, and they told me he is doing well at Yale. He’s part of a fraternity, studying hard, and already halfway through his first year.

  I’ve done my best to convince myself he is better off without me, because it's the only way I've been able to survive these past months without him in my life.

  As I click into an animation project I’ve been asked to work on, I catch a glimpse of a picture tacked onto the corkboard behind my computer. It’s of Maisie, Jayce, Kale, Ryan and I back in our freshman year, huddled together and smiling at Hennessey. My heart aches. For six entire months, I wondered what a huge idiot I am. Am I a minor idiot who should’ve thrown caution to the wind and taken a chance with my best friend? Or am I a major idiot for not suggesting he come with me to Burbank for the entire summer to see if we could actually work?

  “Hey, happy almost-birthday,” my co-worker Rylee says, leaning over my cubicle.

  Oh yeah, tomorrow’s my twenty-third birthday.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you have any plans?” she asks. Rylee is two years older than I am and started working here as an intern a few months after I did. She quickly became one of my best work friends, and even lives in the same apartment complex as me.

  “Not really,” I answer vaguely.

  Truthfully, I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it. My birthday also happens to be the unofficial anniversary of the first time Ryan and I slept together. Thinking back to that night – our first kiss in the back of a cab – only makes me sad, although not thinking about it makes me sadder.

  Once again, I try to push a memory of Ryan out of my mind, but I fail. I can’t stop remembering his face when he told me he loved me, and then again when I told him it was too late. I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the look on his face.

  “Are your friends from San Francisco coming to LA to celebrate? And what about that cutie-pie Kale?”

  “Actually, Maisie and Jayce booked me a flight to spend the weekend in San Francisco. I leave tomorrow morning. Kale is coming, too. You should come with us – they are fairly cheap. Or you can drive six hours, if you want.”

  She shrugs. “Yeah, I could drive up to celebrate with you. Maybe I’ll see if some of the girls from animation want to tag along.”

  “Okay. No pressure, though. We can always celebrate another time in LA.”

  “I’ll be there,” Rylee assures me. She sips from her mug and winks at me. “And try not to work too hard today, Ella.”

  Trust me, I won’t.

  It’s going to be harder than normal to concentrate today. My mind is focused on Ryan and how much I miss him. I can paint on my canvases and work at my awesome job and pretend I’m living my dream life, but I can’t fool myself into thinking I’m not completely in love with him, no matter how much time passes.

  The flight to San Francisco the next morning is definitely weird. I had expected to feel nervous and nostalgic, but realize almost as soon as I’m on the plane that although I’ve made this flight many times before, it feels different this time around. Thankfully, Kale is on the same flight and in the seat beside mine, and talks my ear off to help distract me from thoughts of Ryan and my past.

  Maisie and Jayce pick us up from the airport. The Golden Gate Bridge appears in the distance, and thirty minutes later we arrive at Maisie and Jayce’s new home downtown. It’s a quaint two-story overlooking a park and walking trails. It takes a few minutes for me to process her new life here in San Francisco, a life where we’ve all grown up and assumed responsibilities and careers and pay bills. I imagine a life where I followed Ryan to Connecticut and I had a picture-perfect life like Maisie. I even imagine we have a dog and a cozy one-bedroom apartment somewhere close to Yale. I imagine us going for walks and holding hands, having a beer at the local pub, and curling up together in our bed at the end of a long day. But those thoughts disappear as quickly as they came when Maisie calls to me from her front stoop.

  We go out for lunch, then spend the rest of our afternoon at the beach. It’s really a perfectly relaxed and fun way to spend my birthday. Rylee and the girls from work show up around dinner time and meet up with us. Everyone buys me drinks and Maisie puts a tiara on my head that lights up. A really cute guy buys me a shot, and Rylee insists I get his number. He gives me his business card and when I look down at it, I see he’s a lawyer. I’m lightheaded with and regret and sadness and just so much of everything, but I don’t want my friends, especially Maisie, to notice. All I want is Ryan.

  I fumble for my phone inside my purse and turn away from my friends. My hands shake as I type in my passcode and find a picture of me and Ryan in my Favorites list. Seeing us together brings on a wave of nostalgia.

  With breaths so heavy I’m actually worried I may have another panic attack, I type the words I know I should have said to him before I left – I miss you – and press Send. I’m sorry for leaving without you, I add in a rush. I want us to be together.

  God, my heart is pounding so hard, I can hear the whoosh of blood in my ears. I sit idly on a bar stool while my birthday celebrations swirl around me. Even though the restaurant-bar is noisy, my mind falls silent as I wait for a response.

  Minutes pass by. Ryan doesn’t respond.

  But I’m not backing down that easily. My hands are shaking, and I have to take a moment to get myself together before I call him. When I am finally ready, I open my Contacts list and tap on his name. The call takes a second to connect before the sound of ringing moves through the line.

  It rings, and rings, and finally goes to voicemail. I hang up without leaving a message. I know there’s a three-hour time difference between us – it’s later there than it is here – but if he wanted to talk to me, he would have answered. He always answers his phone.

  I push down the thread of unease and close my eyes, trying to find comfort in my birthday, all the good things happening in my life, and the knowledge that I’m not ready for things with Ryan to be truly over.

  I spin around on my bar stool and take a deep breath. Tonight may not be the night I tell him how I feel, but I promise myself that I will. And right now, I just need to leave this restaurant, so I suggest we go dancing at Hennessey.

  I’m standing at exactly the same place I stood on the day of my twenty-first birthday. This is where everything changed between me and Ryan. I came to this bar ready to drink my face off and make bad decisions. Except that night, I made the best decision of my life, thinking it was the worst. And now? I think. If I just listened to my heart back then, would things be different now? Would Ryan be here with me, as my boyfriend? It’s thoughts like these that I have to stop myself from thinking about lately.

  My friend
s are having fun on the dance floor. I am standing at the bar, glancing down at my phone as I wait for the bartender to serve me a drink.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Rousey?” I glance up from my phone to see a bartender standing in front of me. He slides me a shot of tequila and says, “The guy who sent this shot wanted me to assure you he is neither a rapist, nor a robber.”

  I pause, a little taken aback. My mind flashes back to the first time I met Ryan. What was it he said to me again? “Relax, Rousey, I can assure you I am neither a rapist, nor a robber. Just walking to my dorm room.”

  “Excuse me?” I ask the bartender, my heart pounding like a hammer. Did I just hear him correctly?

  “I don’t know,” the bartender shrugs. “He made a joke about making sure you didn’t have a lamp on you, then paid me an extra twenty bucks to say the rapist-robber thing, so I did.” He looks a little worried even as he pushes the shot closer into my direction. “Are you going to take this? Because if not, I have a lot of thirsty patrons to serve.”

  I grab his arm before he moves away. “Who sent this to me?” I ask, my voice trembling.

  He nods to my right. “That guy. Right there.”

  I glance down the bar and meet his dark-brown eyes, now full of hope and playfulness. He’s wearing his ugly black Yoda t-shirt, dark-wash jeans, and a pair of Vans sneakers. His shoulders are squared, and his lips are curled into an impish grin.

  He looks perfect.

  “Ryan?” My vision blurs as I move through the thick crowd. “What are you doing here? How did you—?” I start, then take a shuddering breath. When he meets my eyes again, I feel the weight of every ticking moment of silence. His jaw flexes as we stare at each other, and when he swallows, the dimple on his cheek flickers.

  “I just called you,” I say, my voice tight. “You didn’t answer.”

  “I was on a plane,” he answers with a smile. “But once I landed, I saw your texts and missed call.”

  “Did you fly in from Connecticut?”

  He nods. The mental image of him leaving Yale and heading straight to the airport is enough to leave my knees weak.

  “Maisie told me you’d be in San Francisco for your birthday,” he says, nodding over to our group of friends and my co-workers, who aren’t even hiding how closely they are watching us. “I texted Maisie the second my plane landed. She said you decided to come to Hennessey to dance. And I couldn’t resist because you know how much I love dancing.”

  I nod, breathing erratically. I want to tell him so many things, but right now I am at a loss for words.

  “You look beautiful,” he says. “So beautiful that I can’t take my eyes off you.”

  “Ryan—” I lean forward and look around. Knowing our friends are watching us makes me nervous.

  “I messed up,” he says, reaching forward. His hand slips into mine, his thumb rubbing on the inside of my palm. “How I showed up drunk at your apartment. I was just so scared. Of losing us. I’ve been messing things up from the very first time I met you by not telling you exactly how I felt about you then. When I walked into your dorm room, you changed my entire world. Seeing you wrapped up in a towel dripping wet and swinging an ugly lamp in my direction,” he laughs. “You were the cutest damn thing I had ever seen.”

  “Ryan, you don’t need to do this. I messed up, you messed up—”

  “But then little by little, I got to know you, all of you – every little perfect part. And from that moment on, whether I wanted to accept it or not, you owned me. And I was so scared of losing what we had that whenever I had the slightest inkling of wanting something more, I forced myself to never cross that line – busying myself with all the wrong girls for so many pointless years.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What I’m saying is that– after everything that happens in my day, all I can think is ‘I can't wait to tell Ella about this.’ Or when I pass by an art gallery or street artists, or even a fucking painting hanging on wall, all I imagine is you admiring those paintings, with me beside you. And you’ve ruined folk music for me; I’ve turned to fucking country music. Do you have any idea what kind of insanity it is for a city boy to listen to country love ballads?”

  The knot in my chest tightens. “You came all the way here to tell me this?”

  He looks down at me and nods. “Yes. Because I miss you so fucking much.”

  “You missed me?” I reach forward and finger a belt hole on his waist.

  “Of course I did, you goofball.” He bites down on his lower lip and digs around in his back pocket. He then pulls out a folded envelope and hands it to me.

  “What’s this?” I unfold and open it to see two tickets to Paris.

  “Your birthday present,” he says. “You wanted to go and visit that over-the-top art museum.”

  “Ryan – what?” I stop, backing against the bar. He slows a little, taking the last few steps to me over what feels like a span of a million rapid heartbeats. I can feel my heart in my throat. “I can’t – have you lost your mind?”

  “Just a little.” He leans his hand against the bar, looking down at me as he steps in real close. “I want you to go to France with me. We leave tomorrow morning.”

  I shake my head. “Ryan, this is crazy.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, I know. It is crazy. Look at me right now. I flew across the country to find you in the middle of a bar, purposely wearing my Yoda t-shirt because I knew it would both piss you off and make you smile at the same time. That’s some messed-up shit.”

  I laugh, a few tears breaking free from my eyes. “I really do hate that shirt.”

  He wipes them away with his thumb. “I don’t care about the distance,” he whispers against my lips. I smell his signature scent, something I will never forget in a million years. He flashes me a playful smile and gets down on one knee, holding onto my hand in the middle of bar. I can't help but panic a bit when curious eyes start looking in our direction. “Ella, will you be my best friend again?” he asks, smiling up at me. He digs around in the back of his pocket and pulls out a rock, placing it in my palm and closing my fingers around it.

  I laugh, wiping tears from my eyes. “Wow. That is so lame.”

  “I need you in my life,” he continues, still on one knee. “I didn’t come here expecting you to be in love with me, I just – I just really want my best friend back because I'm so desperately in love with her.” He stands up, his hands sliding around my waist. “Like so in love with her that I’d stop a Ferris wheel, let her beat me at rock toss, and even buy her tickets to Paris.”

  “Ryan, I—” I want to tell him I love him too, to shout it so loud the entire bar will hear me. B

  But he won’t let me get a word in edgewise. “I’m in love with my best friend," he cups my face and pulls back to look at me. “And I want to know if she’s in love with me. Because whatever this is between us, it is good. It is so good. It is actually the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I don't ever want us to be over.”

  I look up at him and two more tears run down my cheeks. “I don't want us to be over, either.”

  “I love you, Ella,” he whispers against my lips.

  “I love you, too.” I lean forward and kiss him. A moan escapes his lips, along with another ‘I Iove you’, and it’s the sexiest sound I’ve ever heard because it makes everything about this so real. I can hear our friends clapping and cheering in the distance, but right now I am lost to everything but Ryan.

  His tongue slides over my lips, my teeth, my tongue. I’m making pleading little noises, just wanting to get the hell out of this bar and check into a hotel room somewhere.

  “Let's get out of here," I finally breathe out.

  “But it’s your birthday,” he says.

  “I don’t care,” I tell him. “I can’t wait another minute.”

  “Does this mean you’re finally mine?” he asks, his eyes bright with mischief.

  I kiss him again, and squeeze his hands. “Always.”

  E
pilogue

  Three and a half years later

  The receptionist greets me and clicks away on a keyboard. I walk into Ryan’s bright and sunny corner office. He opened an extension of his father’s law firm, Owen Law Office LLP, in LA, leaving his brother Reggie to have sole ownership of the location in Sacramento.

  After our trip to Paris, Ryan transferred from Yale to UCLA so he could be closer to me. It took a long time for his father to accept Ryan’s decision. Up until his graduation last spring, things remained tense between them. But after Ryan was awarded with a commencement medal for his stellar academic performance and his father saw how happy we were together, he eased up.

  Ryan is now a patent attorney. He decided to not follow in his father’s footsteps and practice corporate law. Instead, he specializes in representing clients in obtaining patents. He loves what he does, just as much as I love my new job at Disney as a Senior Animation Artist.

  After I accepted my promotion only a few short months ago, we bought our first condo together in West Hollywood. Prior to that, we’d been renting a one-bedroom apartment while Ryan was in law school. Once our careers started to take off, we decided we should probably start adulting properly and invest in a place of our own.

  He smiles when he sees me. “Hey there, beautiful girlfriend of mine.”

  I lean over his desk and give him a kiss on the lips. “Are you ready to nerd it up?”

  Ryan laughs, and bites down on his lower lip. He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest, amusement twinkling in his dark eyes. I will never get tired of seeing him in a three-piece suit, just one of the many benefits of having a lawyer boyfriend. His offensive graphic tees are for weekends only.

  “If you haven’t noticed, I’m still catching up on all these files,” he motions to a stack of on the corner of his desk. “It’s not my fault I was late to work this morning,” he whispers.