Last Chance to Fall

by Kelsey Kingsley

  “How old are you now?” she asked, her cheeks pinked.

  “I’m thirty-one,” I responded, scraping my thumbnail over the label. One shred peeled away easily, and I ran my finger over the flap of thin plastic.

  “Holy crap, you haven’t eaten ice cream in six years because you’re afraid of getting a bellyache?”

  A chuckle rumbled up from my chest, hiding my embarrassment with humor. “It’s more than that. I don’t want to miss work, like I said, and I don’t want to have to change appointments if I have them. Some things are unavoidable, sure, like the stomach flu, but I don’t ever put myself willingly into a situation that could result in me being irresponsible.”

  Christ, I was talking crazy.

  But Lindsey just shrugged. Her thumb skated along the edge of her glass, circling. Tantalizing. “Oh, I get it. I really do. I, um … We’re a lot alike, I think.”

  “Elaborate?” I quirked a brow, intrigued. Playing her at her own game.

  She took a deep breath, her chest puffing out. My eyes dropped for just a second—a nanosecond really—to take in the fullness of her breasts. The way they pushed against the flimsy fabric of her shirt. The way her cleavage deepened, taunted. I fought my gaze, pulling my eyes to look back to her face. Forced myself to remain neutral, to be a gentleman, to not let her know that I had unintentionally envisioned her in the place of that stripper from the night before. Grinding against me, breasts in my face.

  Stop it, Sean.

  Thank God she started talking after what seemed like too many silent moments. “I don’t really allow myself to do much,” she said, and bit at her lower lip, carefully selecting her next words. “I, uh … I guess you could say the fear of death has inadvertently made me afraid to live.”

  My eyebrows raised at the unexpected serious turn toward mortality. “Well, now you can’t leave me hangin’ with just that. You gotta explain that a little bit.”

  She smiled coyly, dangling her secrets between her teeth. Something shifted in her eyes, something telling me that she had never told these things to another soul. I felt all at once special and terrified. I could barely carry my own truths, let alone someone else’s. A stranger’s, no less.

  I wasn’t sure I could handle how scandalous it all felt. How unruly.

  “I had a feeling you would ask,” she said, her smile never faltering. “I think I wanted you to. I think because I know you’d understand. I mean, not even Jack knows about this. Just me, and my parents.”

  The flame danced over her face, lighting and shadowing the highs and lows of her bone structure. Making pouty lips appear even fuller, deepening the hollows of her cheeks. She smiled, tipping her chin toward the valley of her chest, and if I was brave enough to reach over and gently run my thumb over the plane of her cheekbone, I would have without hesitation. To know just how smooth her skin was under my finger. To know for sure if she were made of flesh or porcelain.

  “So,” she began, tilting her head back to fix her eyes on the lantern. Speaking to it, a focal point to make the truth easier. “I’m an only child, and I thought my life was pretty great up until I was sixteen. You know, it was very, um … Very focused on me, I guess. My parents are incredibly financially stable—the rich socialite type—and having only one kid to spend their money on, you can imagine how spoiled I was. Everything I wanted, I got.”

  She stopped herself, and then turned her eyes on me. “Do you have siblings?”

  I nodded. “Two brothers.”

  “Ah, you’re lucky. That kept you grounded I bet.”

  My cheek twitched, curling one side of my lips into a lopsided smile. “Having siblings did somethin’ for me, but keepin’ me grounded … Not so sure about that.”

  Her eyes glittered in the light, sparkling comfort and warmth. “You’ll tell me about that when I’m done telling you, deal?” I nodded, because what did I have to lose?

  “Okay,” she continued, “so, while my focus had been centered entirely on me and rebelling against the expectations my parents tried to enforce on me, I didn’t know that my body was revolting against me. When I was sixteen, I found a lump in my throat and I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer.” As though she expected I’d need it, which she probably did, she allowed me a moment to react.

  I gently dragged my tongue over my lower lip, searching for my words, until I finally settled on the very bland, very careful, “Wow, I’m … I’m sorry.”

  Lindsey nodded, and then shrugged one shoulder. “It’s honestly fine. I’ve been cancer-free for thirteen years now, and there’s no sign of it coming back. Of course, it always could show up somewhere else, but …”

  She shrugged it away, shaking her head. “Anyway, the diagnosis was harder on my parents than it was on me. The prognosis had been great from the beginning, there had never been a question of life-expectancy or anything like that, but it’s still cancer, you know? Nobody likes that diagnosis. Nobody likes that word. It’s linked so closely with death, and I knew that’s immediately what my parents were thinking. They were thinking, ‘Our only kid has cancer. If this could so easily happen without us knowing, what else could happen? What else could take her away?’

  “I remember looking at them one night, after my second surgery, when my thyroid was removed. I was lying in my hospital bed, they thought I was sleeping, and they just … watched me. Like, if they even dared to look out the window I might slip away or something.” She took a sip of her drink, rubbed her fingertips over her lips. “I had this revelation that night that I had been such a selfish little bitch. I only ever thought about myself and how everything affected me. I had never once thought about how much my life affected them, and how if anything ever happened to me, they’d be alone.”

  I waited for a few beats of my increasingly loud heartbeat to pass before speaking, in case she had something else to say.

  She didn’t.

  “That’s, um …” My hand scrubbed roughly against my whiskered chin. “That’s a shite thing for a sixteen-year-old to have to realize. No kid should have to think about that.”

  Lindsey nodded, eyeballing her reflection in her drink. “I agree wholeheartedly. It is shitty, but for many people, that’s how it is. I was one of the lucky ones who got to live beyond that whole ordeal with a new outlook on life. It’s just that, instead of living my life entirely for myself, I kinda live it entirely for them now.”

  Her gaze shot up, looking ahead and then over at me. “I’ve never said that to anybody before,” she said with a gasp. “I-I mean, you know Jack? Well, of course you don’t know Jack, but my cheating ex? My parents are the reason I was with him. They set me up with their friend’s lawyer son, because they thought he’d be good for me. Never mind that I could barely stand him, or the way he would pick his teeth with his fingernails in the middle of a fancy restaurant—ugh, I really hated that. But I wanted them to be happy. I mean, just because cancer didn’t get me, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a car accident waiting for me around the corner. I’ve wanted to know that if I did die, they would at least be happy knowing that I had lived a good life.”

  Goddammit, my eyes had welled up watching her speak of her death so freely. Just listening would have been one thing. Listening would have helped me separate the words from the gorgeous woman sitting beside me. But watching her talk about something I seldom thought of as a thirty-one-year-old man, let alone a sixteen-year-old child … It had pinged at something deep and undiscovered in my chest, and I had to blink a few times to keep myself from falling apart.

  “Shite,” I said in a half-whisper, pinching the bridge of my nose, and I turned back to her. “That’s … That’s feckin’ heartbreakin’.”

  She shrugged. “It is what it is. I mean, I—”

  And then, my bravery kicked in: “Can I ask you somethin’ that might earn me a swift kick to the balls?”

  Lindsey smiled, looking up at me through long lashes. “You’re too sweet to do that to.”

  Overtaken by bashful
ness, I chuckled and pushed a hand through my hair, wishing I had brushed it a little more before stumbling into work. “I just, ehm … I just wanna know, have you considered what you’re gonna do when your parents have passed on? Like, what happens if you look back on your life and you find ya hate what you’ve done to yourself for the sake of their happiness?”

  Her jaw fell open, her eyes widened, and she laughed. That nervous kind of laugh you only let loose in an awkward situation, when you don’t know what to say.

  I regretted my words immediately. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually speak my mind like that. I just—”

  “You’re lucky I can’t kick your balls from this angle,” she said, poking me in the shoulder. The physical contact was too small, too innocent to be arousing. But still, I felt my nerve-endings buzz excitedly from the contact, and I smiled. “It’s fine. I told you my tale of woe, so you’re entitled to ask. And you know, honestly, I haven’t really thought that far ahead. I just know I kind of love when I go home and see them smiling as they ask about how things are with Jack. It’s going to kill them that we’re done …” She bit her thumbnail, chewing worriedly.

  “Ehm, he cheated on you,” I gently pointed out.

  “Oh, I know. I’m not saying it’s my fault or anything. I just don’t want to be the one to tell them we’re no longer together, you know? They loved him so much. They thought we were perfect together, but … oh well. What can you do, right?” She flashed that grin at me again. On the surface, her excitement for life and conversation left little room to believe she could be so afraid of living. So multi-faceted; a diamond smudged with dirt.

  I shrugged my response, not knowing what else to say and realizing that sometimes it was best not to say anything at all. I tipped my Guinness back, wandering away from the melancholy conversation to the voice of Eric Clapton now singing through the speakers. “Wonderful Tonight” played the soundtrack to the moment: the mood lighting, the privacy of our high-backed booth in the corner of the room. The dark romanticism of the place and the flickering candle. The gorgeous blonde to my right, busy running the tip of her finger along the rim of her glass again. Round and round in slow, fluid movements.

  Another perfect moment to reach out to her, had I known her longer. Had I known her better.

  “So, now you,” she said, pointing a finger directly at my face. “Why are you so safe? Like, what was your moment?”

  “My moment?” I laughed. “What do you mean?”

  Lindsey cocked her head, staring up to the beams running along the gabled ceiling. “Oh, you know … That defining moment that makes a person change the way they think or feel, or the way they live their life. Mine was that night, laying in the hospital bed. What’s yours?”

  “I, ah … I don’t think I really have one,” I said, shrugging, flattening my hands on the table. “It just always was, I think.” I shifted on the bench, wishing I had more room. I suddenly felt restricted, crammed into the tight space with little room for air, and feelings, and tough conversations with beautiful strangers.

  “It’s a lot easier if you just say it,” she said softly. “I would know. I mean, I’ve been a seasoned professional for, oh, three minutes now,” she joked, batting her lashes and flipping the braid over her shoulder.

  “Okay,” I said with a low chuckle, nodding once and resigning myself to being honest. “Okay, so … I have two brothers, like I said, and one of them is my twin. He’s kind of a, ehm …”

  I reconsidered the words. Wondering how to paint the picture of Ryan, even more of a stranger to her than I was. Not wanting to desecrate his name or image, while also wanting to tell the truth as I knew it. So, I started over: “You know how you have people who make the choice to be good or bad, to do the right thing or wrong thing?” Lindsey nodded fervently, immersed in the intense tone of my voice. “Well, there are also people who don’t really make the choice. It’s more of a … a gravitational pull, I guess. They aren’t inherently good or bad; they just are.

  “My twin brother and I earned the nicknames of Jekyll and Hyde when we were really young, from aunts and uncles. I don’t know if Ryan even remembers that … I mean, they don’t call us that anymore. But, I remember, and it wasn’t until I was older that I even realized what they meant when they said, ‘Oh, would ya look now, here comes Dr. Jekyll,’ or ‘Better ya watch yerselves, here comes Mr. Hyde.’”

  Lindsey held up a hand, biting her bottom lip. “Okay, I have to ask—”

  “Here we go,” I laughed, shaking my head. “The accent, right?”

  “Well, yeah … Irish?” Her eyes danced with excitement, and I nodded. “My last name is Molloy,” she said, as though an Irish surname would further tie the strings of this strange night together. “My great-grandparents were right off the boat, but my grandma and grandpa never had any kind of accent. Did you live there?”

  “Just until I was three months old,” I explained, scratching the back of my neck. “But Mam’s entire family had moved here shortly before Ryan and I were born, and my parents waited until the two of us were just a little older to travel over. They’re all very close-knit, so we were more exposed to the accent than anything else growin’ up.”

  “I’m picturing this big Irish commune,” she said with a light giggle.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t unlike one,” I laughed with her. “Over the years, they’ve kind of scattered around the country, some moved back to Ireland, but for a time, the O’Connells had damn near taken over the south shore of Connecticut.”

  Lindsey smiled, tipping her head back just a bit. Taking me in. “That’s your mom’s maiden name?”

  “Yeah, but I’m a Kinney,” and why I had so freely offered up all that information, I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t even blame the influence of booze or peer pressure. It was pure freewill. Freedom—that’s what being with her felt like, even in that hour and a half since meeting her.

  “Sean Kinney,” she mused, the syllables of my name dancing over her tongue, dropping from her lips. “I like that name. You know how some people have really awkward names, and it just feels off saying them? Like, you feel sorry that someone would even allow their kid to go through their entire life with a name like that? Well, you don’t have one of those.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, laughing and gripping the back of my neck. Squeezing, grounding. Desperately trying to keep myself from floating from the booth and through the feckin’ roof of the bar.

  “I like your voice too. It’s different, you know? You’re this weird hybrid. You say some sentences that don’t sound like anything but American, and then you say others and you can really hear it.”

  “You’re gonna make me blush,” I teased, gripping harder. Feeling completely weightless and weird.

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Please continue,” she said, grasping her hands on the table top.

  My brows pinched together, racing through my short-term memory for whatever it was we had been talking about before the topic of accents and perfect names had come up, and I drew a blank.

  “Ehm … What was I saying?”

  “Jekyll and Hyde,” she reminded me with quick-blinked nod.

  “Ah, right. So, ehm …” I gathered my thoughts and with a sigh, I kept going. “Ryan and I were always the total opposite of each other. My parents even had the foresight to dress us differently. I mean, even as babies, Ryan demanded so much more attention. Ya know, always cryin’, always needin’ something, while I was quiet and slept through the night. In school, he was always gettin’ himself into trouble somewhere, failin’ his classes. Whereas I was gettin’ straight A’s and coddled as the teacher’s pet in every one of my classes.

  “And I feel this need to mention that he wasn’t bad, ya know? My best friend Jules would call him the evil twin, and that would piss me the feck off, because there’s nothin’ really evil about Ryan. Not at all. He’s a good person and he means well, but he just … couldn’t seem to keep himself out of trouble.” I knocked the last quarte
r of my Guinness back. Lindsey stared with sympathetic eyes.

  “What about your other brother?” she asked, caution flooding her voice. A bitter reminder that she hardly knew me and didn’t know how I’d react.

  “Ah, that would be Paddy. He’s three years older, and he—”

  “He’s the one that got the girl pregnant?” She bounced in her seat, suddenly remembering my mention of him earlier, and I nodded.

  “That’d be the one. Patrick’s a really good guy. Like, I’d dare someone to find one bad thing about him, and they wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s almost sickening, honestly,” I laughed with a shake of my head. “His only downfall was that he had a, ehm … A moment of weakness, I guess, when tryin’ to forget his broken heart.”

  Lindsey nodded. “That’s really sad.”

  “It was,” I agreed. “And it was strange the way it affected everybody, ya know? More than I think anybody realized at the time. My parents were heartbroken, thinkin’ there was no chance in Hell he would ever reconcile with the love of his life. Ryan just … He kinda used it as a threshold, I guess; thinkin’ that as long as he didn’t get some girl pregnant, there was no way anything he could do could be as bad.”

  “And what about you?”

  I sniffed around a laugh. “I don’t think much changed for me. I just remember there bein’ this one night, right after I turned eighteen. Ryan had been arrested for the first time. A B&E charge on a dare, like a feckin’ idiot. So much of what he did was often to try and impress someone,” and I shook my head. “But anyway, my parents had gone to bail him out of jail, and immediately he took off runnin’ to God knows where. Thanked them for savin’ his arse once again and off he went. Patrick was freshly married, a new father, and livin’ in his ex-wife’s parents house more or less against his will. And I was upstairs, packin’ my things for college.

  “I overheard my parents in the living room: Da was feckin’ furious, and Mam was crying. I couldn’t make out everything they were sayin’, but I remember this one thing Da had said to Mam, after he had calmed down. He said to her, ‘Y’know Helen, at least we have one good kid.’ I honestly think he had been jokin’, but I took it seriously. I mean, there had always been this massive amount of self-imposed pressure on me to do better in school or to exceed my parents’ expectations, but that had been no fault of theirs. However, that line—at least we have one good kid—I took that shite to heart.”