Falling Into Us Read Free Page A

for him.  
      Everyone was watching me. They knew something was going down. Malcolm and Frankie had probably told everyone they knew, which was everyone, that I was asking Nell out, so the whole crowd of “cool kids” was standing in the hallway, not even pretending not to watch.  
    I couldn’t puss out now. Damn it.
    I swallowed the ball of dry nerves and clenched my trembling hands into fists at my sides. “So, Nell. I was thinking. You wanna go out with me tonight? Seven o’clock?” My voice hadn’t shaken or squeaked, and I’d sounded suitably nonchalant.
    Nell’s eyes widened and she sucked in a surprised breath, then let out an excited squeal before chomping her teeth together to stop it. “Yes! I mean, yeah, sure. I’d love to. Where are we going?”
    I had actually done some prep for this, thank god. “I was thinking Bravo.”
    She grinned again. It was an expensive place for high schoolers, and you had to have reservations, especially on a Friday night. I had an agreement with my dad: I would focus on my grades and football, and he’d make sure I didn’t need to work. I got a two-hundred-dollar bonus for every game we won, plus twenty dollars for every touchdown I scored. Our team was undefeated so far this year, and I’d already scored six touchdowns in the four games we’d played.  
    Yeah. My dad really pushed me to succeed at football. Winning was everything, second only to being “a real man.”
    “Don’t you have to make reservations to get in there on Fridays?” Nell asked.
    I just grinned cockily and shoved my fist in my hip pocket. “Yep.”
    She narrowed her eyes at me. “How could you be so sure I’d say yes?”
    I grinned even more widely, mainly to cover my hammering heart. “Well, you did, didn’t you?”
    She couldn’t hold the serious look for long. “I’ll see you at seven, then.”
    I nodded and pushed past her into our classroom, ignoring the hushed whispers. I slumped into my seat in the back by the window and pretended not to see Nell doing the girly whispered freak-out with Becca and Jill. I wanted to have a whispery freak-out myself, but I couldn’t, because I was a man, and men didn’t show emotions.
    Nell settled gracefully into her seat a few rows over and in front of me. She set her backpack on the floor beside her foot and bent over to open it, using the opportunity to steal a glance at me, blushing and smiling when she saw me looking right at her. I wondered in the back of my head if she would let me kiss her.  
    Probably not, but it sure would be cool if she did.

    *   *   *

    Fortunately for me, Coach made us watch a film instead of running drills. He let Kyle skip the film, knowing Kyle would study it at home on his own. The rest of us weren’t so lucky, so we were stuck watching Brighton games until almost six-thirty.  
    I’d planned on picking Nell up right after practice anyway, so I’d smuggled some jeans and a button-down shirt in my backpack. The shirt was wrinkled, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. I showered after the guys all left and then hopped into my truck. I’d bought the truck myself, saving my earnings from all of last year’s football season plus my end-of-year straight-A bonus to buy it. It was a ten-year-old F-150, black, long-bed, manual transmission, four-by-four. It was my baby. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. Dad couldn’t and wouldn’t take it away from me no matter what I did, since I’d saved and paid for it myself. He respected that.  
    He had his own kind of honor, in a warped way. He had no qualms about beating me until I pissed blood, but he respected my space and my things, and he paid my way as long as I earned it. He’d cut short his lessons if I fought back. Of course, the lesson would be shortened via me getting knocked out, but it would be less of a beating, so I’d started fighting back more regularly.
    I drove to Nell’s house, my tires crunching on the gravel road. My nerves were