Falling Into Us (31 page)

I drew the moment out, lifting my hips slightly so he nearly slipped out, neither of us breathing, letting the contents of our hearts exchange silently between our eyes. I sank down with a whimper, resting my forehead against his, mouth wide in a breathless scream. I curled my fingers into fists around his, squeezing as hard as I could, setting an immediately frantic rhythm above him. He met me stroke for stroke, never taking his eyes off mine, breathing with me, sighing with me, giving me exactly what I needed.

When the second wave came, I fell onto him, clinging to his neck with both arms, my lips at his ear, our hips crushing together as we climaxed in unison.

“God, Jason…I love you. S-so,
so
much.” I was nearly weeping with the intensity of the love rippling between us.
 

I felt, in that moment, that our souls had crashed together and merged, like every aspect of our minds, hearts, bodies, and souls were bleeding together. I knew I’d never love anyone the way I loved Jason, and I knew I’d never try.

“I love you, too, Beck.”

I took his face in my hands. “Promise me you’ll love me forever. No matter what.”

He caught the desperation in my eyes, my voice, and he didn’t question it, didn’t hesitate for a split second. “I can’t promise you forever, Beck.” Tears started in my eyes at what sounded like a rejection, but he kissed them away, silencing me by speaking over my protest. “I can’t promise you forever, because that’s not long enough.”

I laughed into his mouth, giggling and sniffling against him, clinging to his neck with all my weight resting on his strong, hard body. “Good. Longer than forever I can work with.”

He laughed and held me tight, his arms around my back and across my backside. With a tug, he tossed the blankets over us, and I turned my face to the side, his chest my pillow. I fell asleep like that, and knew then that I’d never want to fall asleep any other way.

THIRTEEN: When the Bough Breaks

Becca

February, two years later

Time passed in a blur. That first summer home from college, I did end up moving in with Jason in my brother’s somewhat dingy two-bedroom apartment. My parents, as predicted, lost their shit completely, but when I still came home to do laundry and spend time with them, making sure to include Jason in all family get-togethers, they eventually came around. It turned into a “don’t ask don’t tell” sort of situation, and it worked. We went back to U of M in the fall and lived in separate dorm rooms for that first semester of our sophomore year. Jason got a part-time job as a janitor at a local high school, and I ended up in the tutoring center.
 

We went home for holidays and stayed with Ben and Kate, who managed to hang on to the apartment through the school year just so we’d have somewhere stress-free to stay. My brother was doing better than I’d ever seen him. He was an assistant manager at the Belle Tire, sober, and managing his mood swings with only occasional use of prescribed medication in extenuating circumstances. Kate really was a miracle worker when it came to Ben, and I loved her like a sister. She was one of the tallest girls I’d ever met, standing over six feet. She was willowy, slim with long auburn hair, pretty gray eyes, and a wide, always-smiling mouth. She never had an unkind word for anyone, and seemed totally devoted to my brother. She was one of those people who never bought anything that isn’t 100-percent
 
organic, supplementing a vegetarian diet with a plethora of vitamins and shakes. She did yoga religiously, and got me hooked on it. She had a way of defusing even the worst of Ben’s manic rages, and she could lift him out of the worst depressions with a few whispered words. She never lost patience with him, never took his snapped insults to heart when he was in the grip of a mood swing. The only time I ever saw her lose her temper was when she caught Ben with a joint in his cigarette pack. She wigged the hell out, packed a bag, and walked out without so much as a backward glance. She didn’t actually go anywhere, though. She hopped in her car and drove around the block a few times, and then sat in the apartment parking lot, waiting for Ben to apologize. Which he did, abjectly, begging Kate to come home and never leave him again.
 

The worrier in me saw an element of codependency in their relationship, because I didn’t think Ben could maintain his lifestyle without Kate at his side. But she was always there for him, so it worked, I supposed. If she ever got tired of Ben’s bipolar mess, though, I worried he’d regress to his days as a stoned-out drug addict.
 

As for Nell? She seemed to improve with time. She finished a basic liberal arts associates degree from OCC, worked her way up to a mid-level manager’s position within her father’s company on her own merits, and seemed to be doing okay. She never reached out to me about cutting, and I never caught her doing it again, even when I surprise-visited her every once in a while. I saw scars on her wrists sometimes, and every once in a while she’d have a Band-aid on her forearm, but she claimed it was a slip, that she’d stopped cutting for the most part.
 

At the start of our senior year, Jason and I decided to move out of campus housing. We found a one-bedroom apartment a few miles from campus but not too far from the high school where Jason worked. My job was on campus and our schedules tended to coincide for the most part, so we got along with just Jason’s truck, which now had almost two hundred thousand miles on it. Those first months together in our apartment were the happiest of my life. I went to bed in his arms, and woke up in them. I was an early riser, whereas I discovered Jason hated mornings with a passion, unable to so much as hold a conversation until he’d had at least two cups of coffee. I always considered myself a neat person, but it turned out Jason was the one who did most of the cleaning. He claimed it was because if he didn’t clean his house growing up, it wouldn’t get done, since his mom didn’t care and his dad was a drunk.
 

I had a straight 4.0 GPA at the start of the spring semester, and I had applications out to a dozen of the best universities for post-graduate work in speech-language pathology research. Jason was still breaking football records, and had scouts for half a dozen NFL teams watching every game he played.
 

If I had to pick a word for our lives, up until February of our junior year at U of M, I’d have called it idyllic. I filled thirty-six composition books with poetry during those years, and Jason had a portfolio of breathtaking photography and was warming up to my suggestions that he think about trying to sell a few of them. Football was his passion, but to me photography was his true talent. He could capture so much in a single photograph. He focused on macroscopic shots primarily, closeups of everyday objects, especially insects and flowers. He had a few closeups of flowers that reminded me eerily of some of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, which he said was his intention. His photography major included a heavy dose of art and art history, and he seemed to absorb it all like a sponge.
 

Then, one Sunday morning in mid-February, Kate called me.

“Becca? I’m worried about Ben.” Her soft, quiet voice sounded panicked.

“Why? What’s going on?” I set aside my textbook and sat up on the couch where I’d been studying.

“He’s not answering my phone calls. We…we had an argument, a bad one. He left, and I thought…I thought he was just going out to cool down, but it’s been three hours and he’s not back, not answering my calls or texts. He knows that worries me, and he always texts me back right away.”

“Was it bad enough that he’d…regress? Like, relapse?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I hope not, but I’m worried. Is there anywhere he’d go that you know of?”

I racked my brain. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, I can’t think of anything.” I sighed, worrying at my lip, trying to think of something I’d know that Kate wouldn’t. “If I think of anything, I’ll let you know. Are you worried enough that you want me to come down and help you look for him?”

She hedged. “I don’t want to worry you, and I know you’re busy getting ready for finals, but…no. Not yet. If I don’t hear from him soon, I’ll let you know.”

“Ben used to disappear for days at a time,” I told her. “I never knew where he went, honestly. I guess I assumed he had, like, secret druggie hang-outs or something. Since he’s been with you, that stuff has stopped. But if he was mad enough to have a relapse, he might go back to one of his old hangouts. I just don’t know where that is or who to ask. I stayed out of his life, in that sense.”

Kate moaned. “He hasn’t seen anybody he used to party with in, god, a year and a half. Aside from the time I found that pinner in his Pall Malls, the only really big fight we’ve ever gotten in was a few months after I started dating him. He’d been sober for a while, and we’d talked about his drug problem, and I told him if he really wanted to stop the temptation to do drugs, he had to cut off his association with people who did them. So he stopped hanging out with his party friends. Then he hung out with an old friend who I knew for a fact was a hard-core stoner, and I got mad at him. He said he hadn’t smoked, but that wasn’t the point—it was just being around people who smoked. Eventually he’d relapse.”

“Well, you might want to check with someone like that.” I hesitated, then blurted, “What were you fighting about?”

“His cigarettes. I asked him if he’d ever quit those, too, and he got mad. He said he’d given up everything else for me, so why should he give up those, too? He stormed out when I reminded him that he had quit drugs for him, not me.”

“That’s it?”

She sniffed. “That’s the Cliff’s Notes version. There was a lot more to it.” Kate sighed. “He’ll come back. I know he will.”

“Keep me updated, okay?”

“Okay, I will. ’Bye, Becca.”

“’Bye.” I hung up and set the phone on the coffee table, but I didn’t go back to studying.
 

I was worried now. The longer I thought about it, the harder the knot of fear in my stomach became. Eventually I got back to studying, but my mind wasn’t totally in it.
 

Later that day, during dinner with Jason, Kate texted me:
He’s back now. Stoned.Says it was only a little pot to calm him down. Im so mad but dont know what to do.
 

I sighed and showed the message to Jason. I’d explained the phone call to him after he’d gotten back from his run, and he’d agreed that if we hadn’t heard from Kate by tonight, we’d have to think about going down to look for Ben.

I texted back:
At least he’s back and it wasn’t hard drugs.

Yeah, but for him weed really is a gateway drug to worse things.

I know,
I responded,
but I also know he loves you, and he won’t want to risk losing you. Maybe remind him of that, without making it a threat?
 

After a pause, Kate responded:
Good point. I’ll try that. Thanks.

A few weeks passed and things seemed to have settled a bit, as I hadn’t heard anything else from Kate. Jason and I decided to head down for the weekend to check on them. Both Ben and Kate were at work when we got in, so we unpacked some of our clothes and went for a drive, ending up at the old oak tree, where we made love in the cab of his truck for old time’s sake. When we got back, Ben was home, sitting on the front step of the apartment building, smoking a cigarette, smoke mixing with the steam from his breath.
 

I nodded for Jason to go on in and sat down next to Ben. He looked pale, thinner than I’d last seen him, and his eyes held the old glint of tamped-down anger.
 

“Hey, you,” I said, bumping him with my shoulder.

“’Sup, Beck.” He didn’t look at me, flicking the filter of his cigarette with his thumb so a chunk of ash fell between his feet.

“So, how are you?” I wasn’t sure how to broach the conversation now that I was here. He looked like shit, but I’d never say so outright.

“Kate send you?” He sounded petulant, morose.

“No, I haven’t seen Kate. She’s still at work, isn’t she?”

“Fuck if I know. She left.”

I was stunned. I thought Kate would have told me if she was leaving Ben. “Why? When? Why would she leave?”

“Stupid shit. She never understood how smoking helps me. I tried, Beck. I really did. But it was just never good enough for her. No matter what I did, it wasn’t good enough for Miss Perfect Kate Yearling.”
 

“So you’re smoking again?”
 

He shot a
well, duh
glance at me, lifting his cigarette in gesture. “I never quit, thus Kate moving out.”

“No, I meant…I meant pot.”

“Oh. No…well, yeah, but that started after she left.”

I frowned in confusion. “She moved out and broke up with you over cigarettes? You were clean otherwise?”

“It’s fucking complicated, okay? I don’t need you breathing down my neck, too.”

“I’m not…I’m sorry, I’m not trying to breathe down your neck. I’m just confused.”

“What’s confusing to you? I’m a bipolar fucking mess. She got sick of my bullshit, just like I knew she would.” He finished his cigarette and lit another with the butt of the first.
 

“But…that doesn’t make sense. She loves you.”

“Loved. Emphasis on past tense, sis. It’s over. I haven’t seen her in two weeks. I’m losing the apartment because my stupid job at Belle Tire isn’t enough for a two-bedroom, and they don’t have any one-bedrooms left. I don’t know where I’m gonna go. I’ll live in my car, I guess. Won’t be the first fucking time. So yeah, sorry, but you and Jason will have find somewhere else to crash.”

I sensed there was more to the story, and I had to find it. “Ben, please. Talk to me. There has to more to this than you’re saying.”

He flinched visibly when I touched his arm. “Yeah, well…there’s no point, okay? More to the story or not, it’s over. She’s not coming back, and I’m fucking lost without her.” He shot to his feet and walked away, long black hair loose around his shoulder, obviously unwashed. He was wearing a Belle Tire mechanic’s jumpsuit, stained with grease. Which was odd, since last I heard he was an assistant manager.