Page 31 of Falling Backwards (The Edge of Us #1)

I wake up to more than just morning sunshine.

I wake up to a soft body tucked along mine and under my arm. My hand was clearly once being cradled to her chest, anchoring me to her in a most intimately comfortable way, but now her grip is loose because she’s snoozing.

I wake up and realize that what I believed was a great dream during the night was real: Maggie had gotten on the couch with me and snuggled us into close, toasty, cozy proximity.

Although I’m not sure what time it is, the way the sunlight looks through my patio-door blinds says it’s not time to get up yet. We don’t have anything scheduled until this afternoon. No alarms are about to go off. We aren’t late for anything.

So I take my time fully coming conscious.

It involves drifting off another couple times, truthfully, but who cares? ‘Not I,’ said the Luke.

The Luke would happily stay like this for a long time.

Maggie’s steady breathing is interrupted by a deep inhalation and a contented sigh of an exhalation.

Contented for now, anyway. I hope she isn’t about to realize she’s put my hand near her boobs and then fling it away and bring a swift end to me being in her personal space, which is the best place I’ve ever….

But no, all she’s doing is regaining her grip on my hand and nuzzling my other arm, which is peeking out from under the throw pillow we can’t quite share.

Pleased, I brush my thumb over the part of her hand I can reach. Back and forth and back again.

Her next breath is deep, too, but more even than before. Her fingers flex gently around mine.

“Morning,”

I greet her, my voice a bit scratchy.

“Good morning,”

she murmurs in kind.

Yes, it is.

I wait for it to stop. For her to end it.

Still doesn’t happen.

She stays right where she is, humming softly when I keep brushing my thumb over her skin.

It could’ve been said that we were putting on a show when we were holding hands those other times, but it definitely doesn’t feel like that right now. Just feels like Maggie and Luke.

Adult Maggie and Luke.

Not-thinking-about-old-bullshit Maggie and Luke.

Can we not-think about it forever? We’re happy like this.

“I wish we could lie here all day,” she says.

I agree.

“Fuck yes. Let’s call in to work.”

Her giggle sounds as good as it feels, which is damn good.

“Well, no, we shouldn’t do that,”

she amends in true Maggie fashion.

“So nevermind, I guess.”

“Mmm. Logically, I know you’re right. Saturday nights bring good tips at the bar, and you’d be guilt-ridden to hell and back if you shirked a responsibility.”

Another giggle.

“But,”

I go on, smiling.

“the illogical part of me is ready to fake a disgusting cough and make the call and then tack on an ominous-sounding, ‘Sure hope I haven’t gotten Maggie sick too….’”

This time I get big, bursting laughter that bounces throatily off my living room walls and almost certainly brightens every corner of my apartment. It shakes both of us like last night when I made her laugh while she stood in my coat with me, except this is better laughter because we just woke up together.

And I want.

To fucking.

Taste it.

I want so strongly to kiss her that it chokes the breath out of me.

The knowledge pounds in my head, my lips, my ribcage, my stomach—

I sit up on my forearm and move until I’m slanting over her, causing her to tip backwards slightly, but even as I stop holding her hand and turn her face to mine, she doesn’t catch on to the shift in me. Her eyes are closed and she’s grinning as she dwindles into giggling again, still all amused.

Heart racing, I push my mouth solidly onto hers, claiming that smile and that laughter.

And…she kisses me back.

Like it’s instinct, the most natural thing.

Until a weak gasp stutters out of her and the kiss slips to an end.

My heartbeat stutters too.

She fumbles to touch me, finding and gripping my arm, now firmly in the reality of this moment with me.

Both of us are suddenly breathing hard.

My heart races from how that was our first kiss in eight years and how it has been burned into me and how I’m worried she’s going to push me back from her in anger.

This heavy breathing is the only sound now. My hand is still on her face, so that arm I had around her is bent halfway between us, settled against her chest in a way that tells me her heart is racing too.

She isn’t shoving me away, though. She’s…she’s….

I hold still, muscles aching and chest aching more, as she slowly moves closer and lifts her lips back to mine. I memorize how it feels for her to press a kiss up to me on purpose.

And as I let myself sink into returning it, I memorize the soft little noise she makes.

I’m an instant addict.

We take a quick breath and give right in to another kiss, more fervently, and I dizzily think of this Maggie and younger Maggie at once, of how I never got a whimper-moan like that from her before. Things were so different back then—we cared about each other and were drawn to each other like now, but….

My hand shifts up from her chin so I can slide my palm over her bangs and thumb at her eyebrow, and now the sound she makes is breathless, and I hear myself echo it. I don’t know which of us tries to kiss the other about it first.

But we were teenagers. We didn’t have this. We couldn’t have had it.

We were sweet because we were an easy match but also because we hadn’t broken each other yet. We didn’t know the perfection and pain of finding our way back to something we thought was gone.

We know it now.

It’s in how sincere these kisses are. It’s in the way the air buzzes between us when we finally stop. It’s in the way she says my name—gentle, nervous, her voice touching the parts of me that feel exactly like that.

I swallow hard and try to catch my breath.

Then, partly to her and partly to myself, I whisper.

“We said we wouldn’t do that.”

“Yeah.”

She gulps too. Her chest rises with her inhalation.

“Why did you…?”

It takes me a few moments to be able to confess.

“I thought I might die if I didn’t.”

She squeezes my arm and huffs a breath onto my lips, tempting me to kiss her again and spill all my confessions to her and tell her how much I want us to just….

Now I whisper.

“What have you been doing to me, Maggie?”

“What have you been doing to me?”

I shake my head a little as if to insist, ‘Nothing,’ because that’s what was supposed to have happened during our pretend relationship. Nothing.

But even in my own head, I know that word is a lie; if it were true, I wouldn’t see softness in her eyes when I shift up enough to look at her.

I wouldn’t have seen, felt, heard all kinds of things from her lately.

What’s been happening to me has been happening to her. We’ve been doing everything to each other, bit by bit, layer by layer, day by day.

“So I….”

Cheeks pink, she hesitates.

“I’m not the only one who…feels so much?”

The question heightens my nervousness a bit. Nevertheless, this time when I shake my head, it’s a true answer.

And I grate out more truth yet because it, too, refuses to be held in.

“I don’t know where the room for feeling so much even came from. It wasn’t there before.”

She’s quiet at first. Then she sighs.

“I know what you mean.”

The vague reminder of our resentment towards each other has her hold on my arm loosening, has my fingers by her face curling away from where they’ve been touching her.

This is the girl who broke my trust and stomped on my heart—sure, it happened years ago, but it still happened. And it hurt like hell.

Facts that don’t touch how much I hurt her first.

But none of it changes how I feel about the way she looks from our kisses, or how badly I still want to kiss her again. It doesn’t change that I love how big I made her laugh a couple minutes ago or that I’ve loved everything else good we’ve ended up sharing.

I don’t know what to do with all of that, but there it is.

We lie here in silence for several more seconds, just studying each other, and then my phone starts vibrating over on the kitchen bar. After another moment, Maggie reluctantly murmurs that I should check it. Just as reluctantly, I sit up and away from her, my body rather sore from how I was situated; I know I wouldn’t take back a bit of it.

Once we’ve clambered off the couch, she takes her purse in the direction of the bathroom, leaving me to pause halfway to my phone because of how unfairly good she looks in my sweatpants.

She disappears and I hear the door close and I mutter.

“God help me,”

about the pants and everything else. Then I add to myself.

“Are you serious, dude? You officially have a crush on her again? How can that be? It’s Magnolia fucking Moss.”

Saying it out loud doesn’t make it sound stupid, though.

And it’s not even accurate, because…

…well, calling it a crush doesn’t do this feeling justice. At all.

And what I feel isn’t exactly like what I felt back then—my thoughts from a minute ago were right about that. Saying it’s here ‘again’ implies that it’s the same now as it used to be, but that’s not true. There are things here that weren’t there before. New connections and conversations. New levels of trust, warmth, closeness, attraction. She’s more than she was and so am I.

We’ve grown up.

I’ve missed the call by the time I get to my phone, so I check the notification—and my stomach gives a hard, unpleasant dip.

Jayden’s name is there. He’s who was calling, probably about the visit I’ve just remembered he’s planning on making.

Jayden. Jayden.

I don’t work on returning the call. My swirling thoughts are darkening with even more thoughts of past-me and past-Maggie. I relive flickers of everything.

And for the first time in a long, long time, I recall what Jayden said in response to how upset I was about how badly things ended: ‘Dude, man up and get over it. It’s not like she actually fucking matters.’

But she d—

I jump as the notification of his voicemail pops onto my phone screen.

The thought of hearing him talk makes my stomach feel outright sour. I don’t want to hear his voice.

Then a new notification comes up—one for a text from someone else. I do tap on that to open it in full.

AUNT JONI: Hi, dear. Just wanted to say I love you and I hope you’re doing well

It distracts me from my old friend.

On one hand, I still feel frustrated with my aunt. On the other, I’m revisited by the thing I was just thinking about having grown up.

I have to ask myself: is it really worth it to me to cling to being upset with her?

I know Maggie said recently that I’m allowed to feel however I need to feel about my family, and it meant a lot to me. Obviously, it’s something my mom has said about my dad before, but I haven’t told Mom what happened with Aunt Joni. Maggie is the only person who knows I’ve been upset at all, and even she doesn’t know details.

Now, though, I abruptly feel like I want to be done holding this little grudge. It doesn’t seem as important as it did before.

Also feel kind of bad about how long it took me to be done.

But better late than never, right?

ME: Hey, I love you too. I’m doing great. How are you?

We catch up a bit while Maggie finishes up in the bathroom. By the time I hear the door opening, things with Aunt Joni are much more friendly than they’ve been in a while, and it feels good to me. I don’t feel like I’m forcing anything.

In fact, after regularly-dressed Maggie sets her purse and my folded sweatpants on the big chair, I’m filled fast with the urge to finally tell her.

“I haven’t wanted to talk to my dad in years, but my aunt gave my address to him without asking me. That’s why I was mad at her.”

Maggie looks at me with surprise. Then disbelief. Then great sympathy.

Quietly, she asks.

“How could she do that to you?”

I lift my shoulders.

“She didn’t actually know it would bother me. She thought he had my address and lost it—she didn’t know I never gave it to him. I’ve never told her how I feel about him.”

For a suddenly heavy moment, I believe we’re both remembering me trusting Maggie with how I felt about my dad.

Part of me is afraid of how I feel compelled to trust her with another little bit now.

But the heaviness and fear don’t win out. I can’t stop myself.

I tell her.

“Since she gave him my address, he was able to send me a holiday card. The kind with the family picture on the front.”

The sharp sting of it comes back to me like the card is in my hands now.

“It was a picture of him and his new family. They were all together and they looked happy. And it felt like….”

I swallow back the many ways I could end that sentence. Swallow back the emotions I could talk about in a messy flood like a spilled well of ink.

She understands, though. It’s emanating from her as her eyes cling to mine.

I wonder if they’re really a little bit misty or if it’s a trick of the lighting.

“That would’ve hurt me too,”

she says, her voice still low.

“Would’ve made me feel like I’d been slapped.”

Lowly, too, I say.

“That’s exactly how I felt.”

Her eyes are definitely misty.

She crosses her arms…and uncrosses them…and crosses them again. It looks like she has something else to say but doesn’t know how to say it.

I wonder if she’s thinking about the present or the past.

I don’t find enough courage to ask.

She finally says.

“Thank you for telling me about her.”

I give a slight nod.

“Are you still mad at her?”

“No. I, uh, decided a minute ago that I was ready to move past it.”

I hold up my phone.

“She texted and I decided to be done with the grudge.”

Maggie slips a long look to my phone, and I wonder now if she’s wondering about the phone call that interrupted us before.

Don’t ask me who called. Please. I don’t wanna lie, but I don’t wanna talk about Jayden either. I don’t want him anywhere near you, not even the subject of him.

When she looks at me again, a gentle smile turns up the corners of her lips. All she says is.

“I’m happy you feel better.”

Her smile wilts back into an expression of sad compassion.

“But…I’m so sorry about the holiday card.”

Again with her looking like she has more to say.

This time, the fear I feel has anxiety twisted up with it.

What if she tries to counter my rule-breaking kiss with breaking our rule about not bringing up topics that’ll end in an argument? What if she tries to talk about the past? Am I ready for that? Are we ready for it? What if it damages what we’ve built up because she still can’t forgive me and I’ll decide I don’t want to forgive her? I can see in hindsight that kissing her was a big enough risk, and we’ve barely even talked about that, about how our feelings for each other have obviously changed—we definitely haven’t talked about where we want to go from here.

But what if she wants to talk and it doesn’t blow us up? a calmer voice in my head offers. What if we do forgive each other? What if everything has been happening the way it needed to for us to move on and so it’s okay if our biggest rules are being challenged? Things aren’t the same right now as they were when we started this—and they aren’t the same as they were eight years ago.

I know which of those scenarios I prefer.

Without a doubt, I know it.

But is it really possible for us? And if it is, how do we start that conversation? How do we take the first step?

Or have we already taken it?

She clears her throat and my heart jumps into mine.

“Um,”

she says.

“thank you so much for letting me borrow your sweatpants. They were the best. A little big on me, but super comfortable.”

I’m glad for the distraction from my wild thoughts. I was about to start drowning in them.

I decide to take her change of subject as a sign that this is not the right time to get started on all that other stuff.

“Yeah, you’re welcome,”

I reply. After a beat.

“They looked the best on you. A hell of a lot better than they look on me.”

She chuckles deeply.

“Oh, no way.”

Jesus Christ, her laughter….

I’m torn right in two between rushing her for another kiss and controlling my-damn-self when she clears her throat again.

“Hey, do—do you wanna try making eggs Benedict?”

Another good distraction.

Hoping I don’t sound as breathless as I feel, I point at her and confirm.

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Well, I don’t quite sound normal.

But she puts on a smile and says.

“Let’s go get the stuff, then,”

and I notice she doesn’t either.

I’m not the only one who’s torn on how to feel about this place we’ve found ourselves in.

As I head for my bedroom so I can change clothes, I have to wonder how long we’ll teeter here—and where we’ll land when we fall.