Feels Like Falling Read online

  He pushed away from me. “But, Gray, we agreed on this. He needs a strong male influence. He needs his father too.”

  I nodded. “I know, and I’m not backing out of that. I just have to be with him during your weeks. I want to pick him up from school. I want to have dinner with him. I want to tuck him into bed.”

  “But Brooke—”

  I felt my eyes widen. “But Brooke what? Carried him for nine months? Gave birth to him? Took him to the emergency room when that baseball split his eye open? Stayed up with him all night every time he had a fever?”

  That got me, and I started crying again. Because what if he was sick, and I wasn’t there? My sister was right. I should have fought. I should have done everything I could to save my marriage, for my son.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Greg said. I could tell he was in that space where he would do absolutely anything to make the crying stop. “What do you need?”

  If he was trying to dry the tears, it had worked. I hadn’t even consciously thought of it when, “I want you to move. Here,” flew out of my mouth.

  But it was true. I wanted to stay here. I wanted to move full-time into the beautiful house that I had bought and planned and picked every last pansy for. I wanted to have coffee with Marcy every morning, not just the summer ones. I wanted to see Diana every day.

  I could tell he was astonished, and I didn’t want to fight. I was too sad. It was too hard. So I said, “Don’t say anything now. Just think about it.” I paused. “Where’s Brooke?”

  “Wine night or something.”

  I walked past him through the front door, up the seagrass-carpeted stairs, and into my son’s bedroom at his dad’s summer rental. Moonlight streamed through a crack in the curtains, illuminating his peaceful, sleeping face. I thought my heart would absolutely burst at the sight of him. I leaned over and kissed his cheek, breathing in his little boy scent, pulling his covers up tight around him.

  I closed the bedroom door behind me, and Greg said, “He’s amazing, isn’t he?”

  I nodded and looked him straight in the eye. “He is perfect. Move here. Please. For him,” I said, as I walked down the steps. And I walked out the front door before he could protest.

  Andrew was sitting on my front steps when I got home.

  “Before you say anything,” he called, scrambling to his feet as I was stepping out of the car, “I’m really sorry. I wasn’t trying to ambush you, but I wanted them to meet you, and I knew you wouldn’t do it otherwise.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I looked out over the yard, into the windows across the street, lights blazing, lost in my thoughts. I remembered the day we bought this house, how I couldn’t believe it, how I had gotten this perfect life already. “I used to be scared I was going to die,” I said.

  Neither of us spoke for a few beats. But then he responded, “Because everything was so good?”

  He knew me really, really well. “Yeah. I felt like, here I was, barely thirty, and I already had everything: the money, the kid, the husband, the beach house, the perfect life.”

  He nodded. “I get that. I do.” He reached over for my hand, and I could feel my eyes filling up. “Because that’s how I feel right now.”

  I leaned my head on his shoulder and wiped my tears. “You wanted your parents to meet me? Damn, Andrew. That perfect life has shattered in a million pieces all around me. I’m not some cute coed that they’re going to be excited about their shiny son dating.”

  “But I was going to tell them all that. Why wouldn’t you let me?”

  I bit my lip and looked down at my shoe. “You know why,” I whispered.

  He pulled back and looked at me. “Gray, come on. Don’t do this.”

  I shrugged, my eyes filling again. “Andrew, your mom. You’re her perfect son.…” I couldn’t help but think of my perfect son.

  He turned toward me. “So, do you love me?”

  I bit my lip again and turned to look out over the water. “It isn’t that simple.”

  “But why isn’t it?”

  “Because you know it isn’t, Andrew.”

  “But do you?”

  I sighed. “Of course I do. You know I do. Do you think I want to do this? You have filled up that deep, dark, empty space where my son is gone every other week. You have made me feel beautiful and wanted when my husband tossed me out like yesterday’s newspaper. Do you think I want that to be over?”

  He stepped toward me and kissed me. “So don’t let it,” he whispered. “Let’s just tell them. They loved you, and they won’t care.”

  “They will care. They will think I’m preying on their son.”

  “Gray, I know you think you’re fine, but for you to even think all those things shows me how badly all of this messed you up. You are everything that anyone could ever want. You’re the only one who can’t see that.”

  I smiled sadly, shaking my head. “It doesn’t matter,” I whispered.

  I could see tears starting to form in his eyes, and I felt like the devil incarnate.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.

  “But you’re breaking up with me anyway.”

  I nodded slowly.

  He slapped his hand on the hood of my car. “Damn, Gray. I don’t get why you would do this.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said.

  He hugged me, and I could feel his tears falling onto my bare shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said, lifting his head. “We might be breaking up, but I’m not the kind of woman who would deny a guy the chance to check something major off of his bucket list.”

  He wiped his eyes and brightened. “Really?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. I can’t think of a better way to say good-bye.”

  “You can stop being my girlfriend, Gray. I don’t have a choice in that.” He paused and wiped his eyes. “But there’s no way I’m letting you say good-bye.”

  diana: a secret

  My life was finally back on track. Things with Frank were going great. We had had an amazing few weeks together. He’d even asked me to move in with him, and while a part of me wanted to, I knew it was too fast. I wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t think Gray was ready yet either.

  When I’d show up in the morning, smiling and whistling, not even complaining about all the healthy stuff she made me cook, she’d give me a sideways smile and tease me. Then I’d laugh, and we’d talk, and I wasn’t ready for all that to be over.

  But this morning when I walked over from the guesthouse, she was in the kitchen looking like she hadn’t slept all night. I knew she was having a real hard time being apart from Andrew, and even worse, with him gone she had all kinds of time to realize that her kid was somewhere else every other week.

  She looked so pitiful. “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “Wagner has been throwing up all night, and it was so awful and so scary.” She put crushed ice in a glass and popped the top of a Coke. “I’ve never been alone with him when he was sick.” Gray shook her head. “I almost called Greg.”

  I put my arm around her. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I was going to,” she said, “but you got here so early. You need to get out of here. I don’t want you catching this.”

  I laughed. “Honey, I meant why didn’t you call me last night to help?” I took the Coke and said, “I’ll go up and check on him, then I’ll come down and make him some tea and toast and go out and get some bananas for when he’s feeling up to it.”

  “But, Di,” she protested, “you’ll get sick.”

  “Oh, Gray”—I winked—“I have an immune system of steel. I never get sick. Not ever.”

  She smiled weakly at me and said, “Okay.” She sighed. “He’s kept down Gatorade for about an hour now, so I think the tide might be turning.”

  “You go lie down and get some rest, and I’ll get you if we need you.”

  She looked so grateful. I saw tears in her eyes. She hugged me and said, “I know you’re going to leave me, and I don’t know wh
at I’m going to do.”

  I pulled away and squeezed her shoulders, looking in her eyes. “I’m not going to leave you.”

  Now I could see the tears really gathering, and she looked away and said, “Of course you will. You’re in love. You’re happy. I want that for you. I just miss you, and you aren’t even gone.”

  With that, she turned around and walked down the hall, and I got the distinct feeling that whatever was going on inside that tired, pretty little head didn’t have all that much to do with me leaving her.

  Wagner managed a weak smile when he saw me walk in, carrying a Coke and saltines. I sat down on the bed beside him and rubbed my hand across his clammy forehead. “I heard it was a rough night, buddy.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. But I haven’t barfed in a couple hours. I think I’m gonna be okay.”

  I smiled. “That’s a relief.”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to play tennis later?”

  “I’m going to say no to that one.”

  His face fell. “Andrew really wanted me to play with him today. I think he wants a rematch after Johnny and I beat him and Mom so bad.”

  I nodded, and it made me feel sort of sad because I would have bet that locket I loved so much that Andrew wanted to see another member of Wagner’s family even worse.

  “Is my mom okay?”

  I handed him the saltines and said, “Oh yeah. She’s good. I just told her to go and get some sleep.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But, I mean, she seems sad, you know?”

  I shrugged. “I think it’s real hard for a momma to be away from her kid.” I wondered after I said it if I shouldn’t have. But, well, he was getting ready to be nine years old, and he wasn’t stupid, and that’s the God’s honest truth of the whole thing.

  “Yeah. All I kept thinking was that it would’ve been so awful if I got sick when I was with Dad, because I would’ve wanted my mom the whole time.” He shrugged. “It’s weird, right? Do you think my dad and Brooke are going to have another baby?”

  I laughed. “Okay there. That’s enough with the questions. I think that’s for them to know and us to find out. You close those peepers. I’m going to go get some laundry done, but you holler if you need me. Deal?”

  He sank back into his pillows sleepily, and I set the Coke on the nightstand. I pulled his covers up tight and kissed that sweet, clammy forehead. I thought about Frank. And Gray. And that baby I never had. And all I knew was that sometimes, in the most convoluted of ways, somebody up there looks down, smiles, and finally gives you all you really wanted this whole time: a family.

  CHAPTER 16

  gray: bare-soul truth

  Poor Trey. Even he couldn’t get me out of my funk. He was driving, singing show tunes at the top of his lungs, the stereo blasting. Ordinarily I would have joined him. But today I couldn’t muster the energy.

  “Come on, babe,” he said. “Road trip to Charleston! Huge meeting with Glitter! What, what!”

  I sighed. “I know. Why am I such a drag right now? I am literally the worst.”

  But Andrew was gone. It was my fault. I had pushed him away. He had texted me: I’m heading back to school. Can I come say good-bye?

  And, bitch that I was, I had said, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

  I mean, I was right. If he came to say good-bye, that would lead to a kiss good-bye, which might lead to other things, and any or all or none of it would make the heartbreak last even longer.

  To top it off, I had been up all night two nights before with Wagner, stressed and panicked and terrified at how sick he was. Greg and I hadn’t revisited the moving idea, and Wagner’s school started in a couple of weeks. I had him enrolled in both Cape Carolina and Raleigh, but it was time to make a decision.

  “You just need wine,” Trey said sunnily. “And maybe a steak.”

  Now, that we could agree on. Every decadent bite and sip at Halls Chophouse that evening felt like an antidote as I was eating it.

  Five hours later, as it was coming back up, I regretted the choice. Diana might have an immune system of steel, but I did not. Wagner’s virus had hit me hard.

  I don’t think that’s a good idea was running through my mind on a continuous loop. It’s what always happens to me when I get sick like this. I have some phrase or song lyric or something equally annoying stuck in my head.

  This is the worst feeling on earth. Well, good. That was at least something new. It kind of puts everything in perspective, having a throw-up virus. What you’re going to say when you meet the client you’re trying to bag, and the fact that you have to be nice to your husband’s fiancée who you incredibly stupidly are trying to get to move to town with you, and whether you have completely ruined your own life all seem less important. Because all you can think about is how disgustingly horrible you feel. That’s it. You just want to survive.

  No one wants to be alone when they’re sick like that, and you always want your mom. Always. Even when you know she’s dead, you want her to appear to hold your hair back and put a cold washcloth on your forehead and bring you ginger ale and break the whole pieces of ice into little bits with a spoon.

  But she wasn’t going to come back. That was obvious. If she were, surely she would have done it by now. She would have come back to get my sister out of her horrible marriage. She would have come back to help me through my divorce. And, most of all, she would have come back to knock some sense into my head when I started dating Andrew.

  Too exhausted to even get back to the bed, I curled up on my hotel room’s bathroom floor, my head on one wadded-up towel, my body on another, alternating between freezing cold and unimaginably hot. And I thought about Andrew. If my mom wasn’t going to come back, I just wanted Andrew. I knew he would rub my back no matter how disgusting I was and go to the store in the pitch-black dark to get me lemon-lime Gatorade.

  It surprised me, lying on the floor, trying to catch a few minutes of sleep in between my bouts of sickness, that I felt like I could depend on Andrew. Because when the chips are down as low as they can be, when you’re lying on the bathroom floor in the fetal position, there’s a bare-soul, uncomplicated sort of truth about who it is that you are longing to have there beside you. I knew for sure that I had never wished for Greg like that.

  Somewhere in there, I finally fell asleep, and, when my alarm sounded at eight thirty, all that remained was the feeling of exhaustion. But the nausea was gone, the vulnerability was gone, and the certainty that I was strong enough to get over a little summer fling—because that’s all it was—was back.

  I showered and dried my hair, applied my makeup, put on a sophisticated-yet-sassy white dress that was just businessy enough, and swallowed away the nerves of a pitch that I couldn’t screw up just because I was tired and sad. I tried to ignore the awareness that Andrew was here, in Charleston, and that it was taking all the strength I had not to go find him.

  While everyone else sipped gorgeous Bloody Marys with huge shrimp cocktails in the back garden at 82 Queen, I had ginger ale without a straw to save the turtles. The nausea was gone, but I certainly wasn’t going to risk it. Trey was as effusive as ever, and I thought I was too, but who knew.

  Heather Sinclair was saying, “We’re extremely impressed with ClickMarket, but you know you have some competitors out there with lower percentage costs, and that’s a holdup for us.”

  I knew what she was trying to do. I saw it all the time, and when I first started my business, sometimes I would cave to that pressure. But now I knew that all that did was end up hurting everyone involved. So I said, “Heather, I’ll be honest with you. You’ve seen our rate sheet. You can come over to ClickMarket and choose a lower percentage bracket. But the influencers you are going to be working with are not going to be those fabulous micro-influencers with rabid followings and gorgeous branding. Creating those brands costs them money, and there is no way they are going to promote Glitter—as much as they all love you—for seven percent when they can promote Neiman Marcus for
ten. They won’t do it.”

  “But those other affiliate companies don’t offer Neiman Marcus,” Heather said.

  Trey smiled at her. “Enough said.”

  We all laughed.

  “Look,” Heather continued, “I won’t lie to you. Your site is the most user-friendly, and I see the benefits. I really do. But we’re talking three percent of a massive amount of sales. That’s significant.”

  I’d had spreadsheets made up of what we predicted Glitter’s sales would be with ClickMarket over our main competitor, but I realized now that they didn’t matter. I prided myself on being excellent at reading people, and my gut told me that all Heather wanted was to feel like she had made a deal, plain and simple. I could give her that.

  I did some quick math in my head before I said, “Look, Heather, it’s top secret, but we’re rolling out an ad partner program next month that is going to blow your mind. All the best influencers with the most proven sales records. You’re going to want to be a part of that. I’ll give you a three-month exclusive during which I’ll waive all my commission.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Exclusive as in…?”

  I smiled. “Exclusive as in you will be our only client in the ad partner program for three months.”

  It was a big move, a huge thing to give her. But I knew it would be worth it. Every blogger in the country would be clamoring for a spot, and other competing companies would line up to sign up for the program once they knew Glitter was our first exclusive customer. It was genius, if I did say so myself.

  I glanced at Trey. He looked impressed.

  Heather smiled, and I knew I had won. “Ms. Howard, you have made me an offer I simply cannot refuse.” She reached her hand out over the Bloody Marys, and I shook it.

  “Trey will draw up the contract and get it over to you tonight.”

  We had already drawn up the contract. It didn’t work 100 percent of the time, but it was the best way I knew of to put the deal out in the universe before we went in to negotiate it. And I had to admit that Trey was the best partner out there. He knew when to jump in, when to lighten the mood, when to be serious. I texted him under the table: You’re getting a promotion.