THE FALL

by Marie Force

  Ted took a long swig from his beer and forced it past the huge lump that formed in his throat as the dazzling array of implications began to set in. Smitty's new girlfriend. His best friend's girlfriend. Could he really be that much of a cliché? Clearing his throat, he said, "Anyway, enough about me. Smitty's been telling us about you for weeks. How did he finally convince you to come to Newport?"

  "I've been working on a big project and just finished it, so I'm free and clear for a while."

  "What do you do?" He wanted to know everything about her.

  "I'm a freelance writer in New York City. I just did a promotional piece for the convention and visitor's bureau. The money was great, but by the time it was done, I was ready to tear my hair out." She paused, looking almost stricken. "I'm sorry."

  Confused, Ted asked, "About what?"

  "I can't believe I'm complaining about my work to you. It sounds so trivial next to yours."

  "Don't say that. It's not trivial."

  "Still … what you do is so important."

  "I'm envious of your writing talent. I always wished I was better at it."

  "Obviously you were better at other things. Where'd you go to school?"

  "Princeton undergrad with all of these guys," he said, gesturing to the house, "and medical school at Duke. The other Drs. Duffy were not at all happy that I refused to even apply to Harvard Medical School, the family alma mater."

  "A little show of independence?" she asked, her eyes twinkling with amusement.

  "Exactly. Where did you go?"

  "NYU undergrad, Columbia School of Journalism for graduate school."

  "Did you ever work as a reporter?"

  She nodded. "Six years at the Times."

  "Wow. Not just any paper, but the paper."

  "It was fun and exciting and utterly exhausting."

  "Why did you leave?"

  "I was getting married and knew the all-consuming life of a reporter wasn't conducive to the direction my personal life was taking, so I quit. Then my fiancé got cold feet, the wedding was canceled, and I've been freelancing ever since."

  Ted winced, wishing harm on a man he'd never met for the pain he'd caused her. "I'm sorry."

  "Wasn't meant to be, I guess," she said with a shrug.

  "Smitty said he met you through Elise." Why couldn't I have met her first? Why?

  "That's right. Her sister is my former roommate, and we all still run around together. I usually hate fix-ups, but this time I was glad I went. He makes me laugh harder than anyone ever has."

  Ted chuckled when he wanted to cry. "That's Smitty. He hasn't changed one bit in the twenty years I've known him. He still conks out early when he drinks during the day."

  She laughed. "Yes, he does. Well, I should get to bed. It was good talking to you. I'm sorry again about your patient."

  Don't go! Not yet! Don't get into bed with another man. Please… "Thanks for letting me vent."

  "It was my pleasure," she said on her way into his room to go downstairs. With a glance back over her shoulder, she said, "Good night, Ted."

  "Night."

  He watched her go and then moaned as he let his head drop to his chest. "Oh my God."

  * * *

  Ted tossed and turned for most of the night before slipping into restless sleep around dawn. Groggy and disoriented when he awoke at ten, he dragged himself out of bed. All at once, he remembered meeting Caroline on the deck the night before. His stomach fluttered with nerves and anticipation. And fear.

  Knowing she was downstairs, no doubt having breakfast with Smitty and the rest of their friends, Ted was filled with the kind of fear he had seldom experienced. How would he ever hide his immediate and overwhelming reaction to her from the people who knew him best?

  But maybe what happened the night before was nothing more than the emotion of the day catching up to him. Losing Joey had been a tough blow. Perhaps he'd mistaken his attraction to Caroline for something it wasn't. He had probably experienced a delayed reaction to the grief. She'd been nice to him. Nothing more to it than that. If he'd been in his usual state of mind, he wouldn't have felt the way he had.

  Determined to test his theory, he dressed in running clothes, checked his cell phone for messages, and gave his pager a quick look to make sure the hospital wasn't trying to reach him before he forced himself down the stairs.

  "Morning," he said.

  He was greeted by grumbles from the table where Chip, Elise, Parker, and Caroline nursed mugs of coffee and apparently a few hangovers.

  Chip's brown eyes were bloodshot, and his curly brown hair stood on end. Parker looked only slightly better—at least his dark hair had been combed and his blue eyes weren't quite as bloody as Chip's. Elise, as always, could have just stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine.

  And Caroline… Oh, Caroline. She was even more gorgeous than she'd been in the moonlight. Her pale blond hair, which had seemed short in the dark, was actually long, and her eyes were a startling shade of green with flecks of gold.

  As their eyes met and held, he knew that nothing he'd felt on the deck the night before had been a fluke. He'd somehow managed to fall hard for his best friend's girlfriend during a thirty-minute conversation. Hell, who was he kidding? He had fallen for her the very instant he first saw her. The discovery made him want to run, to flee the house full of friends who meant more to him than life itself.

  "Hungry, Duff?" Smitty asked from the stove where he fried eggs and something unidentifiable.

  Clearing his throat and taking a deep breath, Ted reached for the carton of orange juice and poured a glass. Then he leaned around the towering Smitty to peer into the frying pan. "What the hell is that?"

  "Chourico," Smitty said with a big smile on his round face. He was six-foot-four with dark hair, dark eyes, a booming voice, and an even larger presence. "You've had it before. It's a local specialty—Portuguese sausage."

  Ted turned up his nose. "There's no way you got me to eat that."

  "He's the health nut," Smitty said to Caroline. "We only put up with him because he attracts girls like honey attracts bees."

  Ted bopped his friend on the head. "Shut up."

  "Did you meet my Caroline?" Smitty asked Ted.

  Ted's heart hammered in his chest. "Last night." He made a supreme effort to keep his tone light and teasing. "While you were snoring your ass off she agreed to run away and marry me."

  Smitty lunged for Ted, who deftly dodged him, but in the fracas an empty metal bowl clanged to the tile floor.

  Chip groaned and dropped his head into his hands. "Not so loud, you guys."

  Elise got up to fill a bag with ice and put it on Chip's aching head.

  He looked up at her with gratitude, and she leaned in to kiss him.

  "Who's running today?" Ted asked.

  Chip groaned.

  "That's one 'no'," Ted said with a smile.

  "Count me out," Parker said. "And don't let me go out with him again tonight." He nodded his head toward Chip. "I can't keep up with him."

  "No one can," Elise said. "I don't know why we try."

  "You should've followed my stellar example and gotten a good night's sleep," Smitty said to guffaws from the others.

  "So then you're running?" Ted asked, raising an amused eyebrow at Smitty.

  "Fuck no. Who'll feed these people if I leave?"

  "Hey, Duff," Parker said. "How's Joey doing?"

  Ted's smile faded as he shook his head. "We lost him yesterday."

  "Oh, God," Parker said. "I'm sorry, man."

  Elise got up to hug Ted. "Me, too."

  "Thanks."

  Smitty enveloped Ted in a one-armed bear hug, saying quietly, "You gave him years he wouldn't have had otherwise." In a gesture typical of Smitty, he kissed the top of Ted's head.

  Their support overwhelmed him.

  "Are you okay?" Chip asked.

  With a glance at Caroline, Ted said, "Yeah, I will be. I keep telling myself I'm not going to get so involve
d, but then I always do."

  "You wouldn't be you if you didn't," Parker said.

  Ted nodded to Parker with appreciation. "So," he said, clearing the emotion from his throat, "am I running alone?"

  "How far do you go?" Caroline asked.

  Smitty laughed. "You don't want to go with him, sweetheart. He's a machine."

  "Compared to you, my grandmother's a machine," Ted said, and the others howled with laughter, providing a welcome distraction as Ted tried to process the idea of taking a friendly run with Caroline. He didn't know what he wanted more—for her to come with him or for her not to.

  Smitty faked offense and returned his attention to the stove.

  "Three or four miles," Ted said in answer to Caroline's question.

  "I'll go," she said.

  "Traitor," Smitty mumbled.

  "Elise? You gonna let me down?" Ted wanted to beg her to join them so he wouldn't be alone with Caroline.

  "I'm afraid so, Duff. I don't have the juice this week. Caroline can take my place."

  "I guess it's just us," Ted said to Caroline, swallowing hard.

  "Give me ten minutes," she said on her way upstairs.

  "What are we doing today?" Ted asked.

  "The vote was for the beach," Parker said. "Do you want your surfboard? I'll throw it in Chip's truck for you."

  "Sure. Thanks."

  "My dad's leaving the boat for us if we want it tomorrow," Parker said.

  "Nice," Smitty said. "Sign me up."

  "If we leave early, we can sail out to Block Island for lunch," Parker added. "But I'll let you New Yorkers decide if you have time for that. You've got the longer ride home."

  Smitty raised a hand in protest. "I refuse to talk about Sunday night on Saturday morning."

  Chip grunted in agreement.

  Since they were all accustomed to Smitty's weekend rules, Parker just smiled. "We can talk about it tomorrow."

  Chapter 3

  Ted was surprised to discover Caroline could more than keep up with him as they settled into a steady pace on Harrison Avenue. On the way into the state park at Fort Adams, Ted pointed out Hammersmith Farm, the summer White House during the Kennedy Administration. All the while, he tried to figure out why this woman—and not any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of others he had known in his life—had stolen his heart. Why did it have to be her? Why did it have to be someone his beloved friend, who had led a hard-luck life, was clearly taken with?

  He mulled over these and many other questions while they jogged to the far end of the Revolutionary War-era fort and circled around to a well-worn path on the Narragansett Bay side of the tan brick fort that formed one side of the entrance to Newport Harbor. The bay was already filled with boaters enjoying the summer day.

  "I'm impressed," Ted said.

  "With?"

  "I rarely run with anyone who can keep up with me."

  She laughed. "A little full of yourself, aren't you?"

  "I guess that did sound kind of arrogant, but I run every day, so I guess I've earned it. It's the one thing I make sure I do."

  "Me, too. I keep trying to get Smitty to go with me, but he hates to run."

  "He always has, but he kicks ass at football."

  "I can picture that," she said. "Did you play sports in school?"

  "Just club soccer and intramural baseball at Princeton, but I've always been a runner. I did cross country in high school. How about you?"

  "Field hockey and lacrosse."

  They moved in companionable silence for several minutes before Ted asked, "So what's your next project? You said you just finished something big, right?"

  She nodded. "I'm going to take a break for a couple of months."

  He wanted to stop her on the path, tell her how he felt, and beg her to run away with him. They'd go somewhere that no one knew them. He'd give up everything—his life, his friends, his work, his family—if only she'd agree to go with him. Startled by that realization and the knowledge that he'd do it in a second if it meant he could have her, he forced himself to refocus on the conversation. "Any special plans?"

  She glanced over at him, hesitating. "Sort of. I haven't said too much about it to anyone in case it doesn't happen."

  "Okay, now I'm dying of curiosity."

  "And I'm dying to tell someone," she confessed.

  Oh how he wanted to be the one she told all her secrets to. "Perfect," he said with a grin.

  "Well, I'm thinking about…"

  Ted saw her stumble before she fell and was unable to stop himself in time to grab her.

  "Oh," she moaned, cradling the ankle that had twisted violently in a small grass-covered hole on the path. The knee on her other leg was bleeding.

  Ted squatted down beside her. "Let me take a look."

  Her face was pinched with pain and all the color had drained from her cheeks. "Hang on a sec," she said, trying to catch her breath. "Okay. Go ahead."

  Ted put a comforting arm around her shoulders and untied her running shoe.

  She winced when he eased the sock over her already swollen ankle. "Oh, that hurts!" she cried as he did a perfunctory exam.

  "I can't tell if it's broken without an X-ray, but if it isn't, it's a bad sprain." He tucked the sock into her shoe and handed it to her before he lifted her into his arms.

  She sucked in a deep breath when her cut knee bent around his arm. "What are you doing? You can't carry me."

  "Sure I can." He tried not to notice how perfect she felt in his arms. "You're light as a feather."

  Her smile was weak as her arms encircled his neck. "Whose big idea was it to leave the phones at home?"

  Ted had to remind himself to breathe as her scent surrounded him. "I never run with a phone or a pager." He carried her back the way they had come. "It's the one hour of every day I'm completely unreachable. Keeps me sane."

  "I hope we can borrow a phone when we get back to the parking lot," she said, biting her bottom lip.

  "Don't worry about it. I'll figure something out."

  Caroline rested her head on his shoulder, probably because it was easier than holding it up.

  Her soft, fragrant hair brushed against his cheek. "How you doing?" he asked.

  "Hurts," she whispered.

  "I know."

  "Are you okay? I'm too heavy for you to carry me this far."

  "I just told you what a big jock I am," he joked. "You're insulting me."

  "Will they know where to look if we don't come back?"

  "Not really. I kind of mix it up every weekend. Elise usually runs with me, but I don't go this far with her."

  "Sorry to mess up your run."

  "I'm sorry you're hurt."

  When they reached the parking lot, Ted eased her onto a bench. "Hang on for just a second while I find a phone, okay?"

  She nodded as she stretched her aching ankle out in front of her.

  Ted found a young family eating a picnic at one of the nearby tables, explained the situation, and asked if they had a cell phone he could borrow. The husband handed Ted his phone while the wife took a bag of ice over to Caroline to put on her ankle. As Ted dialed the house and then Smitty's cell phone, he watched Caroline nod with gratitude to the woman who had returned with a wet napkin for her cut knee.

  "Did you reach your friends?" the man asked.

  "No answer anywhere." Ted rubbed the stubble on his face as he tried to think of what to do next.

  "Can I give you guys a lift somewhere?"

  "Would you mind? Our house isn't far from here."

  "Of course not." After telling his wife he would be right back, the man pointed Ted to his car.

  Ted carried Caroline and the bag of ice to the backseat of the SUV and gave their new friend directions to the house.

  She stretched her injured legs out in front of her and leaned back against Ted with a sigh.

  "I haven't forgotten the secret you were about to tell me when this happened," he whispered, hoping to get her mind off the
pain.

  "I'll get back to you on that."

  "I'll hold you to it." He told himself that reaching for her hand was a gesture of comfort and not capitulation to the overwhelming desire to touch her. Reminding himself yet again that she was Smitty's girlfriend, he reluctantly pulled back when her fragrant ponytail brushed against his face.

  The car hit a bump, and she squeezed Ted's hand in a reflexive response to the pain.

  "Almost there," he said.

  At the house, they thanked the man who had driven them. Ted lifted her out of the SUV and deposited her in the passenger seat of his car.

  "Where are we going?"

  "To the E.R. You need to get that ankle checked."

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. "I don't want to."

  "Doctor's orders," he said with an empathetic smile as he fought the urge to brush the tears off her cheeks. "Let me just run inside and leave a note for the others. I'll be right back, okay?"

  She wiped her eyes and nodded.

  "Keep the ice on it."

  Inside, he found a note from Smitty: "We went to the store to get stuff for lunch. Meet us at the beach."

  Ted ran upstairs to grab his phone, keys, and a clean T-shirt.

  "They're already at the beach, which is why I couldn't reach them," he told Caroline when he returned to the car. "There's no signal out there."

  "Smitty didn't wait for me?" she asked with annoyance.

  "He went to the store to get lunch and then to the beach. He knew you were in good hands." Ted felt a stab of guilt as he said the words. Maybe she wasn't in such good hands, but judging by her pained expression, she didn't care at the moment.

  "Well, I guess that's okay then." She leaned back against the headrest with her eyes closed as Ted drove them to the emergency room at Newport Hospital. On the way, he left messages for his friends to let them know where they were.

  "Do you think they'll get the message?"

  "One of them will check in with me when we don't show up, so don't worry."