Page 101 of Break Your Fall

Her swallow is tight, her fingers squeezing around my bicep as the implications in that whisper ricochet between us.

We feel like a couple. Itfeelslike we’re together, when I’m touching her, when I’m kissing her. But then I’m reminded in the moments after and in between that we’re still not.

“And it’s gonna be great,” she assures now, shaking my arm, tilting a smile until I smile back. “You’re gonna be great.”

I give her a pointed look. “Well, we have to believe in ourselves, right?”

She returns the look. “Right.”

“And I’ll get it back,” I assure both of us, nodding with the words like that’ll cement them. “I just have to do it for me. Not for a scholarship.”

Reyna holds a smile a moment longer before it fades, and I catch her hand with mine when she slides it down my arm, squeezing before she continues to slide away, and again, I see the worry in her eyes before I hear it. “This … We … This doesn’t have anything to do with. . .”

“No.” I quickly ease her mind, knowing what she’s trying to ask me.

She nods. “I just … I would never ask you to stay if leaving was what you still wanted to do.”

“I know,” I say, a slow smile finding my mouth as I pull her in at the waist, touching her because I want to, because she wants me to act. Her hands reach out to rest on my arms and I feel her struggle to keep them there, a pulse in her fingers to roam, and I want to tell her she can, she can touch me any way she wants, but I instead repeat the words I said back in her bedroom. “But all the same … I know what I want, and I know what I don’t want. If I’m throwing away something I don’t love anymore for someone I do, I’m more than okay with that.”

Reyna’s eyes search mine through another tight swallow, the corner of her mouth lifting, opening right as the door does, and I’m robbed of the words she was about to say. She looks toward the door, shifting from my hold in Julian and Camille’s direction as they walk in, and I shift, too, giving her that space, smiling despite myself at the greeting she sends Camille.

“If it isn’t Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.”

Camille smirks. “I’ve got nothing on your mother.”

Banks bursts through the door a few steps behind and stomps to the fridge. “Where’s my beer?”

“We tried to lose him,” Camille says as she passes me toward the back counter.

Julian joins me at the bar. “He was invited,” he says with a laugh, but it comes out tired, fails to stop the glum look hidden in his eyes. Him and Camille have spent the past week with Brent and Tiffany, sometimes with Naomi, all trying to help each other through the loss. We’re all being touched by loss in some way.

“Yeah,” Banks attests as he rummages through my fridge like he’s still living here, wreaking havoc over all my organization.

“Yeah,” Camille echoes with contempt at Reyna for the invitation, and Reyna’s smile is smug as she turns toward the pot.

“You left a beer?” I question Banks with a face as I mentally talk myself down from bull-rushing him out of this house.

Julian shakes his head with a smile at Banks’s ass as it bounces in the air with his rummaging. “He always leaves a beer.”

“It’s my mark.” Banks finally comes up for air and brandishes the bottle with a beam like he’s in a beer commercial. “Banks was here.” He cracks it open and chugs. “Dude, what’s with women and their ‘eat me, eat me’?” He waves his arms with the words, and without anybody asking, anybody at all, he scars our brains with, “I got kicked out of a girl’s bed because I stopped eating her. But what was I supposed to do? Suffer? It was like eating peppers.”

Reyna, Camille, and I sound out noises of disgust as Julian laughs out with a pointed expression, “I thought you liked them ripe.”

Banks swallows another chug. “Yeah,ripe. Not spicy.”

I’m only aware that my mouth is silent laughing when Banks flings his arm around my shoulder and says, “Dude, you like me.” I flatten my mouth with a hard stare as he flings his other arm around Julian’s shoulder, pulling us all way too close together. “And if you’d justadmit it, the three of us? We’d be unstoppable.” He waggles his brows at both of us and Julian meets my scrunched face with a laugh and a coaxing head tilt.

I twist my mouth to the side like I’m considering, and when I can’t stand Banks’s face so close to mine a moment longer, I shrug his arm off. “Three’s a crowd.”

A knock at the door allows my escape and I rush to answer it, hoping this guy stays several feet away from me the rest of this night.

30

Unpleasant Surprise

Reyna

I twiddle my fingers against the sides of my filled plate, feeling like I’m back inside my father’s gallery as I watch my friends and family taste test my spaghetti meal.

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