The Year We Fell Down (17 page)

She set down her mug. “Corey! You don’t really mean that.”

Of course I meant it, one hundred percent. Guys bragged about bedding trophy girls. Girls like Stacia. Even as I formed this thought, Stacia’s face appeared under the arched doorway to the hall. The dismay must have shown in my expression, because Dana turned around to look over her shoulder.

If possible, the girl was even more stunning than I’d remembered her. Her long, honey-colored hair fell in curtains down her shoulders. Her model-perfect face was made up in a way that was just not seen in the dining hall on a Saturday morning during finals. She wore a clingy black turtleneck sweater over a plaid wool skirt cut to mid thigh. Her high-heeled black suede boots reached way up, over her knees. Between the boots and the skirt stretched a good six inches of smooth, creamy leg.

Her perfect fucking legs.

The moment that Stacia found Hartley, her face lit up, and she began to prance across the dining hall toward him. His table fell silent, and I couldn’t look away. Beaming, she walked around behind his chair. “Well, give us a kiss, Hartley,” she said in an affected voice, which proved she knew she was the center of attention.

Into the silence, Hartley mimicked, “
Give us a kiss, Hartley
. What, there’s more than one of you to service now?” His friends laughed.

Then, as everyone watched, he pushed back his chair and stood. Stacia took his face in her hands and kissed him full on the mouth.

And he kissed her back.

While his friends hooted, he cupped his hands on her face and closed his eyes. It went on and on.

The world went a little fuzzy at the edges until Dana pinched my hand. “Corey,” she said, her voice low. “
Breathe
.”

But it was difficult, because I felt as if a vice was squeezing my chest.

“Should we just go?” she asked me.

I forced myself to look only at Dana. “No.” It would be too obvious if I got up and bolted from the room. I wished I could sink into the floor instead.

Dana took the newspaper and studied it. “We need an eight letter word for a boat trip. Starts with a C.”

“Um,” I forced a deep breath into my lungs. “Cruise. Cruising? No —
crossing
.”

“That’s it,” she said. “And the G at the end starts a Greek food.”

“Gyros,” I said automatically.

“You’re on a roll.”

I gripped my coffee cup. “I didn’t think.” What I meant was,
I didn’t think it would hurt this much
.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “Deep breaths.”

Over at Hartley’s table, they’d found Stacia a chair. I could hear her whiny voice. “But Hartley, you said you’d take me to the Christmas Ball.”

“And
you
said you were coming on my birthday,” he returned, humor in his voice.

“Interesting choice of words,” Bridger put in.

“You don’t have to dance,” she said. “You are only there to look good in a suit.”

“Well, in that case,” he said, his voice humming out the same patient, half-amused smirk I’d heard on move-in day as he dealt with her. He spoke to her the way an indulgent father speaks to his little girl.

It was not at all the way he sounded talking to me.

“So where were you, anyway?” he asked her.

“I would have come up from New York,” she said, “but Marco had theater tickets.”

“
Who
did?” Bridger cut in.

“My ride.”

“Interesting choice of words,” Hartley said. “But you know, they’ve invented these things called trains…”

“I thought of that,” she sighed. “But I had
so
much luggage.”

“Now
that
I believe,” Hartley chuckled.

Across from me, Dana just shook her head. “The evil one wins.”

“Okay,” I said, pressing my palms against the ancient wood of the table. “I’m ready to go now.”

Chapter Fifteen:
The Ass Crack of the Year

—
Corey

When I told Dana that I was ready to leave, I wasn’t kidding around. I needed to put a meaningful distance between Hartley and my crumbling heart. Fortunately, Christmas vacation was about to hand me the perfect excuse.

But first, exams. I hadn’t wheedled and begged my way to Harkness to blow it during the first semester.

For the next two days, I worked my butt off in the main library. From a study carrel deep in the stacks, it was impossible to listen for Hartley’s voice in the hallway, or wonder whether he’d turn up to play RealStix. I ate take-out salads from the coffee shop and studied like a maniac.

Even my hope fairy took up the cause, fluttering between chapters of my calculus textbook, spouting theorems. She put on a tiny pair of glasses and perched on the lid of my travel coffee mug. Even better, she didn’t mention Hart-throb’s name. Not even once.

I turned in my take-home exams early, and then turned my attention to economics. When I sat for the exam on the morning of the tenth, I was so well prepared that having Hartley seated beside me wasn’t too much of a distraction. I finished before the time allotted. When I wheeled out of the exam, he looked up.

I gave him a quick wave, because it hurt to look at him directly. And then I was gone.

He texted me fifteen minutes later.
Celebratory lunch at Commons? On my way over there
. But I didn’t even reply to the text, because I was already on the phone with my mother.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, her voice breathless.

It wasn’t. Not really. But I would never admit it. “I’m fine. But I’m done early, so I changed my ticket.”

“But what about the Christmas Ball? Your brother always loved that.”

“Well,” I said, “it turns out that not everybody sticks around for it.”

“Okay, Sweetie.” Her voice was uneasy. She wrote down my new flight number and time. And I went back to my room and packed.

By the time the Christmas Ball got underway, I was in the air over the Great Lakes.

Being home for three weeks was boring, but boring was just what my broken heart needed.

Thankfully, my mother didn’t dote on me as much as she had the summer before. Not only was I used to doing things for myself again, but she’d had more than three months in an empty nest.

I was careful to smile and tell my parents how well everything at Harkness was going. And I was careful not to brood. I even volunteered to make Christmas cookies with my mom, finally making use of all the handicap accessible changes my folks had made to their kitchen after my accident.

But when I was alone — lying in my new main floor bedroom, or staring out the passenger-side window of our car — my mind always went back to Hartley’s birthday. I would relive the sensuous slide of his lips against mine, and the stroke of his tongue. When he touched me, I’d felt it everywhere. How was it possible for him to kiss me like that, and not want to do it again?

Obviously, he’d felt nothing, and I tried hard to make sense of that. I forced myself to replay Stacia’s reappearance in my mind, remembering how avidly he’d kissed her. I even made myself calculate how many hours had elapsed between the moment he had gasped with pleasure in my bed and then stuck his tongue in her mouth.

It was fourteen hours. Give or take.

The word
paralysis
kept running through my mind. His heart was like my unfeeling toes. I felt Hartley’s touch all the way through, but he hadn’t felt mine at all.

For Christmas, my parents gave me a new laptop — a smaller, lighter model — and I had a good time setting it up. Of course, it came with a lecture from my mother.

“The therapist says you need more time in your braces. We thought this would be easier to carry around when you’re walking.”

“Thanks,” I sighed.

“While you’re home, I booked seven sessions at the River Center.”

“Mom! Don’t I even get a vacation?”

“Not from physical therapy,” she said. “But if you want, you can do all of them in the pool instead of the gym. To mix it up a bit.”

I put my proverbial foot down. “No! Just…no.”

“Corey, you’re being unreasonable.”

I didn’t want to argue with her. I just rolled out of the room.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t much easier talking to my father. He was in the midst of his hockey season, which I’d been following online. The girls were doing really well this year, but he did not want to talk about it with me. When I tried to make conversation, I received only monosyllabic responses.

“Dad,” I said one night when we were all watching TV in a semi-comfortable silence. “Have you ever played RealStix?”

“The video game? No,” he said, surprised. “Have you?”

“It’s a lot of fun, actually. My neighbor — the guy with the broken leg — he taught me.”

“Adam Hartley?” my mother asked. “I remember him. He’s quite a looker.”

“Marion!” my father said, laughing.

“I call ‘em as I see ‘em,” my mother said, which made me laugh. And then I noticed something important. For the first time since my accident, my mother didn’t look tense.

“Anyway, we’re friends,” I said. “And we play a lot of hockey on the screen. Since neither one of us can play the real thing.”

There. I’d said it out loud.

My father picked up the remote and shut the TV off. There was silence as he turned to study me. “And that’s fun for you?”

I nodded.

He hesitated, deciding. “Well, where can we get one?”

We bought RealStix at Best Buy that very night. That was one clue that things were still weird at my house. My very thrifty parents had been spending money like water since my accident. They renovated the house, they bought me every device and distraction I pointed to. So even though Christmas had just come and gone, my father handed over his credit card for a video game console.

Coach Callahan quickly became a RealStix fan, too. And when my brother Damien came home for a long weekend over New Years, he played as well.

But I could easily beat them both. After all, I’d learned from the master.

Hell and damn it. I was thinking about Hartley
again
. That had to stop.

—
Hartley

I woke up on New Years Eve lying naked in what felt like a cloud. In reality, it was a big guest bedroom in the east wing of Stacia’s mansion. I was alone, because whenever I stayed in Greenwich they put me in a room by myself. Her parents weren’t idiots — they probably knew that we had sex. But they wanted plausible deniability.

I didn’t take it personally. If they wanted to pretend that their baby girl would never fill the jacuzzi tub in her private bathroom and then perform a strip tease for me, that was their prerogative. Good thing they’d been out to a lengthy dinner party the night before.

In my guest room, the sheets were made out of some kind of ridiculously soft cotton. I’d heard Stacia and her mom yammering about thread count once. Seeing as I was twenty-one years old and in possession of a dick, there was no way I paid attention to a conversation like that. But whenever I slept at chez Beacon, I had to admit that their obsession with European bed linens had its merits.

Since my boot cast had finally been removed the day after Christmas, I woke up truly naked, my morning wood brushing the sheets, my feet free to tangle in them.

Delicious.

My mind wandered. I was mostly healed from my injury now. The leg was always sore at the end of the day, and my range of motion wasn’t perfect yet. But it was progress. I’d just gotten a note from the Harkness College housing office informing me that they weren’t going to bother reassigning me to a room in Beaumont until next year. So I’d be keeping my oversized single, with the private bathroom and the double bed.

Thinking about McHerrin made me think about Corey. Which meant that I was suddenly thinking about her while lying buck-ass naked with a big boner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time. For the past two weeks, I kept flashing back to that night in her bed, to the way she felt against my body. When I touched her, she’d made the most erotic sigh I’d heard
in my life
. It was hard to forget a detail like that.

Truthfully, it was just plain
hard
.

And when I really felt like torturing myself, I thought of that intense moment earlier on that night, when she bent over me and… Damn, I’d felt a jolt like never before.
That’s for calling me chicken
, she’d said. The fire in her eyes when she’d said it made me want to lose my mind.

Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it?

Seriously, we really hadn’t done all that much. It was just a little hook up. People did that all the time, right? Admittedly, it wasn’t just a drunk and horny flailing. I cared a lot for Corey, but that was only partly why I started it. The things she’d told me about her troubles had really weighed on my mind. More than anything, I wanted her to know that she was one hundred percent sexy. I thought I could prove it to her, and then I did.