How to Fall

by Rebecca Brooks

  Blake held up a hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “We don’t have to—” Jamie started.

  “Talk about it? No. We don’t.”

  Jamie’s mouth shut. He played his card.

  Immediately Blake felt bad for cutting him off. He was supposed to be re-learning how to do this whole friendship thing, not alienating people at every turn. It wasn’t Jamie’s fault that anything that reminded him of Kelley made him want to punch somebody’s lights out. And while the list of things that reminded him of Kelley wasn’t quite as long as it used to be, it still could fill a few ledgers. Hearing about girlfriends running off with the ones you least expected was pretty high on another list he kept, the one about things he didn’t want to talk about. Ever.

  But Jamie was just joking around, one bloke to another, the night dark and the cicadas loud and the cards shuffling back and forth across the table, keeping them busy while everyone slept. Blake wondered what Julia was like when she was sleeping. If her little mouth opened as she breathed. How her limbs splayed out on the sheets. Whether her hair fell into her eyes so that he could lean over her sleeping body and brush it from her face. He took a shot so fast it made him cough. That bus to Buenos Aires couldn’t come fast enough. Once he was on his way, there would be absolutely no more thinking about another body in his bed throughout the night.

  Blake poured another thumb of whisky into their glasses. Thinking about Julia sleeping so close and yet untouchable made the image of Kelley the last time he saw her pop unbidden into his mind. That look in Kelley’s eyes hadn’t been shock or shame or sadness, but delight that she’d finally been caught.

  He never wanted to see anything like it again.

  Jamie didn’t know that he carried that face with him now, whenever anything came up—even jokingly—about losing one’s love. But he would never tell anyone the truth about Kelley. Whatever Jamie wanted to know, he could read about online. He might not think it was true, but it probably was. That was precisely the problem.

  “Chris is just talking about opening up that inn,” Blake said. “Everyone loves to fantasize out here.”

  Another image popped into his mind, this time of the way Julia’s eyes crinkled when she was so close to coming, one flick of his finger sending her over the edge.

  “To fantasies.” Jamie raised his small glass. “And to as many years of good sex as we can possibly get.”

  They swallowed the shots with a sour face. Blake played his next cards, a two to make Jamie draw two cards from the deck, a queen to skip his turn, and an eight to change the suit to spades, which he had three of left in his hand.

  “Fuck,” Jamie groaned as he watched Blake make his plays.

  “You’ve been kicking my ass the last two turns. It’s time for me to have a go.”

  But Blake already knew that like all his seeming victories, this one would also be short-lived. Jamie played an eight and changed the suit to clubs, correctly assuming that, of course, Blake was stuck with spades. He flashed Jamie the finger as he reached for more cards, his hand building back up until he finally got one he could play.

  Blake wasn’t sure how seriously he should take Jamie’s concerns about whether Chris really wanted to settle down. Hadn’t she talked about their plan to return to their home in Melbourne and start planning their wedding? Even if Chris was having cold feet, it was just the idea of their trip winding down, and he told Jamie that reassuringly.

  There were times to step out of your life and jump off a cliff and trust that the rope would hold you. And then there were times when the only thing to do was board a plane in Santiago and go home. Chris would know the difference, when the time came.

  “I guess,” Jamie sighed as he threw down the last card in his hand.

  When Jamie picked up the cards and asked Blake if he was up for one more, Blake knew he’d better turn in.

  “Big day tomorrow,” Jamie said as he gathered up the bottle and glasses to bring inside.

  “Gotta get to the bus station early,” Blake said.

  “Don’t forget to enjoy it.”

  “What?” Blake had no idea what he meant.

  “The bus ride. Argentina. Wherever you go. You’re supposed to be enjoying it, remember?”

  “You got it,” Blake said. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  The last thing he thought of before he fell asleep was Kelley’s face, lips parted, eyes flying open at the sound of the door. And the anger—the shock of that anger she held in her eyes. How had he missed that she’d been so angry with him?

  But no, that wasn’t the last thought. Not really.

  The last thought was Julia and her lips on the straw, eyes widening in pleasure and surprise as she sucked up sweet pineapple juice.

  Chapter Ten

  Wednesday

  The sky was turning a deeper blue when the bus pulled out of the Foz do Iguaçu station, heading east for Rio. Julia bunched up a sweater to use as a pillow and tilted her seat back, closing her eyes. She would not be nervous. Still, it was going to be a long night.

  She couldn’t believe she was really doing this. She was really going to another huge and unfamiliar city by herself, this time carrying not only the memory of her loneliness in São Paulo but what was, she had to admit, the most incredible chemistry she’d ever experienced in her life. She wanted to hate Blake, to kick and scream and yell and cry and tell him off for puffing her up and then cutting her down without so much as a good-bye.

  But he’d been gone by the time she woke up that morning. And anyway, she had no words for him. Not really.

  It wasn’t that she was angry so much as resigned. What, did she think that after he fucked her twice, he’d want to stick around and keep doing it again? A night and a day playing at being somebody else wasn’t going to turn her into the kind of woman who didn’t find herself alone.

  The bus jerked out into traffic and shuddered to a stop. She heard the clank of the door opening, muffled conversation, footsteps coming up the steps—some last minute passenger. There were plenty of empty seats. She didn’t open her eyes. A whole day convincing herself she was having the time of her life on the Brazilian side of the falls had left her exhausted.

  But there were other adventures ahead, she reminded herself for the millionth time that day. The whole point of a fling was that it ended. Period. Full-stop. Poof into memory, like a drop of water spiraling away. Like a cloud.

  And now it was time to move on.

  As if the driver heard her thoughts, the bus lurched forward again. She settled back in to sleep, only to be interrupted moments later by a tap on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, is this seat taken?”

  The voice was low and close to her ear. Her eyes flew open and her heart almost stopped.

  Then she frowned.

  “What are you doing here?” she said crossly.

  “I don’t even get a hello?”

  “You’re kidding.” Was she supposed to immediately fawn all over him because he had suddenly—what? Felt guilty? Wanted another piece of her ass?

  “Well then, don’t mind if I do,” Blake said like he hadn’t heard her and sat down. “Plans change,” he added as he reclined the seat and stretched out his legs. “Don’t they?”

  “I don’t know, you tell me. You’re the one who suddenly had to get to Buenos Aires, after acting like you were completely free.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Didn’t say that?” She practically laughed in his face. Julia may have wanted people to get along, but if Blake thought she was going to be some meek, mealy-mouthed pushover grateful for his dick and his non-apologies, he obviously didn’t know what it took to make a room full of tenth graders pay attention.

  “No, I did, I just mean—” He was getting flustered now. It was incredibly satisfying to watch.

  He tried again. “I mean that I didn’t have to get to Buenos Aires. I didn’t have to be anywhere. I don’t know why I said that I did.”

 
“I want to be clear, Blake. I’m not making you go anywhere. You can go to Rio, you can go to Argentina, you can go to the moon for all I care. But on Saturday I leave for Chicago, and that’s one plane ticket that’s not going to change.”

  “I know,” he said. “Which is exactly why it would be so stupid of me to let you get away before then.”

  Don’t do it, Julia scolded herself, but the heat was rising to her cheeks. It was like her blood vessels were completely disconnected from the rest of her. They went whooshing along for all the wrong reasons, straight from her heart to her thighs, with no concern for her brain.

  “I didn’t ask you to come with me,” she tried again.

  “You should have.”

  “Why, so you could say no to my face in front of everyone?” This time it wasn’t hard for her to summon her irritation.

  “No. So you could tell me I was being an idiot and to get over myself.”

  “Yeah, like that would have gone over well,” she said, and now it was his turn to blush.

  “Okay, I deserve that. I’m just not sure how to do this whole, whatever it is that we’re doing. Where it’s more than a night but in the end we still leave.”

  There it was: honesty. Julia turned and looked out the window, where the last bit of light was slipping away. Behind them was the town, ahead of them nothing but dark fields and the deep purple silhouettes of the trees. Every so often the black was punctured by a beacon of light from a lone dwelling or a small cluster marking a village farther off the road.

  “I didn’t think that was a reason not to enjoy it,” Julia said as she squinted at the lights whirring by. She wondered what it would be like to live in those houses—to live anywhere that wasn’t the life she’d always known.

  “Yeah,” Blake said quietly. “That’s kind of what I was thinking, too.”

  He didn’t need to know that Julia was never the one who talked about enjoying the moment and seeing what happened. She decided, like everything else on this trip, to just go with it.

  His hand brushed the back of hers, as if trying out how her touch still felt. “How were the falls?” he asked.

  “Okay,” she said, and then laughed. “No, that’s a lie. Spectacular, obviously.”

  The endless chasm, the hurtling spray, the overpowering drumbeat of the falls matching time with her heart had reminded her that she didn’t come to Brazil to find a man. She’d come for this: the chance to live a few unscripted days overpowered by something so much larger than her own tidy corner of the world.

  If Liz found out that she’d even thought about wallowing in the hostel dorm room eating bad melted-and-refrozen ice cream bars and reading about curriculum development, she’d drag her to the nearest Chicago singles bar and force her to dance, stat. It was only the thought of the depressing neon lights and terrible beats that had made Julia fill her water bottle and hail a cab.

  And she was glad she did.

  The view from Brazil emphasized the panorama of the river, crowned by the thundering Devil’s Throat. A walkway extended out over the river, and from there the waterfalls looked like slices of white through the lush green trees, piling one behind the other in a never-ending stream. Wringing water from her hair from the spray, the roar of the world in her veins, the rest of her life felt like a far-away dream. It was hard to imagine ever going back to Chicago, bundling up in warm layers, sliding on the ice, surrounding herself with stacks of papers at work, at home, in her bag, constantly reminding her of all she had to do.

  And, okay, there was another truth, too. “It was also a little sad,” she finally admitted, and gave Blake a shrug as though apologizing for breaking the agreement where they both went their separate ways and neither one cared.

  But he had broken it first, by getting on the bus. And then he broke it again, when he gently grazed his lips to her forehead.

  “Sad is watching your ride to Argentina pull up.”

  “That doesn’t sound bad.”

  “And then watching it pull away while you’re still stuck on your ass in the station.”

  “I think the word you’re looking for is pathetic,” she joked.

  “I went to the roadside market that stretches across the border into Paraguay, a hundred and four degrees on the road in the sun and everyone’s trying to sell you broken radios from 1993 and refrigerator parts and hashish and, I don’t know, probably a child if you wanted. There’s no law enforcement there.”

  “Another word: depressing. Aren’t you the writer? I should get you a thesaurus.”

  “I thought that I could wander around by myself until I passed out from heat stroke and no one would find me or know who I was.”

  “They’d see your passport.”

  “I went back to the hostel to leave it in the safe.”

  “Then yeah, that’s a lousy way to bite the dust.”

  “That’s what I figured. So I came back to the station and cashed in my ticket for the bus coming here.”

  “Rio with Julia: Better than Roadside Death.”

  “It has a certain ring.”

  “Thanks. But you were almost late,” she said. “You’re lucky the bus stopped for you.”

  “It was a risk,” he said. “But a good friend once told me that everything’s a chance.”

  “Everything?”

  “Something like that.”

  She thought it over. “I wasn’t planning on coming to the falls in the first place,” she said.

  “But you’re glad you did.”

  Julia frowned. “How would you know?”

  “Your eyes,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I told you they give everything away.”

  “What am I thinking now?”

  He leaned in close, peering at her in mock concentration. “That you’re so lucky to have crossed paths with this dead sexy Australian guy.”

  “Don’t quit your day job,” she snorted in his face. “Your mind reading skills need some work.”

  But still, as the ride wore on and the bus lulled them with its steady motion, she found herself resting her head on his shoulder. His hand stroked her hair, a sort of absent-minded reflex. Like he was reassuring himself that she was there leaning against him, her fingers idly tracing the contours of his stomach, trying to remember this is real, this is real with each strike of her heart.

  “I thought maybe I wasn’t going to find you,” he whispered in the dark.

  “When?”

  “When I got on the bus and didn’t see you anywhere. The best views are in the front, through the windshield, but you weren’t there.”

  “It’s nighttime,” she said. “I wanted to rest.”

  “And here I thought it was because all over the world, the cool kids universally know to sit in the back of the bus. How do they figure that out? Is there some code that’s implanted in everyone’s brain when they turn thirteen?”

  Julia didn’t know. She’d never been the cool kid. She and Liz always sat together when they took the bus to school, too engrossed in their own world to care what anyone else was doing.

  Until Liz decided she wanted to know the secrets of the boys who clustered in the back of the bus, behind the bleachers, under the stairwell after the tinny echo of the last bell faded through the halls. Julia had hovered on the outskirts of those cliques. “Somewhere in the middle of the bus” was how she would have described herself. Neither cool nor uncool. Neither here nor there. She’d gone to the back because she’d wanted to be alone, and now she was grateful for the cocoon of silence that covered both of them as the night rushed past. Even if she didn’t understand everything that was happening with Blake, she wanted him here, if only for this moment. For the time that she had.

  The bus system in Brazil was well established and the ride surprisingly comfortable. It wasn’t crowded for the overnight and the seats were spacious, with plenty of legroom between each row. They reclined far enough that it was possible to get a decent night’s sleep without feeling packed in like a sardine. And the sch
eduled stops along the way offered the chance to walk around and see the countryside, which kept the bus cleaner, too. Julia thought Greyhound could learn a few tricks.

  “Are you comfortable?” Blake asked. Julia nodded against him. The lights were off in the bus and everything was quiet except for the sound of the engine and the subtle snores of the people in the front, already nodding off. He pulled up a blanket to cover them and Julia lay against him, trying to sleep.

  But despite the rocking of the bus and the soothing, quiet sounds of nighttime rolling by, it was impossible to doze off. It was too weird, this whole rollercoaster twisting inside her. She had no idea what to expect in Rio or what she and Blake were going to do the whole time. She’d barely been able to think about what she was going to do there on her own, telling herself she’d take it one step at a time. What if, without the rest of the group around them, they didn’t have anything to talk about? What if they got tired of each other after the first day and then she was left alone yet again? What if Blake decided he’d made a mistake in coming with her? What if she was making a mistake in spending any more time with him at all?

  He kissed her forehead, as though to quiet her thoughts, and as if on instinct her lips searched his. The first kiss was tentative. Then searching. Then it was too much and Blake groaned.

  “You’re not supposed to be able to do this to me,” he whispered, shifting in his seat.

  “I didn’t know that I came with a rulebook,” Julia said, and then had to laugh at herself. If anyone followed the rules, it was her.

  And she was pretty sure that her rulebook didn’t say “get ditched by your fling and then fall back into his arms on an overnight bus of all places.” The thought made her face burn. What would people say if they knew?

  But what people? Who was she living for?

  No one else was in her shoes. They weren’t hurtling through the Brazilian countryside at night, feeling the press of a warm body and making absolutely zero plans for what came next. It was scary to think that there weren’t any right answers here.