Falling into You Read online

  Falling into You

  Lauren Abrams

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © by Lauren Abrams

  The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. No part of this book can be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without the expressed written permission of the author. The only exception is by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locals is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  HALLIE

  I hate parties. I hate the tinkling laughter and the awkward conversations about the weather and the empty compliments and the watery punch-like substances and the way my mouth feels rough and dry in the morning. I even hate beer pong. And yet, I seem to spend half of my waking hours getting ready for one party or another. I really need to work on building a stockpile of excuses to get myself out of these things.

  “Hallie, you do know that you’re supposed to wait until after the party to shed your clothing, correct?” Sophia’s standing in the doorway and shaking her head at the sprawling pieces of clothing covering her guest room. I throw a pillow at her.

  “I have nothing to wear,” I moan. Sophia, as always, is beautiful in a short black dress that matches her hair. It dips low in the front and the back, revealing perfect, olive-colored skin. I groan.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you for months. I’ve been trying to take you shopping ever since the first day of school, but you’re always telling me that clothes aren’t important.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “‘It’s the person inside, Sophia.’” She imitates my voice and I look around for another pillow when she raises her hands to defend herself, laughing at me. “Seriously. Wear whatever. It doesn’t matter anyways.”

  “Of course you would say that.” I throw my arms up. “Everything I own is hideous.”

  She doesn’t argue. “Just hide out for the first hour,” she suggests instead, perching on the end of the bed after tossing aside a brown shirt with a look of disgust. “By that time, everyone will be drunk. Really.”

  “How many people are we talking about here?” On the plane to New York, she mentioned a “little soiree.” However, the dozens of bottles of every kind of booze imaginable that were delivered earlier that afternoon are making me suspicious.

  “I don’t know. A hundred? More?”

  “Sophia!”

  “Hallie!” She’s grinning at me. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s ten people or a hundred or a thousand. The parties are all the same. Let me break it down for you.”

  She rolls her eyes and plays with her fingernails. “Someone will bring a guitar and they’ll want to play really bad versions of something that sounds vaguely like Bob Marley. Thank God, that will get shot down as soon as the party really gets started. Stoners will be on the balcony, so unless you want a contact high, stay away from there. The socialites will linger in the bathrooms with their party favors until they decide that they want to dance. The drunks will get loud and the noise complaints from the pesky neighbors will continue until everyone is passed out on the couches.”

  She ticks each group off, one by one. “Most importantly, everyone who isn’t in one of those groups, or the people who fall somewhere in between, will find someone to hook up with,” she continues, winking at me.

  “Let me guess. Your plan is to find a hook-up.”

  “Obviously. Now we just need to figure out which category you fit into. Seriously, though, try to stay away from the bathrooms. And get your ass dressed.” She glances at me over her shoulder with one arched eyebrow as she leaves the room.

  Her laughter echoes down the hall.

  I settle for my best pair of jeans and a blue shirt that my best friend Ben always tells me to put a sweater over. His big-brother protectiveness is probably a good sign that the shirt was good enough for my first New York party, I think.

  The trickling of more laughter comes in under the door of the guest room, and I take a deep breath. It was going to be fine. I’ve been to a million parties, and they’re usually more or less what Sophia described. Halting for a second to check myself in the mirror, I open the door hesitantly and prepare myself for a long night. Since I wasn’t going to fall in the “party favors” group, the stoners group, or the people looking to hook up, I guess that left me with the drunks.

  ***

  I knew that the jeans had clearly been the wrong choice when I emerge from my room and run into one of Sophia’s party guests, who is blowing her nose into a tissue as she leaves the bathroom.

  “Where are you from?” she asks me without bothering to pause for introductions. She’s checking me up and down, a look of horror in bloodshot eyes.

  Of course, she was dressed in four-inch heels that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe and a green dress that I would have given my right arm for.

  “Ohio,” I say, smiling.

  I think she’s trying to give me a snarky smile, but it comes off as complete disgust. Apparently, being from Ohio is the equivalent of having a terminal disease. Without saying another word, she immediately turns away from me and darts into the living room, shrieking, “Sophia! We have to get you out of that silly college that you’re at! We’re dying here without you!”

  They squeal for a few minutes. Sophia rolls her eyes at me over the girl’s shoulder, mouthing, “Whore.”

  I laugh in spite of myself.

  I try again with the next couple of people I see, offering my name instead, but the reaction doesn’t change. One of them even hands me his coat and a bottle with a blue label, saying, “You can take care of that, can’t you?”

  What I want to do is chuck the bottle back in his entirely too pretty face. Instead, I dutifully leave his coat on my bed, which had apparently been designated as the coat room. I then manage to make my way through the gathering crowd and place the bottle of fancy Scotch next to all of the other fancy bottles.

  Great. Now I couldn’t even lock myself away in my room, because I’d probably get covered in coats.

  I’m lurking near the kitchen, nursing a beer, when the next guest busts through the door. He glances at me and starts to hand over a bottle of champagne and his coat.

  “The coat room is that way,” I gesture, pointing towards the hallway.

  “What? No coat girl?” He’s leering at me. Ugh.

  I turn away. Apparently, jeans and a shirt was code for coat girl. The cavernous living room, which looked enormous just minutes before, was now stuffed with people. I dart outside, hoping that the corner of the balcony that I had scoped out earlier was empty. I would just have to deal with the contact high. With a sigh of relief, I nudge my way through the haze of weed and smoke and find a tiny bit of space hidden behind a giant planter.

  If I could just block out the persistent humming of a guitar being strummed and the hollow noise that ice and a mix of vodka and juice makes as it sloshes against red plastic cups, I could pretend I was alone.

  I lean just a little bit too far over the railing. I’m perched dozens of stories above a brightly-lit New York City night and I breathe in. From the 27th floor, New York didn’t smell much different from Ohio or Atlanta or any of the other places I’d been. It was disappointing, to say the least.

  I had dreamed about this view since I was four years old and my mom made me watch Miracle on 34th Street. Before then, I thought everyone lived in a small house with a small yard and ran around their neighborhoods eating the
red, white, and blue popsicles from the ice cream truck. My parents and I had been to visit cities, Cleveland and Chicago and Pittsburgh, but I didn’t think anyone actually lived there.

  In my head, the tall buildings were full of robot people. But Miracle on 34th Street taught me that there were real people who lived in real cities with ice skating rinks and museums and thousands and millions of people. I had fallen in love with the idea of New York.

  In the naïve fantasies of a four-year-old, this was MY view.

  My slightly more realistic nineteen-year-old mind reminds me that this particular view of all of New York, from a four-bedroom, 3000-square feet apartment on Fifth Avenue, belongs to Sophia. More precisely, the view belongs to her father, William and her stepmother, Cleo.

  And the well-dressed hordes of people wandering out on the balcony to steal a puff of a cigarette or a long-wanted kiss with a drunken high school crush, belong to Sophia, too.

  Unfortunately, I would have to reenter the lions’ den eventually. I had only been outside for a few minutes before my feet start turning into frozen bits of ice, a result of the fact that I had never been good at packing. I usually threw a bunch of clothes into my suitcase and then hoped for the best. This time, it was to the severe loss of any feeling in my feet. The warm Atlanta weather had lulled me into believing that flip flops were somehow going to be a sensible footwear choice.

  Ben would get a kick out of it, I think. He usually went through my suitcase before we went camping, which was mostly due to an unfortunate incident where I had forgotten the sleeping bags. Maybe inside was better, after all. I glance inside at the screeching coming from the guitar (Long-Haired Strumming Boy Who Needed Some Lessons was attempting a punk rock song) and changed my mind. Nope.

  “Do you have a light?” a voice asks, reaching out a hand to touch my shoulder.

  I jerk back in response. I didn’t dare look at him, not yet. His voice was low and musical, and there was a hint of a smile underneath it. I was hoping for a social pariah, a skinny or chubby kid with glasses and mousy hair, someone to distract me from the scene that I definitely did not fit into. Of course, that would be a total contradiction from the incredibly sexy tone of his voice.

  “Sure.” I hand him a white lighter from my pocket.

  I had picked up pretend-smoking the summer before I left for college. I’d wanted to impress a boy who played the guitar badly (not unlike the Long-Haired punk rocker inside) and smelled faintly of tobacco and marijuana. My plan clearly hadn’t worked.

  We had a few conversations where I had dispensed advice about the mysteries of girls, and I had friended him on the internet on a night where I maybe had one too many beers. I would bet a hundred dollars that he still didn’t know who I was, although I was currently well aware of his current girlfriend and whereabouts.

  I hated smoking, but for some reason, the collection of lighters remained.

  “Thanks,” he says. He leaves the lighter on the ledge for me to grab.

  He’s exhaling slowly and I watch the smoke curling into the air. I sneak a quick look up at him. Great. Just my luck. Instead of a social outcast, I get some kind of ridiculous god-like creature.

  I manage to avert my eyes before he catches me staring at him. He’s tall, at least five or six inches taller than my 5’9, and long and lean. If I had to guess, he spends some serious time in the pool or on the track. His dark curls are just a little bit too long, tumbling over the corners of his ears.

  All of this was secondary to what I realize on my next glance. He’s probably the best-looking boy I’ve ever seen in real life. I need to stop staring. I’m acting like an idiot. Hallie, what are you doing? He’s going to go tell all of his friends that the creepo girl by herself on the balcony couldn’t even string together a sentence and must have some major issues. Whatever.

  He still hasn’t moved, so he’s probably waiting for me to shut my mouth and miraculously make words come out of it. “No problem,” I say, glancing away. There’s something familiar about him, but it was locked away in the part of my brain I couldn’t quite reach. I couldn’t help myself. I look up again.

  He opens his mouth, as if he’s about to say something. Shaking his head, he walks away, smiling.

  He moves to the other side of the balcony. From the furtive glances I give him, I can tell that he is smoking and laughing with a trio of girls. They touch him—on his arm, his shoulder, his shirt, seeking a tangible physical connection. More girls hang around the fringes, waiting to swoop in and switch places.

  Oh, god, I was staring again.

  I look hard, once, taking a picture of his face to try to figure out where I had seen him before. I spend a few more seconds trying to find it in my brain, and realized that the sexiest man alive candidate was the first one who had mistaken me for the maid. I should have recognized the voice. Of course he would think I was the maid. What a douchebag. I look again, hoping that my new insight would somehow make his face less attractive.

  Nope. The girls around him are chattering away and he stands alone in the middle, staring off at something. He was practically carved from a block of marble, the bones in his cheeks protruding slightly as he watches them, clearly amused.

  I manage to tear my eyes away to lean down to rub some feeling back into my feet. I don’t even know how I had ended up here. When Sophia had asked me to come home with her for winter break, I had jumped at the chance to escape my very nice mother and a round of family gatherings with stunted conversations and the smell of home-cooked meals that sat in the oven a bit too long. I had wanted a taste of New York with a real New Yorker, who happened to be my best friend.

  Clarified—my best friend at college. It seemed a million miles away now, our late-night sessions of endless reality TV watching and sunny days of driving around in her convertible with the top down. At school, we were Hallie and Sophia. I had come here knowing quite well that it wouldn’t, couldn’t, be the same here. We were in Sophia’s New York.

  It wasn’t like I was some charity-case friend or anything. I’d made plenty of friends at college and still talked to my friends from high school on a regular basis. But Sophia was different. When I told my mom that I was coming to New York, she had agreed with some trepidation, saying, “Sophia’s a wee bit of a dangerous friend, don’t you think, Hallie?” Yeah, my mom is super lame.

  Sophia definitely ran in racier circles than I did and had a wealth of experiences that I didn’t (and wealth that I definitely didn’t) and she was a little more carefree and wild than I had ever been. But she was also whip-smart, hilarious, a whole lot of fun, and one hell of a good friend. And the Sophia who had become one of my closest friends wasn’t quite what she pretended to be to everyone else—she was more real, more down-to-earth, and more genuine than the creature throwing this party.

  And that Sophia, the fabulous and real and fun and slightly crazy Sophia, was why I felt lucky to be her friend.

  She had pitched the idea to me excitedly, three weeks before. “Hallie, you will LOVE it. My friends are fabulous, and they will just love you. Some of them are even famous! We’ll go to Chinatown, to Central Park, everywhere.”

  I needed the trip to get out of my own skin, to avoid Ohio. I wanted New York.

  I should have known that I wouldn’t quite fit here, in this world.

  I grab the lighter from the ledge and move to get another beer, to get some air that wasn’t filled with conversations that I wasn’t a part of, and most importantly, to try to salvage some of the sensation in my feet. Snap out of it, Hallie, I told myself. You can do this. Just be a slightly more interesting version of yourself and find someone to talk to.

  As I turn around, a pair of green eyes flecked with gold meet mine. He is really, really, really good-looking. He smiles and nods at me. Not sure what else to do, I smile back.

  I stand, rooted to the same spot for a long minute after the most beautiful boy in the world smiles at me. I steady myself. Hallie, there’s no way he is actually intere
sted in you, and the last thing you need is an incredibly cute boy who wants to smile at you just to distract the girl who has actually captured his attention. Find someone else to talk to. Even if it’s a wall.

  I console myself with the fact that he is an incredible douchebag who totally thought that I was the maid.

  I knew his smile—it was a play to make another girl jealous. This wasn’t a rare occurrence. Somehow, I always ended up talking to the guys who went on and on about their former girlfriends. They would come up, pretend to be interested in me for a minute or two, and then they would start pouring their hearts out while I tried to plan out escape paths.

  After hours of listening to whining (I swear, boys were definitely worse than girls), I would get a, “Thanks, dude. That was super cool of you. We should hang out sometime.” And my heart would speed up. And then I would realize that the boy in question had just called me dude and the hang out that he was talking about included nothing more than a series of questions about the mysteries of the female psyche and maybe a few rounds of a video game.

  Maybe there was something wrong with me. Maybe they had smiled at me in the hopes that I would be the girl of their dreams but something was so fundamentally lacking in me that I instead became their new therapist.

  That’s me. Hallie Caldwell—normal girl extraordinaire. There were no real skeletons lurking in my closet. That’s not exactly true, my inner voice counters, but I push the thought away.

  I was pretty much the definition of average. I was okay with that, honestly. It meant no lofty expectations and it allowed me to go about my merry way. Maybe I spent a little bit too much time daydreaming about how it would feel to be glamorous, to be more like Sophia. But all in all, I was pretty sure that I kind of, sort of, knew who I was, and I was okay with me.

  Even if it would be nice, just once, to be the object of affection rather than the substitute shrink.

  Chapter 2

  CHRIS

  I sneak a glance back at the girl that I had asked for a light. She’s leaning far over the balcony, looking like she wants to vanish into the thick, smoke- and booze-filled air.