Page 2 of Falling Backwards (The Edge of Us #1)

“What?”

Surprised, I look between our server, who’s walking away, and Paxton, who’s dying laughing across the table from me.

“What the hell!”

“Oh my God,”

he barely gets out, one hand smacking onto his chest.

“That’s…that’s what you get, dude!”

I peer to the bar and lock eyes with Duncan. He’s an awesome bartender, but he has just done me wrong. Grinning, he points at me, clearly not feeling bad because he’s in agreement with my friend.

Well, I’m a bartender myself and I probably would’ve done the same thing he’s done.

Still, I repeat.

“What. The. Hell.”

Paxton wheezes out another.

“That’s what you get.”

Yeah, I haven’t truly been done wrong.

It wasn’t my intention to make Maggie drop her drink, but it was a direct result of me creeping up on her with the intention of getting a big jump out of her.

I was on my way back from the bathroom when I decided to have a moment of innocent fun at her expense; work was garbage today on top of our usual quarreling, and I never got what I think of as ‘the shoulder drop’ from her, so I rather wanted it.

It’s entertaining to me.

Didn’t get it at her booth either, though.

Just got a front-row seat to her mojito bath and the green glare it brought on.

Not that that didn’t convey her aggravation to me on its own; she may be softspoken a lot of the time, but her eyes are never so quiet.

They’ll tell me what’s on her mind whether her mouth joins in or not.

Anyway, I don’t disagree with Duncan sending our server over here to tell me to pay for the drink, but it’s kind of embarrassing that he apparently saw it all go down.

I probably looked like a dumbass.

Or a jerk.

Or both.

And since I’d rather eat dirt than explain my motive, I’ll just fork over the money. No one needs to know I’m entertained by anything Maggie does.

Often wish I didn’t know it myself.

I sure don’t understand it.

I didn’t even always care about that little pose of hers, but a month or two ago she did it and something about the angle I was at and the way her hair was fixed and whatever just…I don’t know.

For some reason, that specific time resulted in a weirdly picture-perfect moment that hooked me.

But on the whole, she works my nerves.

I only realize I’ve drifted a look back over to her when her attention idly drifts up to me in return. The calmness with which she was eating her mozzarella stick instantly gives way to paused chewing and narrowed eyes.

I mime spilling my drink all over myself.

Her jaw goes slack in disbelief. She looks like she has half a mind to flip me off—but of course the other half stops her. All she ends up doing is sweeping her free fingers beneath her bangs and swinging her gaze to whatever her friend Joy is chattering about.

Still no shoulder drop.

I take my eyes off her again. Think about the harsh scar I know is on her eyebrow beneath those bangs. Suddenly remember the first time I saw her up close when I was sixteen and realized she was even prettier than I’d thought before.

And as easily as I breathe, remembering that makes me remember how I ended up hurting her.

A low sigh slips out of me.

I hadn’t meant for things to go that way. I was just….

I take a deep chug of my rum and ginger ale, but old guilt is what’s filling me up.

Until I remember how sixteen-year-old Maggie responded to what I did, that is. Then I feel old, familiar humiliation.

And then in comes the resolve I’ve been clinging to since then: she did know her actions would hurt me, but that didn’t stop her, which made her a little bit more of an asshole than I was.

Plus, even though she’s only gotten easier on the eyes as we’ve aged, working at the same place these last many months has put her and her fussy nature in my face way more often than I appreciate.

The years we spent apart between high school and her first day at Lucent did a lot in the way of numbing me to my history with her—she only crossed my mind if I was starkly reminded of her or happened to see her somewhere.

Since her first day at work, though? Oh, she’s been on my mind, all right.

It’s like I live by railroad tracks and she’s the train that keeps blaring through my easy peace and quiet. Any numbness has disappeared.

My guilt can tote its ass away, if you ask me.

“So,”

Paxton sighs.

“your dad.”

Just like that, my stomach is knotting up.

I pull a slow breath in through my nose, try not to clench my jaw like I’ve already done most of the day, try not to grip my glass too tightly.

My dad.

That bastard.

I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him.

After years of arguing with each other, my mom caught him cheating when I was twelve and again when I was fifteen.

That time, he left us for the other woman and her two kids, who were right around my age.

In the nine years since, his marriage to her has stayed happy and they’ve had a son together, who has apparently joined my stepsiblings in being my dad and Suzanna’s pride and joy.

My dad called me at seven this morning, and it wasn’t a friendly conversation.

He insisted I attend a family reunion happening soon—just me, not Mom, even though she was part of his family for longer than the other woman has been.

I already heard about the reunion last week from his sister Joni, who is the only nice person on his side of the bloodline and with whom I haven’t minded keeping in touch.

But I told him the same thing I told her: I’m not interested in traveling for hours to not only catch up with a bunch of relatives I never felt love from, but also to ‘get to know’ the people he traded me and Mom in for.

And that made him mad.

All I say back to Paxton is, “Yeah.”

“Sorry about him, man.”

“Don’t be.”

Literally. Because I’m not. All I am is done with him.

Paxton is nodding.

“Yeah…. I get it.”

I nod, too, because I value his support, but…well, he doesn’t really get it.

I impulsively griped about my dad to him today, but I haven’t told him enough about my family for him to really understand.

I’ve basically only said my parents are divorced and my dad isn’t my favorite person.

Paxton and I became friends a couple years ago when he was still a server at Lucent, but dwelling on my family drama isn’t something I like to do.

And my mom is a living, breathing angel, so even though I haven’t had heart-to-hearts with her about this either, I’ve still had good help with learning to keep my dad’s shit out of my life.

In fact, as crazy as it sounds, the only person who knows how hard I was hit by my dad’s old actions? Maggie Moss.

Not that I’ll bother cluing her in on him trying to talk to me.

To this day, I resent teenage-me feeling comfortable enough to tell teenage-her about the weight I felt because of him.

I hadn’t spoken of it to anyone else and hadn’t planned on letting her change that—and sure, she genuinely cared back then—if I think about it, I can still feel exactly how gently she—

No.

I pop my neck, then my knuckles.

None of our good times matter. We don’t have gentleness or comfort or up-close moments with each other anymore. Maybe she’d understand about my dad more than Paxton if I told her…or maybe she’d find a way to use it against me again.

Trusting her with that stuff had turned out to be a mistake I won’t make a second time. It’s not her business and not something I want to make her business.

Besides, no, it’s neither here nor there with us these days.

Thinking about her and my dad at once brings back how my current day with her started.

I tried to go back to sleep after he called since I didn’t have to work until later, but I couldn’t.

I stayed in a bleary mood up until it was time for the distraction of my job, to which I was late because a cop pulled me over for my more-pause-than-stop at a stop sign.

And when I finally got clocked in, Maggie overheard me telling the assistant manager why I was late, so after Ronald walked away, she took the first opportunity to quietly mock me for not knowing the difference between stopping and yielding.

I hissed back at her.

“I know what a fucking stop sign means.”

“Are you sure?”

she countered.

“Seems like if you do, you would’ve stopped at that one.”

That led to a short argument.

She’s been a rule follower for as long as I’ve known her, and it didn’t always irritate me, but it does these days.

There’s no way she obeys every traffic law to a T—there’s just no way.

I refused to believe it.

Her response was that no one is perfect but that she tries hard to drive as carefully and respectfully as she can.

And to be honest, I was more than ready to grill her about it, but then I remembered how she got the scars on her eyebrow and neck: she was in a close call of a wreck in the tenth grade.

And…well, that’s why the argument was short.

I let it fizzle because being cruel about an experience like that would’ve been heartless—even towards her—and that ain’t me.

I may have ended up flat-out telling my dad to go fuck himself this morning, but my apple fell far from the rotten half of the Bramhill family tree.

Anyway, for about an hour after that tussle, work was okay.

Then the place got wild by Lucent standards, which doesn’t normally happen in a reservations-only restaurant.

It wasn’t fun.

It’s one thing to have a full book for the day, and it’s something else to have three big parties basically happening on top of each other, involving rich people using their celebrations as an excuse to get drunk and loud.

I’m not even quite sure how that happened.

We’ve never accommodated so many gatherings so close together because we don’t want anything to get out of hand.

But both hostesses working at the time said they didn’t handle those reservations, so either it was the new girl who was off today or someone was lying to cover their ass.

And since one of tonight’s two hostesses was Maggie, that narrows it down further, because I honestly believe she didn’t do it.

She hasn’t had her job as long as I’ve had mine, but she still knows it backwards and forwards and she respects the general rules too much to let something like that slip through the cracks.

So whoever did let it slip through really slammed us.

The reservations had to be honored and Mr.

Polk, the owner-slash-manager, is out of town until tomorrow and wasn’t around to keep things under control.

The assistant manager is somewhere between a pushover and a douchebag, so unlike the big boss, he doesn’t often side with us employees or force customers to rein in their behavior.

We all—even Maggie and the other hostess—were left wide open to the entitled attitudes that came with the boozy groups today.

To illustrate some of how it went….

One of the two brides-to-be threw a fit when her server chuckled at a joke someone made about the wedding colors being ugly.

Ronald cared most about pleasing the big money spenders, so my colleagues and I couldn’t offer many solutions to other patrons who were annoyed by the craziness.

And the only way my fellow bartender and I could convince Ronald to cut off people’s drinking was to bluntly remind him of the dire consequences and huge fines that could come of us overserving, and we all still got an earful from him after he got several earfuls from the partiers.

It was a long, tiring, aggravating shift.

The only bright spots were the tips we brought in and how funny Maggie looked when I rounded the corner to the bathrooms and surprised her.

She swears I snuck up on her, but I didn’t.

I also have no idea how she stumbled and scraped her hand on the wall, since we hadn’t been avoiding a full-body crash or anything.

The expression on her face got me good, though.

That was the first time I had laughed in what seemed like forever.

Obviously, she wasn’t amused at all.

And damn, would I have appreciated the shoulder drop just then.

Like, I can even imagine exactly where it would’ve gone in the sequence of events: I turned the corner and somehow spooked her from several feet away, and she jumped a mile and lost her balance and knocked her hand into the wall, and I laughed at the goofy deer-in-headlights look on her face, and right there is where she could’ve dropped her shoulders and cocked out one hip and tilted her head and given me that certain stare like—

“What’s up?”

Paxton says.

I look up and find he’s talking to me. I’ve been gazing unseeingly at the table.

With a shake of my head, I reply, “Nothing.”

I trade my mixed drink for my glass of water and recall a conversation we started some time ago.

“So your brother broke your PS4 again?”

“Oh my God.”

His frustration returns in full along with his frown.

“He did! Why did I let him borrow this one after he broke the first one? I knew not to let him borrow it! I’m not sure if I’m more pissed at him or at myself!”

I shake my head again, just as confused as he is, because I warned him.

His brother isn’t much younger than we are, but he’s bad about not taking care of nice things and even worse at paying back what he breaks.

What he’s good at is making promises that sound solid, particularly when it comes to wanting Paxton to share his video game collection.

“Fuck, man. Kingdom Hearts 3….”

One of his hands lifts to get our server’s attention while the other knocks back the rest of his beer.

I wince.

“Yeah, ouch.”

It took him a while to replace the first broken console, and he only finally got into the latest Kingdom Hearts game a week ago. Now his PlayStation 4 is resting in peace (or, more accurately, in pieces) in gaming heaven. Again.

After he stifles a burp with his fist, he says.

“All right, you’ve reminded me that tonight calls for the drowning of sorrows, but I’m starving too. Want some food?”

Maggie’s mozzarella stick pops into my mind, and I decide that sounds tasty.

“Yeah, sure. How about cheese sticks?”

After a beat, something else occurs to me.

“Or I’d be down for some pretzel bites. The beer cheese dip is really good.”