Page 8 of Falling Backwards (The Edge of Us #1)

I actually haven’t figured out how to spend my evening yet. After I clocked out, I came home, sank down onto the couch, and decided to rest for a little bit while some activity or another came to mind.

Small though my apartment is, it’s clean and in a relatively quiet location. Sometimes the place feels lonely and sometimes it feels confining, but on evenings like this one, I’m glad it is what it is. Even though I got better sleep last night than the one before, I realized I was tired as soon as I sat down, and this space I call mine instantly offered comfort. I was once again glad my neighbors aren’t usually a hassle, because my thoughts were loud enough already and I didn’t want extra noise closing in on me; that would’ve set me up for a headache.

I haven’t even bothered turning the TV on. For some time now, I’ve simply had my eyes closed and my head dropped back against the cushions.

But more and more over the last few minutes, I’ve felt like the possibility of rest has been slipping away.

Those loud thoughts seem hellbent on sticking around. They keep summoning flashes of family drama, replaying snippets of snappy chatter from my day, bringing back glares, threatening to set my aggravation into full motion again. Just moments ago, I caught myself clenching my jaw and had to actively relax it—and now I’m noticing my fists are clenched too.

After I loosen them and shake my hands out, I sigh.

Relax, I tell myself. You deleted your dad’s message about the reunion, and you’re off work now, and it’s Saturday. This is easy time. No need to be all tense and worked up.

Except the things that keep circling in my mind don’t only involve my dad and work.

No, his message wasn’t welcome, but I handled it the way that felt best to me. And while standing on my feet for hours is never really easy, I’m plenty used to it. My shift today wasn’t the worst either, not counting how Ronald acted at the end.

It’s just….

Her. It’s her and the past.

These words in my head aren’t of a calming tone like the others. They’re bitter.

Beneath that, they’re…other things. They’re ashamed and….

Yeah, the past is to blame for how I feel right now. Recalling it is distressing and overwhelming and confusing. Noisy and exhausting.

I wanted to forget about Maggie after our argument in the breakroom, but just like in real life, she won’t leave me alone.

I keep remembering how sweetly she looked at me so long ago after our first kiss, which was her first kiss ever, and I feel echoes of the true affection we had for each other—until I recall how it ended and then how she glowered at me today when she caught me checking her out. Thinking about her angry jab at my chest makes me angry again until that turns into thinking about how much I used to like holding her hand, which was smaller than mine and yet still such a good match for it. And those years-old memories glow with laughter and warmth and trust and feelings I didn’t know I was capable of, until it all bleeds into her derisive question from the hostess stand: ‘Oh, can I trust you?’

My heart painfully skips a beat now just as it did then.

There’s no way around the fact that her words hurt.

It had come so fast, that skipped heartbeat from earlier. I’d been distracted by the nonsense with her ex, and I didn’t have time to raise my defenses again before her words sliced in deep. They cut straight through eight years of us not liking each other and all the way back to when we liked each other so much it was breathtaking.

Inhaling deeply, I drag a hand down my face.

I try again not to think any more about any of it.

I don’t want to think about it. Still don’t even know why the past has been coming back up in my mind as much as it has today.

It’s hard to keep it away, though, now that I’m not at work. It was easier to get around it during those hours. I had other things to focus on. I had people to talk to and tasks to keep in mind. Even most of my interactions with her didn’t go too far below the surface.

‘Oh, can I trust you?’

The way she said it went beyond whether I was capable of finding a roll of stickers on my own. And on both that front and the deeper one, I instinctively wanted to argue that she can trust me. Of course she can. I’m not some terrible force of destruction.

But I knew that wasn’t exactly true. I knew in a way, I am.

Well, I was. Years ago, for that brief time in the eleventh grade, yeah, I was.

All too late, I figured out it stemmed from teenage boy stupidity; the damage was already well on its way to being done by then. Figured out later still that everything with my dad had been weighing on me in different ways, some of which I didn’t understand, some I didn’t even see.

You don’t have to be chaos incarnate to be untrustworthy. Don’t have to be an all-out monster. Sometimes you just have to get caught in the perfect storm of shitty circumstances.

That’s what happened to me. For one reason or another, my brain wasn’t in working order when I was sixteen.

Then Jayden and I had a bet going one night about which of us could go the longest without throwing up the very expensive tequila he’d stolen from his older brother, and we agreed the loser would have to do something embarrassing at school to make up for wasting the booze. When the loser turned out to be me, I found out his idea of ‘something embarrassing’ was dating a random girl he considered unattractive and taking her to junior prom a month later. If the outcome was anything other than that, he would rat me out to his brother and I would owe Jayden two hundred bucks for being a double failure.

I didn’t have that kind of money, so to my ridiculous little mind, I was stuck.

What a nerve-racking notion it was.

I didn’t relish having to go out with someone I didn’t choose myself. I’d be courteous to whoever got picked and the whole thing would be temporary and it wouldn’t be significant enough to have any lasting effects on her, but still. For one thing, who wants a girlfriend they’re not attracted to somehow, fake or otherwise? And for another, what if she thought I was too boring and it kept us from making it to prom time?

Well, as it turned out, Maggie was the girl whose name got drawn out of Jayden’s baseball cap.

I was equal parts relieved and confused because I wasn’t sure why he thought she was ugly. She wasn’t thin like so many were or strived to be and she’d gotten into that car wreck and been scarred in a couple places, but I liked the way she looked. I’d liked it since our freshman year when I switched from private education to the public high school. And though we hadn’t gotten around to speaking, she had given me a few incredibly shy smiles over the years when we happened to catch each other’s eye.

Of course, I didn’t tell Jayden any of that. Didn’t tell him he was letting me off easy. He would’ve remedied it somehow without pause or mercy, and I would’ve groaned and wondered why I didn’t just go along with his initial so-called punishment.

So I accepted his terms.

God, it sounds so lame to say I genuinely believed it wouldn’t be a big deal, but at the time, I did. I wasn’t setting out to be cruel to Maggie or gain anything. All I was doing was following along with some dumb shit my friend had concocted.

From where I stood, it seemed harmless. She had given me those little smiles in the past, so she at least didn’t find me repulsive. Even though I wasn’t about to pour my heart and soul into bonding with her, I would be nice and treat her with respect, as I’d already intended. I wasn’t anything special by any means, but hopefully we’d get along just well enough to be each other’s date to the junior prom—girls hated going to dances alone, so I had my fingers crossed that she’d be down to keep me around that long. I would try to make that night fun. Then after it was over, we would be over too. She wouldn’t be upset about it, especially since everyone knew high school relationships to be flaky; students got together and broke up all the time, notably right before summer break. It would be a trivial month-long thing that, although kind of insincere, would be a blip in her radar and as good a deal as I could hope for in my situation.

Date, dance, done. That was my simple plan.

All I had to do was keep my secrets quiet so my unexpected luck of the draw wouldn’t get wrecked and so I wouldn’t have to come up with a bunch of money to give to anybody.

No one was supposed to start feeling anything real.

But things with Maggie didn’t go according to that plan.

She turned out to be…glorious.

The sound of her voice and the things she said. How her giggles were soft and her big laughs were moments of proof of little old me feeling safe to her somehow. The way she looked at me and the things we connected over.

I couldn’t resist any of it. Couldn’t ignore, couldn’t detach, couldn’t keep my own guard up.

When I touched her, kissed her, asked her out, I did it because I badly wanted to. Not because I was expected to—I wasn’t even expected to do most of that, since only the dating part was a rule of the bet. In every one of those moments, the bet wasn’t what I was thinking about; there was just her in my head, the way she made me feel. I meant those things with her like I’d found myself meaning so, so many others.

We grew far closer than I expected us to, and it happened faster than I could keep up with.

And before I could wrap my mind around it, much less figure out how to handle it, one overheard conversation ripped us apart and in half and down to ugly shreds.

Another flashing memory spears through my mind, making my stomach churn something fierce.

The devastated way she looked at me that afternoon in the hallway at school.

It was almost exactly a month after I approached her and sparked off what should’ve been a bunch of nothing but became absolutely everything. And it was mere moments after her hushed gasp had me spinning away from Jayden, who’d accosted me to try to pry about my situation with her. He’d been blabbing about the logistics of it and we didn’t notice her creeping up behind us to surprise me with a bottle of my favorite soda, only to find out….

Even he had mumbled, “Uh oh.”

An enormous understatement. She had just been slapped by the very rude awakening of hearing I asked her out basically because someone dared me to, and the heartbroken betrayal exploding through her expression was a kind of violence I’d never seen before. It hit me so hard I thought I was going to be sick—even her heaving the bottle of soda at me didn’t hurt as much as the look on her face.

I almost feel sick again now.

I think the last time I felt this unsettled about it was in January of this year, during my first shift back at Lucent after taking a handful of days off for vacation. I was walking a drink down the bar to a customer when a pleasantly light laugh came from across the way and had me looking to the front of the house. And in the next second, it was like I had been punched squarely in the stomach, the chest, the face—suddenly weak and winded, I quit walking and just stared at Maggie. She was going in the direction of the breakroom, wearing sophisticated black clothes like the rest of the staff, unaware of me because she was having a warm conversation with the owner. Obviously, I didn’t have real confirmation yet, but I swear I still knew it right then: she had somehow started working there, too, while I was gone.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her since high school. I glimpsed her around town on more than one occasion, especially at Merritt’s. Those moments had affected me in their own ways, sure, since my anger about her retaliation hadn’t lessened, only sunk down out of sight…but it wasn’t the same as how that day at Lucent affected me. I wasn’t only freshly angry, I was shaken.

If we worked at the same place, there would no longer be any such thing as sporadic glimpses that, if we were lucky, only one of us had of the other. At Lucent, she would take hard notice of me at some point, and I would be unable to ignore her. There would be shared shifts. We would probably have to talk to each other, at least sometimes. And we would definitely always feel each other’s presence because there would be no way not to—just like nobody forgets the first person to ever hold their heart, nobody forgets the first person to shatter it.

Only she didn’t shatter my heart the way I did hers. When we get down to it, mine got shattered mostly by me.

As I try to even out my breaths and control the deep discomfort rising in me, I realize I’ve started shaking my head at that last thought.

Damn it, I don’t want to feel this way.

I don’t want this fresh flare-up of guilt, this heaviness, this emotion that burns almost like sad longing. Where is it all even coming from after all this time? Why is it coming up now?

The other side of the coin is easier to deal with.

My embarrassment and resentment over the hurtful flyers she posted about me still plague me, but it’s different from how those other emotions plague me, which means I prefer them. I used them as easy fuel for firing up my walls that first day I saw her at Lucent. And I use them now to ward away everything about her that makes me feel weak.

Immature, whispers that same voice from moments ago. You’re as stupid right now as you were eight years ago.

It’s also the same voice from when I was arguing with Maggie in the breakroom. And like then, it doesn’t do anything to improve my mood.

“Motherfu—”

With an annoyed huff, I spring up from the couch.

Yeah, I’m not going to do this. Not a bit of it.

The past is in the past. What happened was messy and painful and a lot of other things, but for many years, I did well at not letting it eat me alive. I went on with my business. Maggie coming to work at Lucent reopened the wounds somewhat, and it led to a lot more head-butting since there wasn’t as much distance between us as there had been, and we both refused to quit our jobs or scramble our hours because of each other, but so what? There’s no need for all this shit I’ve been doing the last several minutes. There’s no reason to get in my feelings. Today was nothing remarkable, and I’m tired of it lingering with me and bringing up old stuff with it.

I forcefully shake out my arms and legs as I go to the refrigerator. Paxton and my mom are both busy until later tonight, so I’m on my own for now, and I’m determined to loosen up and calm down.

Once I’m back on the couch with a beer in my hand and the need for a comedy TV show finally in my head, I tell myself out loud.

“Snap out of it, Luke. You can’t change what you did, so that means dwelling on it doesn’t do any good.”

I pick up the remote control and turn the TV on.

“You’re an adult, remember? Let go of her. You did it once and you can do it again.”

Much of me nods hard in agreement, claps in encouragement. ‘Yeah, that’s right! Don’t let her dictate what mood you’re in! She doesn’t matter! Everything is awesome!’

And yet….

There’s another part of me—that whispery part….

I clear my throat loudly as if to interrupt what it’s berating me with now, even though it isn’t berating me with anything. It’s just there. Like it’s quietly holding its ground.

Well, I wish it wouldn’t do that, but hopefully it’ll retreat over the course of this beer and an episode of The Good Place.

I take a swig, bring up the show, and kick back into my Saturday evening like I mean it.