How We Fall (10 page)

I laughed and licked off my spoon. Sweet and cold. “I figured I should make it convincing.”

“Well, it’s not like I mind.” He popped a marshmallow in his mouth.

I shook my head. He had his legs stretched out in front of him, and he wore his blue basketball shorts and one of his white t-shirts. His wasn’t sheer like mine, but it did fit him nicely. “Are we really both wearing white shirts?”

He grinned. “I noticed that. I figured it would be cooler.”

I kicked off my sandals while I chased the last of the fudge around my container with my spoon. “Thanks for this.”

He set his ice cream down. “I wanted to do something. I mean, it’s been a year now.”

I sat up. No, no, no. Don’t ruin this. “Marcus.”

He rested his hands on the blanket behind him and leaned back. “You know, avoiding saying something doesn’t make it any less true.”

No. Saying things brought them out into the open and made them something to act on. The breeze toyed with my hair and 61

How we Fall

blew some of my longer bangs into my eyes. But if I moved, it would break the spell of me watching Marcus, and him watching me, and me knowing it wouldn’t matter if he never touched me again as long as when he looked at me, it was like this; like he knew me and he understood and it was okay anyway.

For once, I said what I was really thinking. “Do you ever feel like we must be really screwed up or that we’re messing up our lives or something?”

“What? Shit, no.” His eyebrows drew together and he moved closer to me. “Why would you think that?”

“You know. It’s not normal. People think this kind of thing is gross.” I scraped the last bit of ice cream onto my spoon but didn’t feel like eating it.

“Maybe some people would, but that’s their problem.

There’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t even think that.”

I watched his eyes. “What do you think your parents would do if they found out?” Aunt Shelly, with all her micromanag-ing, would freak out. Healthy, well-adjusted teenagers did not hook up with their cousins.

He looked down. “I know. It would be bad. They’d probably ask your family to move out and they’d put me in therapy or something.” He shifted. “But look. No one knows. Maybe we should be more careful, but it’s worked so far. And maybe we can’t do anything long-term. But I don’t want to go back to being just cousins. As long as it works, there’s nothing to stop us, right?”

But he’d be branded a pervert. And since he was the guy, I’d look like a victim when I was the one who’d started it. “Do you ever wonder how this happened? Why us?”

He shook his head. “I don’t care. Lots of people crush on a cousin. And a lot of cousins have a relationship and even get married. People just don’t talk about it. Come here?” He held out an arm and I moved over.

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He played with the end of my ponytail. “Don’t worry about it. Right now, there’s no problem and we don’t need to worry about it until there is one. Did you bring a book?”

I nodded. I wanted to finish
Pygmalion
. The film
My Fair
Lady
was an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play, but with an important difference in the ending. In one, Eliza Dolittle and Henry Higgins stayed together, and in the other, she left him and married someone else. I couldn’t yet tell if the difference in the ending was due to one of the Elizas or one of the Henrys.

Marcus lay down on the blanket. I dug the book out of my bag and lay back on his chest. He held still for a minute, then exhaled and played with my hair again.

He liked it when I did things like that without asking.

While I read, he messed around on his phone, texting. The shade shifted and before long we were in patchy sun. “Did you bring any water?” I asked.

Marcus reached over his head and fumbled around in the cooler before handing me a bottle of ice water. The condensa-tion dripped on my shirt. “Wow. You planned everything.”

He didn’t reply, just sent a text and gently tugged out my ponytail holder. “I love your hair.”

Definitely not a conversation I should keep going, but I didn’t move. His chest was warm and solid, and his hands kept moving through my hair, running down the lengths. Falling asleep was tempting, but I kept reading because I was nearly done.

When I closed the book twenty minutes later, I rolled on my shoulder toward him. He was still messing with his phone.

“Who are you texting?”

He glanced at me. “Hey. How was the book?”

“Good. Not as happily-ever-after as the movie.” I poked his side. “Are you texting someone secret?”

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How we Fall

He gave me a look. “It’s just Sylvia.”

Just Sylvia. “This whole time?” He could text her. It wasn’t like there was a reason he shouldn’t be texting her, because this wasn’t a date and we weren’t together. Still, I sat up. I reached for the water and took a drink.

“She wants to hang out some time.”

“I’ll bet she does.”

“Hey.” He touched my arm, grinning. “You’re jealous again.”

“I am not.”

“Bullshit. You totally are. Come here.” He pulled me down on top of him. My hair fell around my face so I tucked it behind my ear.

“Listen,” he said. “Don’t be jealous.” He kissed my nose, then pressed his lips to mine.

I was still jealous, but Sylvia wasn’t the one kissing him on a blanket in the middle of the afternoon. I settled more fully on top of him, stretching out until I could feel his foot with mine.

My bare leg touched his, rough against my smooth skin. Hands in my hair, his tongue brushed my lower lip. One hand moved and slid into the back pocket of my jean shorts.

I slipped my hands behind his neck and when my hair fell forward around us again, I let it stay there. His other hand moved up and down my back. His fingers found the straps of my bikini top and traced the lines across my back. Not unsnapping it, just touching. I leaned my forehead against his, watching him watch me. His eyes moved over my face and down my shirt. He wound my hair around his finger and tugged.

Sylvia could text him all she wanted. I moved my mouth to the skin below his ear, and he smelled so good I instantly forgot what I should and shouldn’t want. I touched his arms, his shoulders, his chest. His hands warmed my whole body, and not just because he made these lazy, light circles with his fingertips. Because he treated every part of me like it mattered.

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My hands. The sensitive skin on the undersides of my wrists.

My collarbone. I couldn’t think about anything else while he touched me.

My hands closed around his biceps. This past year, he’d put on a lot of muscle. His shoulders had broadened, giving his upper body a slight triangle down to his waist. I saw him every day, and I still couldn’t get over it. I kissed him with my mouth open, brushing his tongue with mine. He tasted like his vanilla ice cream. I slid my hand down his side and paused at his waist, playing with the elastic band of his shorts.

His breathing changed. His hands touched my bare skin under the hem of my shirt. My heart thudded right along with his. I shifted up and he found my eyes before pulling the shirt over my head. I was wearing a bikini, so it didn’t matter. I tugged on his shirt and he sat up a little so I could pull it off.

I moved my mouth down his neck. His skin was hot on my lips; his face was flushed. I loved that I could do this to him, but I loved even more that with my hands and lips and body, I could tell him things I couldn’t say.

I didn’t want him to leave. Whatever that meant, I didn’t want it to happen. He rolled to his side and I slid off him, him leaning half over me on my back on the warm blanket. This time his lips moved across my shoulder. His fingers played with the strap of my black-and-white checkered bikini top.

This was why he held my hand sometimes. This was why he touched my shoulder when I was upset and why he looked at me the way he did. My skin tingled as his hand found my stomach. We’d been telling each other things for a year now, just with our bodies instead of words. His hands said he wanted me. Mine pulled him closer.

He was so handsome sometimes it hurt. I didn’t think other girls saw him this way. Cute, they said. Hot, even. But when I looked at him, I didn’t just see his jawline and dark eyelashes 65

How we Fall

and the slight definition in his stomach muscles. I saw Marcus.

I saw his years of raising his family and trying to bring some kind of order and consistency to the house and him always lifting the heavy crates when we worked and winking at me and pulling over on the side of the road to kiss me where no one else would see us.

I didn’t care. I was so sick of caring who saw and when I could see him next and what would happen later on and what people would think. I didn’t care, I didn’t care. All the way out here, the only thing to stop us was ourselves. He came back to my mouth and kissed me until I had no air left at all.

He was mine. I wasn’t using him, he wasn’t using me. I wanted this to be real and he did too. We were desperate hands and sun-warmed skin and his chest on mine.

His hand slid up my thigh. Mine found his chest and trailed down his stomach. Blood pounded through my entire body. He closed his eyes while my hands wandered around the top of his shorts again. Being this close fixed everything. Everywhere our skin touched burned me. Everything from my bare feet touching his legs to his body pressing mine into the blanket and the grass to his hair brushing my neck as he kissed my collarbone hummed with energy. Skin, hands, heat. Light fingers trailing up and down, hands finding small places.

His eyes were dark, his breathing harsh. He tugged on my shorts, fiddled with the button.

I closed my hand around his wrist. “Wait. Hang on.” I couldn’t think what to say. I wanted him with me, like this. But I also didn’t. I wanted us to be real, but we couldn’t.

We watched each other for a minute. His chest rose and fell.

I could fool myself into thinking we could undo a year of hooking up, making out, being more than friends. We could adjust and go on with our lives after all this. But we couldn’t undo sex.

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He moved his hand and sat up.

I took a deep breath. “We just can’t.”

“Yeah. I know.” He reached for the water bottle.

“That would change everything. We live in the same house.

We’d see each other every day.”

“We already see each other every day.” He took a drink.

“I mean, if we did . . . this. Later on, we’d have that history, always there. It would make things that much worse once we—”

His eyes darted to mine. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but he knew what I meant and I saw on his face it hurt him, too.

It would make things that much worse once we quit, moved on, stopped messing around. Once we broke up.

For once, he didn’t go silent and avoid the issue. He moved close to me and his eyes burned into me so intensely I looked away. He put his hand on my cheek and turned my face toward his. His voice went lower than usual. “Listen. I want you, Jackie. I want all of you.”

I pushed his hand away. “We said no sex, and I don’t—”

“Not sex. You.”

My brain stuttered. “What?”

“I like you. For real. I have for a long time.” He leaned closer. “When I look at you, sure, I see my cousin, but I also see a girl who’s smart and beautiful and will yell at me when I do stupid things. There are hundred wonderful things about us together, and none of them make me think it’s a bad thing. I want it to be okay for me to like you this way.”

“But it’s not,” I whispered.

He shook his head. “This is why we’re not working. We set these limits on how much we can care about each other, and it’s just—I’m so far past them, every time you won’t let me show it—” He took a deep breath. “Caring about you isn’t something I want to change. If you want it too, then why can’t we really be together?”

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How we Fall

I touched his hand. My throat was so tight it hurt. “But I shouldn’t and we can’t.”

Something sparked in his eyes. “But you do want to be with me?” His hand closed around mine.

He’d focused on the wrong part of that. Something wet streaked down my face. Another. “What I want is to not want this.” Something was wrong with me. Me sitting here, thinking these things about my cousin and doing these things with him and wanting to tell him I wanted him too.

It was a minute before he said anything. His eyebrows drew together and the lines on his face deepened. “I’d thought maybe you’d changed your mind.” His hand came back to my face and his thumb stroked my cheek. “So you—you like me, but don’t want to?”

“Right.” I put my hand over his and pulled it away from my face, but kept his hand in my lap.

“I guess it helps to know that.” He laughed, but somehow it still sounded sad. “I don’t know what to do. I’d been planning on telling you this today for like, weeks now. I was so afraid I’d been misreading things and that this was just friends with benefits to you, like we said. But if we can’t do anything about it, if you don’t want to, then . . . it comes out the same.” His eyes flicked over my face. “I still don’t have you.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I so desperately was. Every cell of my body wanted this to not be happening.

Marcus moved to beside me, his legs stretched out behind me into the grass. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Don’t kiss me back.”

I closed my eyes, blocking out the trees and the blanket and Marcus, but not the summer light. My hearing sharpened, my skin noticed the breeze and the prickles of the grass under the blanket.

I felt his warmth beside me, heard his breathing. I waited.

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Kate Brauning

His fingers touched my hair, brushing it aside, and then his hand moved to the back of my neck. His breath warmed my skin before he touched his lips to my eyebrow, my cheekbone, my jaw line. Each one hurt. His thumb traced my lip. And then his lips replaced his thumb, parting mine. I leaned in, but he shook his head just the slightest amount.

He’d never kissed me so slowly. The soft curve of his lower lip teased mine. I couldn’t see him, but I felt him more than I ever had before. The light pressure of his mouth and the gentle clasp of his hands. His cheekbone, his jaw, his skin against mine.