Last Chance to Fall

by Kelsey Kingsley

  “You didn’t really give me all that much of a chance,” I grumbled, never taking my eyes off Lindsey and her reaction.

  “You’ll have to excuse my idiot brother,” Ryan said to her. “He wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he were hostin’ a family of cockroaches, let alone a woman …”

  I shoved his shoulder, pushing him into the doorframe. “Feckin’ dick.”

  “No, no, Sean’s fine. I really just, uh … I got here just a little before you did,” Lindsey said, immediately shy in the presence of my brother. “Um, I’m Lindsey.” She offered her hand.

  “Ryan,” he said, accepting. His large hand engulfed hers, and I envied him tremendously for the two seconds that they shook. “And ya don’t have to lie on my account. Sean can tell ya. Before I was married, I bagged my share—” A hard nudge in the ribs cut his confession short, and he glared at me. “Touch me again!”

  Lindsey pinched her lips between her teeth, obviously finding this all very amusing, and she shook her head. “No, really! I stayed at my place last night. Or, um, my boyfriend’s place. No, ex-boyfriend. God, that’ll take some time getting used to,” and she smiled up at me, almost apologetically. And why she’d be sorry, I still couldn’t quite figure out.

  I hadn’t heard Patrick come up behind me, and I jumped at the feel of his hand on my shoulder. I could only imagine how Lindsey felt, having three large men barricading her into the tiny, unfamiliar bedroom. I felt like a world-class arsehole.

  “Relax,” he said to me. “Old William Fuller isn’t gonna come up and choke you with his cold, lifeless hands.” His hands circled around my neck for good measure, and he and Ryan had themselves a good chuckle, while Lindsey hid her smile behind her hand. “So, are you two idiots gonna let her walk past ya, or are you holdin’ her hostage for a reason?” he finally asked, looking from Ryan to me.

  Ah, Paddy. Always the hero.

  I rolled my eyes, and with my arms crossed, headed into the living room with both Ryan and Lindsey on my tail.

  “This is my older brother Patrick,” I said, waving a hand in his direction.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said softly, and Patrick responded, “You too, Lindsey.”

  When we were in the, only slightly bigger, living room, Patrick turned again to Lindsey. He smiled easily as he said, “Sorry to interrupt whatever you were in the middle of, but it’s the only day all three of us have off, and I need the help movin’ this shite from our parents’ house.”

  She smiled up at him. “No, it’s totally fine. I just came by to grab breakfast with Sean, but if you guys have something going on, don’t let me get in the way.”

  God, I wanted her to get in the way of everything, and I watched her a little too intently. The way she lightly moistened her lips with her tongue. The way her eyes glistened with intrigue, wandering around the living room, taking in the things I owned. The way her breasts dropped and fell with every breath, pushing against the loose fabric of that flowery shirt.

  Ryan caught a glimpse of me looking at her. He arched his pierced brow, and cleared his throat. “Hey, ehm … why don’t ya come along? With the three of us and Da, it probably won’t take too long. Kinsey and Snow—our wives—are spendin’ some time with Mam, so if ya didn’t wanna watch us lift some heavy shite, you could hang out with them for a little while, and then go off to do whatever it is ya had planned.”

  He might have been the cause of my irritational fear of inanimate people. He might have been the Hyde to my Jekyll, as grossly exaggerated as that may be. But I could never look at him as being a crappy wingman, and I hoped he caught the gratitude in the slight tilt of my chin.

  My eyes dropped back down to Lindsey, trying to gauge her reaction. Trying to sense if she was recoiling at the thought of meeting my very involved, very Irish family. But she smiled, catching my eye, and asked, “Well Sean? If you weren’t afraid, what would you ask me to do?”

  My brothers flanked both sides of me, making their presence known with their overabundant size, but that particular moment belonged to Lindsey and me. There was only us, making the decision to be brave in a world that had left us paranoid and afraid, and I nodded. “I’d ask ya to come.”

  “Good,” she replied, her smile widening and her cheeks pinking.

  Ryan gripped the back of his neck with one hand and slowly moved his head from side to side. “Well, I have absolutely no feckin’ idea what any of that meant, but ehm … great. We’re happy to have ya.”

  And so, on Day Two, Lindsey met my family, and I was brave.

  ❧

  “Sean!” Patrick shouted from the head of the antique bureau.

  “What?” I shouted back, my arms screaming from the weight of the feckin’ thing.

  “You’re droppin’ your end!”

  I gritted my teeth, my muscles bunching and straining as I hoisted higher. My arms shook and my fingers threatened to snap. “Can I just take this moment to remind you all, that I’m not the one jumpin’ on the weight machines five days a week?”

  “Oh, for cryin’ out loud.” Ryan removed his jacket, tossing it over Patrick’s fence, and bumped me with his shoulder. “Quit your bitchin’ and let me do it.”

  “Be my guest,” I grumbled, as he grabbed my end. He lifted effortlessly, beefy biceps flexing as they carried it the rest of the way into Paddy’s house. “Showoff!” I called to him.

  “Jealous fecker,” he shot back, and I rolled my eyes with a smile.

  With nothing to do in that moment, I turned back to my parents’ place, the house I grew up in, and headed up the walk. When had I stopped thinking of it as home? When had it simply become my parents’ place? It felt like an adult thing. One of those things you don’t realize happening until you’ve been doing it for years and suddenly it hits you out of nowhere, maybe when you’re pushing through the front door, and you realize it’s no longer yours. Now it’s just that place you grew up in and moved on from. A stepping stone on your way to more solitary destinations.

  I walked through to the kitchen and stopped in my tracks at the sight of her, laughing with my mother and the women my brothers had chosen as theirs. That laugh, bordering on offensive, it twisted something in me and I was struck with another insight: was home where your heart chose to live? Had Kinsey been Patrick’s home since he was a toddler? Had Mam and Da’s place in River Canyon ever been his? Because there, in the kitchen doorway, I was pretty certain that the woman with the obnoxious laugh could be mine. If I allowed myself to not be afraid of what that might mean.

  “Oh, Seanie, are ya done already?” Mam asked, spotting me first. “Where’s your brothers and father?”

  Lindsey turned her eyes on me, and they met mine. She smiled, and my heart stopped. “Nah. Ryan and Patrick are finishing with somethin’, and then I’ll go back to help them.”

  “Well, why don’t ya sit down and have somethin’ to drink?” Mam offered as she jumped from her chair, buzzing straight toward the refrigerator. “I don’t need ya gettin’ dehydrated. Y’know, I was just readin’ in a magazine, that it’s the leadin’ cause of death durin’ the hotter months.”

  “How morbid of ya Mam,” I grumbled under my breath.

  She continued to chatter about fluid loss through perspiration, as though it was a recent development in science, but I was too busy looking at the blonde at the table.

  The chair next to Lindsey was empty, and I felt the eyes of Kinsey on me the entire time it took to go from the doorway to that chair. I sat down and looked across the table, catching those eyes that had teased me numerous times in my youth, and I shook my head with a warning. She smiled, biting her lower lip, and I suppressed the urge to kick her under the table.

  My feet were so much bigger than they were when I was six and I now risked doing significant damage to her shins.

  “Here ya go, my sweet boy,” Mam coddled, putting a glass of water down in front of me.

  My sweet boy. One good kid. “Thanks,” I grumbled, and downed half of it.
I used my arm to wipe the sticky sweat from my forehead.

  “See how thirsty ya are?” My mother pointed out the obvious, and I nodded.

  “Well, it is hot,” I agreed.

  “Tell me about it,” Snow groaned and ran her hands over her beach-ball belly. “I wouldn’t mind if someone just shoved me in a freezer right now.”

  Kinsey laughed. “Oh God, you’re preaching to the choir, sister.” She fanned herself, pressing a hand to her own stomach.

  Mam sat down at the head of the table and pointed one finger at her. “Ya better watch it then. Paddy’s already talkin’ about needin’ a son after this one’s born.”

  “Yeah, well, when he can make one himself, he can be my guest.” She turned to Lindsey and blinked slowly, showcasing her intolerance for my brother’s desperation for a son. “He’s having a difficult time wrapping his head around having another girl when he was so-o sure this one would be a boy,” she explained.

  “And then,” I tossed in, “he got seriously butt-hurt when he found out that Ry’s havin’ a son.”

  Kinsey laughed. “Oh my God, he totally did. He was so freakin’ jealous, I thought he’d actually cry.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d think Ryan would be grateful then, right? But nope, he’s already talking about having another after this one,” Snow said with a shake of her head. “He says he wants an army. The guy barely thought about having kids a year ago, and now he wants a hundred of them.”

  Mam laughed. “Collin was the same way,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s in their blood to reproduce.”

  Snow snorted. “I think I’m gonna invest in a chastity belt after I get this kid out of me.”

  There was no way Snow was giving up sex—not with the way Ryan talked about their sex life—and I broke the chatter with a burst of laughter, and Lindsey glanced over at me. She smiled, lowering her eyes to the table. Shy. Flirtatious. It occurred to me that she might actually like me, that it might not all be in my head, and I wiped my palms on my jeans.

  Mam shrugged. “Collin was no different. He wasn’t thrilled when I was done, after givin’ birth to twins. I’m convinced men don’t feel useful unless they’re liftin’ heavy things or makin’ babies. Otherwise, we’d survive just fine without ‘em.”

  Lindsey pinned her lips between her teeth, and I lifted my head to glare incredulously at my mother. “Thanks a lot, Mam.”

  “It’s true though! Come on Lindsey, back us up here,” Kinsey said.

  She shrugged. “My ex-boyfriend certainly wasn’t very useful for anything other than opening jars sometimes,” she said quietly. But she looked up to me and met my eye. “But I’m sure there’s an exception somewhere.”

  “Oh God,” Kinsey groaned with a roll of her eyes. “Come back to me when you’ve been together for ten years and you’ve had at least one of his babies. Then we’ll talk. Right now doesn’t count. You’re still smitten.”

  I lifted a brow at one of my oldest friends, waiting for the signal that what she had said was the truth and not just a teasing jab. And her eyes met mine, and with a slight tilt of her head and a quick raise of her brows, my pulse quickened and I swear I heard my heart beating in my ears.

  “I, ehm ... I better get back out there and see if they need me,” I said, pushing away from the table. “Don’t let them feed ya too many lies,” I directed at Lindsey, and she giggled.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” she said. “Your mom already told me you wet the bed until you were eleven.”

  “Very funny,” I grumbled at her with the beginnings of a smile.

  I ran a hand through my hair, hesitating on turning around and walking away. Just in case there was something else to say, something else to hear. Just in case I’d miss that hint of green in her brown eyes when the light hit them just right, or that little lift to her upper lip right before she was about to smile.

  And so I walked backward for two steps, watching her and gripping my neck, and it was only when I bumped into the frame of the door that I turned with a nervous chuckle. A real Casanova, that’s what I was, with a serious crush on a girl I just met.

  A girl who, I thought, could one day be my home.

  CHAPTER FIVE |

  Wolverines & Good Days

  “So, we still have to do breakfast,” Lindsey reminded me on the walk back to my apartment. “You still owe me some syrup,” and she poked me in the ribs.

  “Uh-huh,” I said with a roll of my eyes and a smile on my face. “Tomorrow.”

  We got to the staircase running alongside the diner, leading to my apartment. I gulped, looking up at it. I wanted to be there, behind my door. Away from the world of possibilities and frightening things. It was my usual feeling, looking up those stairs and at that door, but now there was something new, mingling with the everyday anxiety. Now, I also wanted her to be there with me. I wanted her in my arms, in my bed. Reminding me to live.

  And that, in itself, scared the feckin’ hell out of me.

  “Sean,” she said, reaching out to graze her fingernails over the inside of my forearm. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

  My lungs filled with a gasp, eyes focused on a lamppost nearby. Anywhere but at her. “I don’t know,” I answered. Lying. The fingers on my opposite hand moved, itched to touch her. To act on those feelings that had been weighing me down all feckin’ day, so much more than all those pieces of antiquated furniture.

  “Yes you do.” Her nails whispered over the length of my arm, barely making contact, all the while touching every part of me. Touching too much.

  I pulled away and shook my head. “Stop it Lindsey,” I warned.

  “Why?”

  “Because … I-I hardly know you,” I stammered over the cliché line and hated myself for it.

  But still, she grabbed my hand, ignoring the warning in my voice. “It’s my turn to pick now Sean,” she said, all but stomping her foot on the sidewalk. That spoiled brat she had told me about emerged from the surface of her own ebbing fear. “I am so tired of doing what I think is the right thing, only for it to be so fucking wrong. I am so tired of not living my own life, because I’m afraid of what might happen if I do. But you know what? When I’m with you, I’m not afraid, and all I keep thinking is, ‘What if this is your last chance?’”

  God help me, I didn’t want to ask. God help me, I had to. “Last chance for what?”

  “To feel something real.”

  My body was possessed by my frenzied heart, and I propelled forward on feet that were no longer my own. My palms found either side of her face, drawing her to me, and my lips pressed against hers. Hard—too hard maybe; perhaps not being hard enough. She smiled against me, looping her arms around my neck, holding me hostage in the moments that her lips parted and her tongue swiped and licked. She coerced my mouth to open, to accept her, and I did.

  She tasted sweet and good, a lingering mint entangling with the natural flavors of her mouth, and I gripped the back of her head to roll my tongue with hers. To delve deeper and savor the moment longer, in the event that it should end, because good moments always do.

  Long fingers combed through the hair along the back of my head, scratched along one shoulder and over to the opposite side. My cock strained and screamed against the zipper of my jeans, reminding me of everything I had thought about in bed just the night before, and my palm flattened against her back. I pulled her into me, gave her little choice but to feel the effect she was having on me, and she groaned into my mouth, reverberating through my tongue and awakening something in my soul. Something buried by years of suppression and shame, guilt and anxiety.

  “Please tell me you’re not afraid to take me upstairs,” she moaned breathlessly against my lips. I opened my eyes to find her staring up to me, hungry and desperate.

  “Are you sure?” There goes my stupid mouth again, letting my worried mind do the talking. “You just ended a relationship, and—” Her fingers tugged at the hair on the nape of my neck, and my lips ceased to function. A s
trangled moan caught on my tongue and my eyelids fluttered.

  “I’m not thinking about that now, and neither should you.”

  I didn’t want to be something she’d regret. I didn’t want to be the rebound, or the one-night stand. I didn’t want to be the one she snuck out on the next morning. I didn’t want to be that guy she could never look at again, because I wanted breakfast. I wanted maple syrup every day for the next five days, and goddammit, I didn’t want her to think of me as a feckin’ mistake.

  I wanted to say these things, but her arms had left my neck and she was pulling away. Her fingers intertwined with mine, and she tugged me toward the stairs. Walking backward, leading me with her dark chocolate eyes. With every step forward and every step upward, all of those negative, nagging thoughts seemed to wither away and I had lost the ability to do anything but succumb to the pulsations of lust and heat.

  The ascent didn’t involve anybody tripping, and the lock didn’t give me any issues. When we were inside and the door was closed behind us, she was on me again, kissing desperately with her hands in my hair and my tongue between her luxuriously soft lips. Virtually nothing hindered our journey across the living room and into my bedroom, like I would have expected it to, and as we dropped to the bed and she straddled my hips, I thought with total sincerity that this might have been the best day of my life.

  I wrapped my arms around her back and rolled us over, raising up on my forearms to look into her eyes.

  Brown is said to be the most common eye color. Thinking about it, I couldn’t say exactly how many brown eyes I had seen in my life, but it was a lot. Hundreds, or maybe even thousands. But her brown eyes … Hers were unlike any brown I had ever seen before. I would’ve remembered something so awakening, so intense. A deep and dark cocoa flecked with the same golden shimmer from her hair. They engulfed me in a warmth that felt much like stepping into a bath and I plunged, diving under, as she stared back into the mundane blue of my own.