Be My Downfall

by Lyla Payne

  She let go and picked her underwear up on the floor, studying them for a second before shrugging. “I can’t wear them now. They need to dry.”

  I laughed at the way she went from sexy as fuck to totally random with a slight tendency to overshare in the space of five minutes. “Well, I’m not putting mine on, either.”

  I did put my pants back on while she straightened her dress, then we both washed our hands and tried our best to put our sex hair back in place before leaving the bathroom. It was all for naught, because Emilie and Q were both awake and busted us before we could stuff the discarded underwear into our bags.

  “Aw, c’mon.” Quinn groaned. “The bathroom is going to smell like sex and I have to pee!”

  Emilie cracked up first, which gave me permission to join her. The pilot came on and promised we’d be on the ground in less than twenty minutes, so Quinn decided he could hold it.

  “You know, that can cause permanent kidney damage.” Kennedy’s smile was wicked.

  I’d never seen her tease anyone except me—hell, she pretty much never smiled around other people. For some reason, it fed the hesitant sprout of hope in my chest.

  “I think I’ll chance it. You two better hope they’ve cleaned this plane since the last time Em and I took a trip.”

  “Quinn! Jeez.” Em laughed, obviously neither embarrassed nor angry about the fact that the two of them had a more-than-healthy sex life. Like everyone who lived at the SEA house after they’d finally gotten together didn’t know that already.

  The wheels touched down a few minutes sooner than promised, and a car Sam had sent whisked all four of us straight to the tennis center. Kennedy and I stayed behind in the backseat alone so we could put on fresh underclothes, then the four of us made our way to the player’s box in the grandstand. We went straight there since Sam’s match started in ten minutes, and Quinn spent the entire time glad-handing pretty much every person we came across. They all wanted to know how he was doing, what was going on with the business, and his thoughts on the current players.

  He answered them all with a magnanimous smile, his hand firmly around Emilie’s, so different from the Quinn Rowland I’d met when we’d started at Whitman. That Quinn had been pissed off at the world and taking out his anger on whoever happened to be within reach. Now he seemed comfortable in his own skin, happy with the future he saw with Emilie and not the one he’d thought he’d lost when he blew out that knee.

  It was nice. I wished we could be better friends, actually. Maybe I would ask him for advice about Kennedy. They had more in common that he probably realized, even though Quinn hadn’t had a drinking problem. I’d heard he’d struggled with drugs for a while.

  Sam and his opponent, a tall Swede, came out for the coin toss and the four of us settled in the back of his box. The first couple rows, from what I could tell, were filled with Sam’s parents, coaches, trainers, and whoever else it took to run a pro-tennis career these days.

  Kennedy was quiet through the first set, but we were all focused on the match, so I tried not to think too much about it. It was hard. I’d told a girl I thought I was falling in love with her for the first time in my life, and she hadn’t responded. I was putting on a pretty good face, I thought, but my insides were making me sick with anxiety.

  Quinn and Emilie left between sets when a P.A. came down from the commentator’s booth and asked if he’d come up for an interview. He hadn’t wanted to, but Em had convinced him with the reminder that it was a good chance to plug the French Open coverage in a few weeks.

  I leaned over to Kennedy when they left, pressing a kiss to her hot shoulder. “You okay? You’re quiet.”

  “I’m good,” she whispered back with an unconvincing smile.

  My nausea tripled. “Are you freaking out about what I said in the bathroom?”

  “Kind of.” She reached out and grabbed my hand so hard her knuckles turned white. “It’s not because of the feelings, Wright. Because I care about you, too. I’m just wondering if that means being with you is...right.”

  Cold fear grabbed the back of my neck. I took deep breaths and rubbed circles on her thumb until her fingers relaxed a little bit. There were no good words. She was talking about her, not me. I’d done all I could do by laying it out there for her. I couldn’t make her comfortable with it.

  “You being here makes me happy, strawberry. I know we’ve got a long way to go, and we haven’t even discussed what we are, really. But I’m not sorry you know where I stand.”

  “I make you happy as long as I pretend things are fine,” she breathed, the air between us changing. It had been charged this entire match, but now it ignited.

  Anger joined my worry. “I don’t want you to pretend at all. I want you to share how you’re feeling, even if you think it’s gross or wrong or stupid or totally fucked up. You don’t have to hide from me.”

  “You only say that because you have no idea how fucked up I really am.”

  “I don’t care. I want all of your little fucked up ass. It’s real. You’re real, and the feelings between us are too.”

  “Okay, Wright.” Her lips drew tight against her teeth, the words flung at me like a knife. She was throwing up her protective barriers, but I didn’t know why.

  Quinn and Emilie came back about ten minutes later, and I caught them exchanging a glance after sitting with us for a couple of minutes. They could feel the tension, so thick it was hard for me to see straight. It rose up and clouded the air like heat off the August pavement.

  Kennedy got up when the second set ended, mumbling something about the bathroom and getting a soda, and once she’d left, all the air whooshed out of my body.

  “What the hell happened while we were gone? I’m getting some kind of nervous rash sitting next to you two.” Quinn asked like he really wanted to know, and whether or not he did, I needed someone to talk to.

  Even if he didn’t want to be friends, Em would help me.

  “I’m honestly not sure. I kind of…told her how I feel on the plane. She seemed fine at the time but now she’s freaking out.”

  “Oh, Toby. You don’t tell a girl you love her right after you have sex. We know your brains aren’t really working yet,” Em sighed.

  “I didn’t tell her I loved her. I told her I think I’m falling in love with her.”

  “Yeah, that’s not really different.” Em rolled her eyes. “Tell me exactly what she said.”

  “She didn’t say anything then, but just now I asked her what was wrong and whether or not I’d freaked her out, and she said yes. Because she cares about me and maybe that means she shouldn’t be with me at all.” The misery in my own voice made me feel like a whiny douchebag. I sounded like a goddamn emo character in some teenage reality show about to go sit on the floor of the shower and bawl.

  “You want to take this one, hon?” Emilie raised her eyebrows at Quinn, who had been silent but definitely listening.

  He rubbed the back of his neck and checked to make sure play hadn’t resumed. We weren’t supposed to talk during the match at all, really, but this was a small tournament and one of the outside courts, and they were still on a changeover.

  I took my cue from Quinn and kept my eyes on the court, my face forward, while I waited for some advice from the guy who had traded pro tennis for being a pro asshole, then traded that for being a pro boyfriend.

  “Has she been in this whole time? On this thing with you? Or…?”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but the comment she’d made a couple of times about not being ready bubbled past my panic and to the surface. “She said a couple of times that she didn’t think she was ready for this, but she would try.”

  I saw him nod from the corner of my eye, his lips pulled down into a frown.

  “Yeah. Okay. So, she’s thinking you guys are attracted to each other, and she trusts you enough to stick around, but now there are real feelings involved and she’s freaking out.” He glanced at Emilie with an endearing expression of r
apture. “I was there. We started out with this crazy attraction, but the more walls she broke down, the harder it was to stop myself from caring about her. And I knew that if I really cared I would stay the fuck away, because I was a terrible person.”

  “So, she’s pushing me away.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. She’s trying to figure it out. Whether she’s any more ready than she was when this whole thing started. Whether she wants to be selfish and stay, even knowing it might not be the best thing for you.”

  “Can I help?” It was hard to get words out around the strangling dread.

  “I don’t know. As much as I can pretend to understand her thoughts, I don’t know what she’s feeling. Emilie’s insistence on coming back no matter how hard I pushed worked because I needed something to make me want to change. If Kennedy’s not ready to change, or doesn’t want to, then nothing you do is going to make a difference.” He shot me a quick look. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It helps to hear it somewhere except in my head.”

  “For what it’s worth, Toby, I think she’s different. Quieter, but also quicker to smile. Less like she’s faking it, maybe.” Emilie reached out and squeezed my hand. “Don’t lose faith. But don’t put your life on hold for her. You’ll have a future whether she decides she wants to be a part of it or not, so don’t forget about you.”

  Emilie’s leaving Quinn and spending the summer in New York had been what convinced me of the truth of their love, and reinforced that her taking his shit proved anything but weakness. She had been the strong one the whole time, carrying the desire for her own life, and Quinn’s, and the hope that one day those two would collide.

  I had to do that. I had to be as strong as Emilie, because right now Kennedy was still on the fence about what she saw in the future, but I wasn’t. I wanted to work in Hollywood, and I wanted to write, and yeah, I wanted Kennedy at my side and in my bed.

  But I wanted a life for her, too, whether it included me or not. I would believe in it until she could, too. Admitting that it might never happen was a challenge for another day.

  Kennedy returned, the sun hitting her hair and turning it red on her way down the steps. A light breeze fluttered the hem of her dress, lifting it higher on her thigh and reminding me of how it had been bunched around her waist a few hours ago, and that well inside me refilled and surged, pooling in my chest. When she sat down, carefully avoiding my eye, I pulled her face to mine and planted a kiss on her mouth, letting my tongue slide over her bottom lip until I earned a catch in her breath.

  She raised an eyebrow in a silent question when I pulled back, but I just smiled and winked. The four of us watched the remainder of the match in silence, like proper tennis fans, then we followed Quinn to the locker rooms to wait for Sam. He emerged faster than I would have predicted, dressed in warmups, his brown hair damp from the shower.

  His welcoming grin faded as his eyes slid from face to face, ending with Kennedy. “Where’s Blair?”

  Quinn grinned and clapped his old friend on the shoulder. “Not interested, man. First time for everything.”

  Sam shook off his apparent disappointment in a breath, making me wonder how genuine his desire to get to Blair was, and how much of it was about securing a tough conquest. All guys liked to prove they could snag a hard-to-get occasionally, me included.

  That didn’t include Kennedy. Hard-to-get and ambivalent about being gotten were two different things.

  While Quinn and Emilie caught up with Sam, Kennedy’s edge seemed to dull. Instead of standing stiffly a few inches away, she relaxed, slinking closer to me. I wondered if she even noticed, or if it had become more of a habit during the past five or so weeks. We’d spent so much time together that it seemed weird not to call her my girlfriend, when my whole life it had been using that word that had seemed impossible.

  Sam paused, sticking a hand out to me. I shook it and thanked him for the tickets, then he turned to Kennedy. “I’m sorry, red, but I’ve forgotten your name. Didn’t realize the two of you were a couple.”

  She smiled and stuck out her hand. “It’s Kennedy. And we weren’t.”

  “Weren’t, meaning you are now?” He quirked a flirtatious smile at her, dimples flashing. “Asking for a friend.”

  I was torn between rolling my eyes and shaving off his eyebrows while he slept.

  Kennedy did roll her eyes, which made me feel something like pride.

  “Yeah, we are.” Her hand slid into mine and she leaned into my side.

  The gorgeous smell of her, only made sexier by an afternoon in the sun, wrapped around me and for a few minutes, I felt sure that everything was going to be fine.

  One Year Ago

  “How are you feeling, Kennedy?” The therapist watched carefully, with eyes like a hawk except blue, even though the question and the answer hadn’t changed in over three years.

  “I don’t feel anything, but I’m doing fine.”

  “Are you excited about going away to Whitman?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t really matter what I do with my life, does it? I’m not supposed to be here. I’m biding time until I get to leave. That’s it.”

  The therapist closed her eyes, but instead of praying the way Grandmother always had when the girl’s voice turned sassy, she suspected the therapist counted to ten.

  “Then why go?”

  “Why not go? The money’s there, my grandmother is never going to stop trying to starve the devil out of me, and I can party unsupervised. At least until they kick me out.”

  “What do you plan to major in?”

  “I plan to take the classes I can ace without lifting a finger. That should work for at least a year.”

  “It’s okay to enjoy your life. Your parents loved you—they would want you to be happy. To take the gift you were given when you walked away from that accident and make it count.”

  “You didn’t even know my parents.”

  “I’ve done enough homework to feel certain that you were a loved little girl.”

  Maybe the girl had been loved once, but not anymore. Those memories had faded so far behind the iron curtain now that they couldn’t be coaxed closer without extreme measures. She still drank to glimpse the girl she had been from the corners of her eyes. She still craved the intense, harsh pain that reminded her she was alive—and that she mourned. But if she didn’t look at the past, it didn’t hurt. She didn’t have to face the fact that things had once been good.

  Being excited about the future meant admitting she was glad to be alive even though they were dead.

  That somehow her life had mattered more than all three of theirs put together, and she could enjoy boys and sex and college and math and traveling without knowing what her parents would think, what their faces would have looked like at her graduation, on her wedding day. What could that mean, other than she hadn’t loved them at all?

  Grandmother had been wrong about many things—including the viability of oatmeal as an edible food—but she and the girl had always agreed on one thing.

  It was not okay for the girl to be happy on her own. Not ever.

  Chapter 21

  We made it to May without another slipup on Kennedy’s part, not since the night we’d argued after the baseball game, but we also hadn’t had another breakthrough. She was exempt from three of her finals because she had hundred percents in the class. Her other two classes were going to ruin her perfect G.P.A., because the profs saved 10 percent of the grade for rewarding attendance, but she promised to sit for the finals, anyway.

  It was the Thursday before finals week, and I’d been busy with class or study groups for four days straight. Since hanging out with Quinn and Emilie in Alabama we’d spent a little more time with other people, catching a movie with Audra and some dumbass I felt sure her brother would not approve of, and seeing Ruby’s latest play with a group of people. We still did better alone, and I’d promised Kennedy we’d put away all th
e books tonight and chill, just the two of us.

  When I got back to the room and dropped my bag, she was asleep in one of my T-shirts on top of the covers, thin legs splayed enough for me to catch sight of a scrap of light pink lace. Fatigue won out over the flare of lust when I climbed in beside her, though, so I curled around her body. In sleep, Kennedy had no defenses. Her body found mine like we were opposite ends of a magnet, ass pressing into my crotch and back molding to my chest.

  I wrapped my arms around her waist and held her tight, tempted briefly by the fact that she wore no bra and her heavy breast fell against my hand. Instead of waking her up, I shifted so it dropped into my palm, then breathed her in and closed my eyes.

  I woke up with her mouth on mine, her teeth nibbling my bottom lip. I kissed her back, moving my hands under her shirt and up her smooth back, then pulled away and smiled. “Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself.” The huskiness of her voice and the lust in her eyes shot straight to my groin.

  When she felt me shift against her belly, the smile grew and she slipped a hand between us, teasing me with gentle thumb swipes. I kissed her again, not worried about nasty breath or the fact that I hadn’t showered today, or anything but reveling in her.

  Her boobs filled my hands, and watching her eyes roll back in her head when I lavished attention on them had become one of my favorite pastimes. I could play with them for hours just to watch the way it made her feel, and when I lowered my lips to let them take over for my fingers, her hands fisted in my hair.

  “You’re deep in me, too, Wright,” she gasped, pulling my face back to hers.

  “Not yet, strawberry,” I whispered into her lips.

  She shook her head, breaking the kiss, and the tears in her eyes stopped the progress my hand was making toward her ass. I hadn’t seen tears for weeks.

  “I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about what you said in the bathroom on the airplane. About how you felt me digging deeper every day. I liked you that first day, when you drove me home and didn’t ask any questions or try to sleep with me. I kissed you on the ski slope because I couldn’t stand not knowing what you tasted like for another minute.” She bit her lip, stalling the already halting words, but I didn’t move or speak, afraid of scaring them off all together. “You taste good, and I had fun just talking to you—on the plane and at the dance. Then we slept together and I lost my shit, but again, you handled it. The sex was amazing. I couldn’t believe the things I told you at that halfway house. Shit. And you kept trying when I ignored you, and when I needed help you gave it to me, and you didn’t leave. Every time, every one of those moments, sank you deeper under my skin. I’m falling in love with you, too, Wright. It’s just happening before I’m ready.”