Falling Into You (Falling 1)

She finishes unbraiding her hair and shakes it out, combs through it with her fingers. “You should go,” she says, disappearing into the bedroom. I hear cloth rustling and hit the ground. “I have class.”

I’m a shameless ass**le. I know this, because only a shameless ass**le would move around the counter to see into her room. Which is what I do. She’s in a matching bra and panties set, pink with black polka dots. Facing away from me, tight round ass so delectably perfect in the boyshort panties. Oh god, oh god. She feels my presence, twists her neck to glare at me.

“Well you’re an ass**le.”

“Should’ve closed your door.”

“I told you to leave.” She reaches into a drawer and unfolds a pair of jeans, steps into them.

Watching a girl dress is almost as hot as watching her strip.

“But I didn’t and you knew it.”

“I didn’t think you’d blatantly watch me change. Fucking pervert.”

I grin at her, the smile my buddies call the panty-dropper. “I’m not a pervert. I just appreciate art.”

She smirks. “Smooth, Colton. Very smooth.”

I grin. No one calls me Colton. No one. I’m Colt. “It wasn’t a line, Nell. It was the truth.” I turn up the wattage on the smile, stepping toward her.

She tenses, clutching a pale blue T-shirt in white-knuckle fists. “What are you doing?”

I don’t answer. I continue toward her, step by deliberate step. I feel like predator, a lion stalking prey. Her eyes grow wide, doe eyes. Her nostrils flare, her hands twist the shirt, her br**sts swell as she breathes deeply, swelling until they threaten to spill out. God I wish they would. Like I said, shameless. She’s just inside the room, which is tiny. Barely space for the bed and dresser. I’m inches away from her again, and I could see her ni**les if I looked down, probably. At the very least, I’d be treated to a huge expanse of porcelain cle**age. I don’t look though. I meet her eyes, let my raw desire, my weltering boil of emotions show in my gaze as I reach past her. My hand brushes her shoulder just beside her bra strap as I grasp the edge of the door. I’m so close, now. Her br**sts are touching my chest, my arm touching both her shoulder and ear. Her eyes slide closed, breaking the contact, and I hear her breath catch. She wilts slightly, the tension bleeding out of her, and she tilts her head to rest against my arm.

Her eyes flick open, bright with renewed determination, and she straightens so she’s not touching me. I pull the door closed between us. Just before I step out of her front door, I take one of my business card from my wallet and set in on the table, on top of the packet of guitar strings. I close her apartment door with deliberate noise, so she’ll know I left.

The walk back to the subway and the subsequent ride to my apartment in Queens is long, providing me with too much time to ask myself exactly what the f**k I’m getting myself into. Nell is bad news. She’s got major damage, a baggage train a mile long. And so do I.

I toss my guitar on the bed and go downstairs to the shop. I set my phone in the dock and blast Black Label Society’s “Stillborn” loud enough to drown my thoughts as I throw myself in the 396 big block I’m rebuilding. It’s for a classic ’69 Camaro, which didn’t mean shit to me until Nell showed up, and then all I can think of is Kyle’s Camaro, which I restored from a bucket of rust in a junk heap into mint condition, and then left behind when I moved here.

I loved that car, and it hurt so bad to leave it behind, but Dad had paid for it, so I couldn’t take it. Never mind that every penny of the parts came from me, or that I’d spent the blood, sweat and tears to restore it. The seed money came from Dad, and if I moved to New York instead of attending Harvard, then I brought nothing but what I bought myself. That was the deal.

At least Kyle took care of it.

I snorted as I thought of Dad’s expectation that I go to Harvard. He’d actually thought that would happen. Fucking ridiculous. Even now, almost ten years later, I can’t fathom what went through his head. I’d fit in at Harvard like a bull in china shop.

My thoughts return to Nell. Sanding piston rings is boring busy work, so of course I can’t help but think of her. Of her sweet crystalline voice and her piercing green-gray eyes and her fine, fine body. Goddamn it, I’m in trouble. Especially when I think of the deep-seated ache in her gaze, in the desperate way she drank that whiskey, as if the numbness was a friend, as if the burn was a welcome respite from reality. I know that pain, and I want to take it from her. I want to know her thoughts, know what haunts her.

I mean, of course I know. Kyle died, and she saw it happen. But that’s not really it. Something else drives her. Something else eats at her, some guilt. And I want to know what, so I can absolve her of it. Which, of course, is impossible and stupid and reckless.

I set the 400-grit sandpaper down and inspect the ring, finding it ground down to my satisfaction. The headers are the next item of business, and those too only take a portion of my attention, so my thoughts are free to roam back to the way she leaned her head on my arm for a split second, as if wishing she could let herself go, let herself lean further. But she didn’t, and I can’t help but respect her for that, even I know her strength is false, propped up by the shaky girders of old man Jack.

One day soon, those girders will collapse, and her world will crumble, and I know I have to be there when that happens.

Chapter 7: Cuts; Pain for Pain

One week later

I’m perched on a barstool in a midtown hole-in-the-wall bar, strumming my guitar and playing an original song. No one is listening, but I don’t care. It’s enough to play for the love of the music, for the chance to feel the notes fly out and bounce off minds and hearts. I take that back, there is one person listening: the bartender, a girl I knew for a long time and finally hooked up with a couple times a few months ago. We weren’t really compatible, and it turned into an odd sort of friendship, wherein she gets me to play on Thursdays nights in return for a hundred bucks and free drinks and some harmless flirtation that never goes further. Kelly, her name is. Beautiful girl, good in bed, funny, and slings a damn good Jack and Coke. But we just didn’t click in the bedroom. We never really figured out what it was, other than just…not quite right. But we enjoy each other’s company and have some good, much-needed laughs. So she’s listening, and I’m playing for her. It’s a song about her actually, about a girl with long black hair and bright brown eyes and coffee-colored skin and a sweet smile and a rocking body who will never be more than a friend. It’s an odd song, kind of lonely and sad but touched with humor.