How to Fall

by Rebecca Brooks

  Yeah, Kelley, he’d wanted to ask her. When exactly did this all “click”?

  But there was no way to know. Blake still wondered how much of her feelings for him had ever been real.

  But maybe they had all three been acting, and he’d been pretending as much as she and Liam were. J.B. Williams. Just who did he think he was?

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Julia said, and Blake was startled out of the downward spiral his mind was on. She slipped her hand in his as they walked down the winding side streets where the beach turned and the mountains began.

  It wasn’t a question, though. Or a request to know more. Just a comment, a murmur, like the waves that kept on nudging the shore. Just a reminder that they were still there.

  “I was thinking about Liam,” Blake admitted, steering them back toward the water. It was nice to stroll around like this, light with wine and heavy with food, admiring the way the breeze rustled through Julia’s loose hair and the hem of her skirt.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “It’s weird,” Blake said like he hadn’t heard her. “I would’ve assumed that I’d miss him, you know? But then I think about it, and it’s hard to even remember anymore why we were friends.”

  Julia nodded, letting him talk. Now that the dam had been broken and the big secret out, it was easier, somehow. And easy to talk about with someone who didn’t know the parties, didn’t know the history, and didn’t particularly care. Someone he was, in all likelihood, never going to see again.

  Maybe it was because they weren’t close that he could talk to her like this. Jamie had become a friend, but even they didn’t talk about details. It was better to pretend he didn’t know anything, so that Blake could be just a regular guy.

  “I guess I miss the idea of him more than the actual person. I miss having these people who were always my people, you know?” He paused, considering. “But I don’t need them the way that I thought I did.”

  When they got to the beach, she kicked off her sandals and he followed suit, holding them in one hand while they walked across the sand and down to the shoreline. The water came up to their ankles, still warm. When the waves retreated, the breeze on their toes was a sudden surprise in the dark.

  “Maybe it was good to let go of them,” Julia said after a pause. “Maybe they aren’t what you need anymore. Not that it was good that they made that decision for you. But, you know. In the end.”

  Blake thought about that. Everyone had tiptoed around the issue, knowing but not knowing what happened, unsure how to respond. Calling Kelley a bitch or Liam an ass wasn’t helpful, because who wanted to feel like the fool who’d sunk time and energy into such awful people? But trying to rationalize what they’d been thinking when they got together was even worse. Blake’s mother had pursed her lips and avoided the subject, only telling him when he came home after his whole world was shattered that she thought the camera lights had gone to Kelley’s head and he’d find someone better suited to him.

  Which may have been true, but at the time it felt, again, like he was the one with the problem and she the shining star absolved by the brightness she cast.

  If he hadn’t scrapped his failed project. If he hadn’t started The Everlastings. If he hadn’t thrown Kelley and Liam together in front of the camera. If he hadn’t walked in on them. If his whole life hadn’t changed.

  Then he wouldn’t be walking down the beach in Rio on this night, full of chocolate soufflé, the mountains behind him and the ocean lapping at his feet.

  And he wouldn’t have met Julia.

  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 sof
t, 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?”