Page 100 of Fall for Me

I swallowed, fresh tears running down my cheeks, as I stared out at the sliver of silver water in the distance.

A memory hit me then, one I hadn’t thought of in years.

“Do you remember that time Jude took one of my sketchbooks?” I asked. “He was going on that fishing trip with his friends and he took my backpack because he couldn’t find his. It had my sketchbook in it. I’d been eleven, making Jude…” I did the math. “Thirteen, so you were… seventeen?”

Eli nodded.

He lost everything—all Dad’s fishing equipment. My pack. My book.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Eli said.

Of course he did. It had been a huge thing. It turned out that Jude and his friends had capsized their canoe—the canoe they weren’t supposed to have taken. Mom and Dad were furious. Not that he’d come home empty-handed, but that he’d put himself in such danger. I remembered Mom and Dad’s faces. They hadn’t just been angry. They’d been panicked.

Suddenly, it dawned on me. “It was because of what had happened to the Reilly’s, wasn’t it?”

Eli nodded. “They were paranoid about us being in the canoe after that happened.”

My chest tightened. That accident—it had affected everyone.

“You went out to look for it,” I said, remembering. “The sketchbook. You and… Seamus.” I’d forgotten all about that part.

Eli leaned back in his seat. “It was Seamus’s idea. I said it was stupid—it would be long gone, ruined in the water anyway. But he insisted we look. Even though I knew just looking at the river gave him panic attacks after…” He trailed off.

I pressed a hand to my mouth. Seamus had wanted to help me, even back then. He’d been so good. Always so good, even in his own grief.

Eli rested his forearms on the steering wheel.

“Mom took Seamus in. Do you remember that? His own mom was like a ghost after Kev died, and Mom always made me make sure Seamus was invited everywhere we went. She always sent him home with food for his family. She loved him.”

“So do I,” I whispered.

Eli froze, examining me.

I shifted my gaze to meet his, the truth feeling like a liberation. Like air I hadn’t been able to access before. “I love him too, Eli. Like, I really love him. I’m in love with him.” I laughed, through the tears, then the laughter died. “I just didn’t know it.”

“You mean that, Chelsea? You’re not just…”

“Into him? Going to be done with him in a couple weeks?” I shook my head. “I’ve never known this feeling before, Eli.” It’s why I didn’t recognize it. Why I kept trying to pass it off as me being overwhelmed or confused. Why it took me this long.

Eli smiled, a little sadly. “It feels like getting knocked on your ass and catapulted into the sky at the same time.”

“Yeah.” That was exactly it. “And plummeting back to earth at the same time.”

Eli grimaced. I knew he’d had his heart broken by Kelly, his ex-wife. But I was pretty sure the same thing had happened with Reese, our restaurant manager. Only he’d ended things with her—badly—so things were more than a little hostile between them.

Then Eli looked even more pained, his forehead. “Seamus told you he’s going to New York, right?”

“Yeah. That’s why he told me it was over.”

“He what?” Eli stiffened, his hands clenching on the wheel. “What the hell? That doesn’t make any sense. I see the way… I know he feels the same way, Chels.”

Once again, I shook my head. “It was the right thing to do, Eli. He did it for me.”

“We can go back there right now, and either you tell him to take it back or I will.”

“Eli!” I exclaimed. “No. I want to be… I told you the other day, I need to figure some things out first. But it’s more than that. I want to be able to stand on my own two feet. Before I… I relied on Mom, and when I lost her, I was unmoored. Now I don’t want to be codependent. I want to be independent, so I can be a stronger person for…” Seamus. “For whoever I end up with. I don’t want that person to think I’m going to fall apart when hard things happen.”

Like people leaving. Or dying.

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