Falling Away (17 page)

“Belmont.” She’s looking at me, now, hearing the off note in my voice. “What’s wrong?”

“Belmont. In Nashville.” There’s only one Belmont University, so the clarification is pointless.
 

“Doing It Our Way” by Gloriana comes on, both fitting and painfully out of place.

“Yeah,” she says, standing up and turning to look at me. “What?”

I shrug and shake my head, not willing to face what the realization has done to me, what I’m feeling and thinking. I refuse to acknowledge it. “Nothing.” I lift the bag in my hand. “So what stays and what goes in here?”

She doesn’t take her eyes off me. “Everything goes. I cleaned this room out when I moved to Nashville. Those jewel cases are empty. I have the discs at school.” She moves in front of me as I take a step deeper into the room, stopping me with a hand on my chest. “Ben, what’s the deal?”

“Nothing.”

She sighs. “Now who’s shutting down?”

I groan and drop the bag, sit on the bed. “I’m from Nashville.”
 

She stares at me. “What?”

I nod. “Yeah. Lived there my whole life, from the time I was three. I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but we moved to Nashville when I was three. I’m about thirty credits shy of a bachelor’s from Vanderbilt. I was the starting quarterback there for three years straight.”

Echo blinks. “Shut the fuck up. You’re kidding, right?”

I shake my head. “Nope.”

“I have friends who go to Vandy. I mean…Jesus. I dated a guy who was on the football team—two years ago?”

“What was his name?” I ask, feeling shaky.

“Marcus Shaker.”

I fall backward onto the bed. “You dated that asshole? Jesus. He’s a hell of a tight end, but he’s a total dickbag.”

“You know him?”

I stare at her. “Like I said, I was the starting quarterback.”

“Wait.” She waves her hands in a ‘hold on’ gesture. “Ben…like Benjamin Dorsey?”

I nod. “That’s me.”
 

She tilts her head back. “Holy shit. Marcus hates your ass.”

I laugh. “I know, and the feeling is mutual.” I glance at her. “Wanna know what our beef is?”

“Sure.”

“We were at a frat party one weekend. Our sophomore year. I caught him roughing up this chick in the bathroom. Pawing at her, calling her names. Had his hand up her skirt, and she was fighting him off, but…she wasn’t winning.” I shake my head, remembering. “I pounded his ass into the ground. He missed three games because of that fight. I reported it, but the girl refused to press charges, and the school never did shit about it. But he got a lesson from me, that’s for damn sure.”

“That—that sounds like Marcus,” Echo whispers. “I didn’t date him long.”
 

Something is off in her voice, in her posture. “Echo?”

She shakes her head, turns away, head ducked, fingers plucking at frayed white threads of a hole in the thigh of her jeans. “Don’t worry about it.”
 

“Because saying that makes me worry less.”
 

She shrugs. “You stopped him that time. But that wasn’t the only time he did something like that.”
 

“Meaning he tried it with you?”

Echo blows out a short, sharp breath, head tilted back on her neck. “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. I dealt with it a long time ago. Just…drop it, okay?”

“Echo, come on, you can’t just—”

“I said
drop it!
” She turns, shouting. “It’s old news, and none of your business.”

I slide up behind her, my hands curling around her arms. “Echo, Jesus—”

She shakes me off. “I’m not talking about it, Ben. I don’t need your help.” She turns, takes the bag from me, pushes me out of the bedroom, through the living room to the front door; I let her push me, though I’m not sure why. “You’ve done enough. Thank you, and goodbye.”

“So it’s like that, huh?”

She holds the front door open, gestures out. “It’s like that.”

I stop in the doorway, turn to look at her. We’re close. She’s holding the front door, standing in the tiny foyer, eyes hard, posture ramrod-stiff, but her lower lip trembles and her fist on the doorknob is white-knuckled.

“More Than Miles” by Brantley Gilbert plays on the radio
.
 

I’m at a total loss for words. “Echo, I—”

She just shakes her head and cuts me off. “Nothing to say, Ben. It’s not about Mom, it’s not about Marcus. It’s just…I can’t do this with you.”

“Why not?” I close in, stand so close she has to peer up at me. “Why are you pushing me away?”

“Because you’re getting too close, Ben. And that’s the last thing on earth I have the time or emotional energy for.”

I glance down and see the outline of her phone in the hip pocket of her tight jeans. I pry it out, hand it to her. “Unlock it real quick.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.” So she does it, hands it back. I dial my cell number, and after my phone has rung twice, I hang up the call and save her number into my phone. And then I call her phone from mine and save my number under “Benji.” I hand it back to her. “Can I at least see you before you leave?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I just know I’m overwhelmed and you’re making it worse. You’re confusing me, and I don’t need that right now.”

“Fair enough.” I start to turn away, but then change my mind.

I grab her face in both hands and kiss her hard and deep, wrestling her lips with mine, slashing her tongue with mine. I cup her cheek in one hand and slide my other hand to her waist and crush her against my body.
 

She lets me kiss her, stunned, for several seconds, and then I break away. She gazes up at me, two fingers to her lips, like she can’t believe I just did that. “You suck,” she whispers.

And then she pulls me back in, closes the front door, and then we spin and her spine is pinned against the door and Echo is lifting up on her toes to kiss me. She tries to go gently, but I’m having none of that. I don’t know what’s driving me. It’s not mere lust, though there’s that in spades. I want to prove something to her, but again, I’m not sure what.
 

When her lips touch mine, shivering and trembling, her breath soughing slowly over my tongue, I breathe in her scent and then dive in to steal her oxygen, demand her kiss, demand heat, demand fire. And she gives it. She lifts up on her toes and clutches my shirtfront and gasps and relinquishes gentility in favor of aggression.

My hands seek skin, her shirt rises and I find it, palm her spine and the soft curves of her sides, just above the waist of her jeans, and then my fingers are toying with the string of her thong peeking up over the low-rise jeans and hers are busy at my chest, pushing at my shirt.
 

But I’m not content to merely kiss. Not after what we had together this afternoon. I break the kiss and grab her by the shoulders, spin her in place so her front is pressed up against the door, and I slide my palms around her waist to her belly, press in flat and dig my fingers under the waistband of her jeans, against her skin. She gasps and sucks in her stomach, rests her forehead against the door and lets out the breath in a whimper when my fingertips graze her opening. She’s limp against the door, yet also taut and tense at the same time. I pop the button of her jeans and lower the zipper and shove them down, and she’s pushing back against me, grabbing my hand and pressing it to her now-bare core, dipping at the knees as I touch her, find her wet and willing. She’s gasping out loud within moments, and then she’s reaching blindly behind her for my zipper, and before I know it, my own pants are around my ankles and I’m pressing up against her.

We both hesitate at the same moment, freezing, not breathing. I lower my face to her neck, pull my body away, breathing shakily. “Not here, Echo. Not like this.”

“No.” She doesn’t move, though, as if she’s feeling the fight of need versus knowledge; I know I am.

I owe it to her to be stronger. So I bend, find the scrap of material that she calls underwear and lift it for her, tug it into place, and then do the same for her jeans. I tug, tug, and she lets me, not moving, breathing deeply and slowly as I get her jeans into place. She spins and pushes me away.
 

“Stop, stop. I can’t handle it when you do that. I’m barely handling myself right now as it is. You being sweet and dressing me like that…I can’t handle it.” I don’t apologize. I just bend and lift up my own clothing, but she grabs my wrists and stops me. “Let me help you out with your problem,” she says, glancing down at my straining erection.

I shake my head and back out of reach. “No. That’d be even worse than if we’d done what we just started.” I pull my boxers into place and zip my jeans, button them. Now that we’re both clothed, I let myself get within touching distance again, but I don’t actually touch her, because that would be catalytic and dangerous. “Has anything changed?”

“Between us?” she asks, and I nod. She closes her eyes, wipes at her face with both hands, and then falls back against the door. “No. I don’t know how to change it. Us fucking wouldn’t change it. Here, your place, anywhere. It’d feel incredible, but it wouldn’t change anything.”

“Then we’re right back where we started before I kissed you.”

She shrugs and nods. “Yeah. If we fucked, it would put us right back in the bubble, and—as much as I like it in the bubble, I have to face reality at some point.”
 

“So you still want me to go?” I hate how my heart thumps and aches.
 

She won’t look at me as she nods and reaches for the doorknob, moving out of the way so I can step fully outside. “Yeah.
Want you to go
may be too strong a way to put it, but yeah, it’s best if you go.”
 

“Okay then.” I step carefully down the two wobbly stairs to the sidewalk and cross the grass to my truck. “You have my number.”
 

“I know.” She waves, like it’s any old goodbye. “Drive safe.”
 

“Yeah.”
 

And then I’m gone, back out to the main road, to my apartment, where I contemplate the fact that Echo and I were just a few miles apart, that we even know some of the same people but never crossed paths until now, until this. And I think about how this makes the thought of going back home to Nashville all the harder. Before, it was like skulking home with my tail between my legs. And then I got injured and I just couldn’t face even the idea of going back and hearing all the talk, the whispers, the curiosity about why I’d vanished so suddenly.

And now, if I go back, I’ll know not only is Kylie there with Oz—married now—but Echo as well.
 

What the fuck am I supposed to do?
 

And of course, just to rub it in, the radio plays “The One That Got Away” by Jake Owen.

TEN: Ben-Shaped Hole

Echo

It’s eleven o’clock at night, and Mom’s house is done. I tossed almost all of her clothes, because she was taller and skinnier than me, which irked me pretty much my whole life, from the time I was old enough to be jealous of her figure. I kept a pair of her shoes, killer red heels I’d always envied and that she’d never let me borrow. I also kept a leather bomber jacket that was old and worn and likely belonged to my father, as well as her favorite cream knit sweater. I have two boxes of sentimental stuff, picture frames and photo albums and her jewelry, and her favorite books. The curb is piled high with bags that I labeled as either “trash” or “free stuff”, as this neighborhood always gets trash-picker traffic the night before the garbage is collected. Someone will take the bags of goods and the rest will get thrown away. I leave the furniture, the TV. I clean the place top to bottom, scrubbing and vacuuming and mopping and wiping until the house looks like it had never been lived in. Grandpa and Grandma will sell the house and take care of whatever else has to be done.
 

And I do it all without sobbing.

When I’m done, I book a flight back to Nashville for early the next day.

Then I call Grandpa. “Hey there, sweet-pea. We was gettin’ worried about you,” he says by way of hello, his voice low and thickly Texas-accented.
 

“I needed time to deal, Grandpa. Sorry, didn’t mean to worry you.”

“Where ya at?”

“Mom’s—Mom’s house. I just finished…going through everything.”

He’s silent for a moment. “You shouldn’t have done that on your own, sweet-pea. Your grandma and I woulda helped you. We’re old, but we ain’t helpless.”
 

“It was mine to do.” I swallow hard. “I had help, too.”

“That boy you left with?” His voice brooks no argument, meaning, I’d better damn well explain, because even if I am twenty-two, I still have to answer to my elders.

“Yeah. Ben.”

“Echo.” It’s a none-too-subtle warning.

“Just let it be, Gramps. Please?” My voice shakes. “I just…I need a ride to the airport in the morning.”

He lets out a breath. “You’re stayin’ with us tonight, then?” It’s a concession, which means a lot to me, since Grandpa isn’t one for conceding anything, ever.

“Yes, sir.”
 

“Be there in forty-five. Just hang tight.”
 

“Thanks, Grandpa.”

“No sweat, sweet-pea.”

I sit on the stoop with the boxes at my feet, killing time on The Berry, and then Instagram. That last one is a mistake. I end up in my own photograph history, swiping through the pictures of Mom and me the last time we were together. It was the Fourth of July, and we spent it with Grandma and Grandpa at a lake near their house, grilling and drinking beer and setting off firecrackers. Mom and I got along great, since we’d decided on an unspoken rule to totally ignore my choice of schools and career.

I hold back the sobs, even still.
 

I keep holding them back when Grandpa shows up, his Wranglers as tight as ever, his shirt plaid and pearl-buttoned, his boots worn and scuffed. I hold them back as we drive in silence back to their house in his rattling, chugging, diesel Ram pickup that’s older than me. I hold the tears back when Grandpa hugs me stiffly outside the truck in the gravel drive out front with the crickets singing and the moon high. And I hold them back when Grandma hugs me tearfully and makes me sit down to eat reheated roast beef and mashed potatoes and pecan pie.