The Harder We Fall

by Mina V. Esguerra

  I had to go up on tiptoe to lather his hair, completely. This made his dark, thick hair seem longer than it was. I combed my fingers into his scalp, and then held his head in place as the water washed the lavender away.

  “I would have been done with the whole thing by now,” he groaned.

  “I’m being thorough. Are you complaining?”

  He had opened his eyes to find me kneeling, lathering up my hands again and then circling them, barely, around a thigh. I scooted over slightly to avoid getting poked by the tip of his cock, successfully and deliberately ignoring it so far, despite all its efforts to be noticed. The shower water ran down my back. He had yet to see me naked, I remembered, although this wet-shirt thing was damn close.

  One strong, trunk of a leg, then the other, delighting in his taut calves and tracing the web of scars on his knees.

  “You’re a mess, aren’t you,” I said, imagining now the falls and tumbles that each one represented. And then the countless others that weren’t cruel enough to mark him.

  “Yes. I am a fucking mess right now.”

  “Shush. If you can outrun a beep for that long, you can handle this.”

  I turned him around so I could work on his back, and he dropped his forehead to the wall, pushed against it with both palms. The shape that simple move gave his back made me shudder from want, and I let it happen, because he wasn’t looking.

  “You don’t have ink,” I said, starting to soap down one shoulder blade.

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “Nearly everyone on the team does. You’re not into it?”

  “Blood transfusions. I need to be ready to give, any time.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I let that drop.

  When I was doing his abs, one tight ripple of muscle at a time, I was thinking, this is my favorite part but now that I was reorienting myself with the first part of him that I’d ever touched, I changed my mind. I would love this back for a long time, I thought. I would know it from a lineup.

  “How’s the scratch?” he said.

  He must have noticed that I was gentler around it. It was healed, mostly, and would be gone without leaving any scars in a few days. “Better,” I said. I dropped a kiss on it, and he knocked a fist against the wall.

  “Are you done?”

  I laughed. “Almost.”

  The backs of his legs were cleaner by now, and a faster job, but if he had expected me to be done with him he was mistaken. I pulled him off the wall to make sure the water ran down his back, and then turned him around again.

  He was ready for it and stuck his tongue right into my mouth, and I gave him that, and gave mine back. I almost giggled; it was a sloppy, wet, hungry kiss and I absolutely wanted to eat it up. His arms went around me, hands working their way under my shirt.

  “One more thing.” Yes it was his pleasure that was most obvious when I wrapped my hand around him, but it was also my curiosity, my determination to get something done, and yes my pleasure absolutely, as I slid it down, then up, his considerable length.

  “Fuck.” One of his hands tangled in my hair, the other found the horizontal pattern in the wall’s tiling to hang on to.

  “The good kind?” I teased, pausing, before sliding down again, squeezing on my way up.

  “The best. Fuck. I’m not going to last. Not here.”

  “Why, you have other plans tonight?” I said, giving him a raised eyebrow as my hand pumped him faster. “There’s time.”

  The hand in my hair pulled me toward his lips as he started coming, his tongue slick against mine, his cock spasming in my hand, warmth seeping into the skin of my belly through my tank top. It was a mess. Good thing we were in the shower.

  ***

  He “got back” at me good later, or so I thought, if “getting back” meant satisfying himself in a way that coincidentally satisfied me too.

  We were on my bed, diagonally because that way his feet wouldn’t hang over the edge. I was on my back, my arms stretched over me, one of his hands making sure they stayed there, the other doing a thorough exploration of my breasts, finally there for him to see and touch.

  All this while he was inside me, speared in there condom and all, causing sparks of electricity to shoot through me each time his cock twitched. And it would, every now and then. But he wasn’t thrusting it, not yet anyway, even though I suggested it several times.

  “I’m busy,” he said, his mouth full of side boob. “You’re going to have to wait.”

  He liked that part. Sort of obsessed over it. Spent more time there than any other part of his that I individually soaped and rinsed. Obviously, revenge.

  I moved my hips, and there was slight friction where we were connected, enough to shoot another spark through me.

  “What did I fucking tell you?” His tone was an echo of mine in the shower, but with dirtier language, an improvement on the system. “I’m not done.”

  The man was serious; he wasn’t done. After the worship of both breasts, his mouth paid special attention to my neck, my collar bone, that hollow space down my throat. Each small move thrust him in a little deeper, nudged him in the right direction, and by the time he raised himself up on his elbows, retreating, and then pushing in again, I wasn’t even speaking. Or I was, but not aware of what I was saying. Was only really aware of that perfect, precise slide of his, in and out of me, faster and faster.

  And when I came it was sharp, and bright, and violent, like my pleasure was being torn out of me and I was chasing it to grab it back. And then I grabbed it, and I was falling back with it, happy, tipsy, not caring where I landed.

  He rolled away from me to do stuff, then came back into bed, and by then I was only dimly aware of lacing my fingers around his neck and pulling him close.

  ***

  By two a.m. I’d had sex more times in that week than ever. Not counting the times I’d had to get myself off, which was often the case, not for lack of relationships alone but also because it was easier. Sometimes you’d find someone willing, but he wouldn’t get the job done, you know? So frustrating. I always suspected that it was me fundamentally lacking something that other people, who managed to date and like the whole experience, seemed to have. Then I realized that I had probably limited my dating sphere to pretentious asses, and managed to become one myself, so it perpetuated the problem.

  I wished I had more than leftover pizza in the refrigerator, but I had stopped shopping and already did my week of cooking and eating everything edible in the pantry. Starving at midnight, we knocked around the kitchen trying to find something, and brought back up to the bedroom a slice and a half of pizza, a quarter jar of green salsa, a hotdog, two slices of cheese.

  “Wait,” I said, as I split a can of soda with him, “you’re in training, right? On a diet? Which stuff here can’t you eat?”

  “All of it,” he said, cramming his section of pizza into his mouth. “I’ll burn it off.”

  “Anything I can do to help.”

  I helped. If you’d consider getting on my knees and having him do all the work from behind, helping. (He was sweating after, so yes.)

  Much later, when I was trying to fall asleep while on my stomach, I lifted my head to search for the covers and saw him on his back, eyes open and looking up at the ceiling. I thought he was asleep, because he had been still for so long.

  “Who’s sick in your family?” he said, aware that I was up.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I said something about blood transfusions and you didn’t ask what I meant.”

  Because I knew what he meant. “Maybe I didn’t hear it.”

  He occupied so much space on my bed. Simply turning toward me caused our bodies to touch. “You did.”

  “Maybe I don’t know what it means.”

  “Unlikely.”

  Fine. We were going to do this. “She’s not sick anymore, because she’d been gone for years. My mom, I mean.”

  He nodded, but there was no surprise in his face. �
��I’m sorry. What did she have?”

  “In the end? Cardiac arrest, but it was a bunch of things before that. Breast cancer, before that something in her throat. I didn’t know this at the time. In high school—by then she’d been gone for like nine years—I finally asked my dad to explain everything to me.”

  That was what ultimately changed things between me and my dad, and we both knew it. The year or so prior he had started dating again, or at least started letting me know that he was, and I was unfortunately hitting puberty and casting myself as an entitled bitch. But then I asked him to tell me the saga of mom’s sickness, and it was the right time. He was able to talk about it with some distance, and though he had regrets this was a thing that had long been settled. I also discovered then, good thing I didn’t miss it on account of being younger, that he needed to talk about it to someone who was on the same side of that loss. He spent some time in grief counseling, I knew, but so did I, and that didn’t give us any breakthroughs. I doubt that he had ever been able to talk about this to anyone else, not any of his girlfriends, his siblings, his best friends.

  Remembering this, I pressed my lips shut and slid an arm under Nicholas’s back, that gorgeous back of his, and waited for him to say something.

  “Why do you need to win this trip to Europe?” he asked.

  “Europe and Asia. I’ve been chasing this for years.”

  “But you’ve been in school.”

  I sighed into his bicep. It felt good. “Yeah, I pretty much moved my entire college career around so I could be right for something like this. I’m so close, and none of the other contestants have remotely the same qualifications I do.”

  “Why this internship? Aren’t there others?”

  “Yes but...this one starts in the summer after I graduate so it’s the right time. And is a film project. And it’s Europe and Asia. About malnutrition and child hunger. Funded by UNICEF. All the elements are there. That’s rare.”

  “Whether you get it or not depends on how good you make a video about us?”

  “Yeah. You guys and your balls.”

  He turned, and one of his hands reached up to hold the side of my face. It seemed huge, his hand, and while I’d never fantasized about large, jock types before, I finally got why someone would. It felt like I was being cradled all over.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you. You are, too.” Because he was. “In that hot, manly way.”

  My fingers wrapped around his wrist, the one connected to the hand that was on my face. I felt a pulse somewhere, or maybe I was imagining it, imagining the life underneath that beautiful skin.

  “Will you be able to drive me somewhere tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Where do you usually stay again?”

  “While I’m here to oversee tryouts, at Grayson’s. I’ve quit my job and given up my place already. Car included.”

  Because of Japan. Right.

  “Anywhere you want to go,” I said.

  Chapter 11

  Later, Steph admitted that when she came back from her jog the following morning and saw Nicholas in the kitchen, she thought she had walked into the wrong house.

  “This is Nicholas,” I said. I had never had cause to introduce a guy to my housemate before.

  Steph sized him up as she drank the remaining water in her handy bottle. “You look all right. Do you have a brother?”

  “No, but I have a friend,” Nicholas said. “He has nice teeth.”

  “Tattoos here and here,” I volunteered the locations. “And huge. If you’re into that.”

  Steph made a show of shuddering with disgust. “No. Thanks for trying to build him up, but no. You two enjoy yourselves.”

  Having him beside me as I drove was….nice. Comforting. He had asked to be driven to his apartment, his real one, to pick up a few things that he’d need. He programmed the address into my GPS and good thing, because I’d never been to that neighborhood before. Maybe once, passing through, those few times we drove up to SF instead of flew.

  “Will you need more trunk space?” I asked him.

  “Not really,” he said. “I don’t need a lot of stuff.”

  “You said, when you met Mr. North last week.”

  “Did I?” Nicholas shrugged. “I guess I say it all the time.”

  “It’s good, to not need a lot of things,” I said, and I wasn’t trying to be deep about it really; I was getting on the freeway and had my mind on that. Trying to ignore the way he was lightly, lazily, touching my shoulder.

  “You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?” he asked.

  Freeway concentration be damned. I laughed a bit. “Nice of you to go back and check after having sex five hundred times.”

  Whenever Nicholas smiled, in that particular way, because of something I said, I felt like I had scored a point. There was something about him that made him seem so wound up, so impenetrable, and then a little sunshine seemed to come through. “You’re graduating.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’ve seen some people do that last run around the campus.They sleep with anybody. Or everybody.”

  “I’ve heard about that, and that’s just distasteful. If the picks on campus were that bad for four years, going back into that pool for one last desperate hookup is not going to be a good idea.”

  His arm stretched out and touched the back of my neck. “You and I were in that campus. Couldn’t have been that bad.”

  I smirked at him. “Imagine all the sex we could have been having. You’d have no time for rugby. I’d have no time to do uncredited projects for work experience. It’s future-ruining kind of sex.”

  “If I met you then, I would have ruined it.”

  “What makes you think you won’t ruin it now?”

  That smile. Yes.

  So I was starting to get what Grayson meant about Nicholas lugging all this baggage around. I wasn’t asking, already. I was perfectly willing to let him remain my strong, quiet, sports stud, while I was his...what was I?

  But he kept bringing stuff like this up. Like he was trying to have me know him as a person. That was more dangerous that any misguided pre-grad hookup.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Nicholas reminded me.

  “No boyfriend,” I said, indulging him. Maybe he could get to ask questions too. Fair was fair. “I don’t believe I actually had one, while I was here. I think the longest I dated a guy was one semester.”

  “Not an athlete, right?”

  I shook my head. “None of them were. Maybe you’re changing my mind about athletes as boyfriends.”

  “You shouldn’t. We’re the worst.”

  “Because you can’t shake off the women who throw themselves at you?”

  “Because we can’t prioritize for shit. The time it takes to be good at one thing means everything else falls around us.”

  One day I’d ask what the full story was, but on that morning I satisfied myself with an imagined ex-girlfriend, arguments over time and lack of it for each other, optional betrayal. “It doesn’t have to,” I said, and I did mean to be a little deep about that.

  ***

  As soon as I stepped into the Cevasco apartment, certain things about Nicholas clicked into place.

  He wanted me to see it, and know this, without him having to say anything to incriminate himself. Sure, he needed to pick up some things, but there were other ways to get them. They didn’t require involving me, unless he wanted to.

  Every family coped their own way, but there were telltale signs in a house, when someone in there was living with a disease. My own vague memories involved a new addition to the household (“Nurse Rita”), the bathroom smelling like bleached lemon, a white board calendar of treatments, getting to sleep in my parents’ room whenever Mom was at the hospital. That house may have been bigger, and the disease something else entirely, but I recognized the weight of it in the apartment as soon as I walked in.

  My eyes
swept through the humble space quickly, and saw a few familiar things. A small table beside the chair facing the TV, topped with prescription bottles, identical labels, haphazardly stacked. From the front door I could see half of the refrigerator, and the long piece of paper stuck to it had dates listed with marker, some of them crossed off. Discarded face masks, the kind used in hospitals, tucked away in a small waste basket beside the couch.

  Nicholas introduced me (as “Daria” without qualifier) to his mother, Judy, and my heart sank as I shook her hand. I had a feeling it was her, the one who had the thing. Not that she looked sick; she was walking, she had a nice glow to her face, hair was cut short but I could see that it would be lush if it grew out. The hair reminded me of his, like the short cut was keeping it from reaching its potential.

  It wasn’t in her voice either, because it was cheerful if a bit soft, and she smiled at me with a pleased curiosity.

  It might have been the eyes.

  My mom might have looked at me that way, before. I wasn’t sure, it was too long ago, but a familiar pain lurched in my stomach and I looked away before the tears welled up. Maybe I missed my mom, any mom.

  Nicholas kissed his mom’s forehead and excused himself to get whatever damn thing it was.

  She motioned for me to take a seat at the couch, and she resumed her place on the comfy TV chair.

  “Do you know how I can send a photo from here?” Judy asked me, holding up her iPad.

  “Oh.” I scooted closer, willing myself to snap out of this mood. “Yes of course. Through email, you mean?”

  “Yes. So my son gets me this right before he leaves and I pretty much know how to turn it on.”

  I smiled as I flipped through her photo sharing options with some finger swipes. “It’s easy to pick up, after a few tries.”

  And then it was ten more minutes of that. How to open this, how to send something, save this, share that. Judy asked one question after another, and I hope I was competent at my tech demo. We scanned through photos of someone’s kids, a garden, cupcakes, and an entire album of Nicholas playing rugby.