Before We Fall (29 page)

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”

That’s my favorite quote from Ernest Hemingway, and it perfectly sums up why I’m writing this series.

The older I get, the more it seems that everyone in the world is broken in some way, whether it is from divorce, death, drugs, etc. I wanted to write stories that people could relate to, stories where my characters were far from perfect, but had readers rooting for them to succeed, to overcome their personal demons.

While my characters’ problems are sometimes more exaggerated than real-life problems for the sake of fictional entertainment, the roots of their issues are firmly planted in real life.

The fact of the matter is, real life can be a bitch sometimes. It can slap you, shove you around, and then kick you while you’re down.

But the important thing to remember is always this:

Life is hard sometimes, but it can only break you if you let it.

No matter what, you have to always stick your chin out and keep going. You have to keep going through the motions even if you don’t feel like it. Flip your problems the bird and keep fighting to make your life how you want it.

Your life is your own. If you don’t like it, if it makes you sad, if it makes you discouraged on a daily basis, change it. Change everything about it until you’re in love with your life and it’s exactly how you want it.

If Dominic, Jacey, Madison, Gabriel, Pax, and Mila have shown you anything, I hope it is that. That you can be dealt a really crappy hand in life, but the power to change everything rests within you. You hold the key to your own happiness.

We’ve each got one life. Live the heck out of yours.

Courtney Cole is a
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author who lives near Lake Michigan with her family. She’s always working on her next project… or staring dreamily out her office window. To learn more about her, please visit
courtneycolewrites.com
.

Please see the next page for a preview of
If You Stay
by Courtney Cole.

“Pax.”

I can’t be sure that the girl said my name. Her voice is muffled and unintelligible and hard to understand, mostly because my dick is in her mouth.

Slumping against the black leather seat of my car, I push the girl’s head down further, wordlessly urging her to bury more of me in her throat.

“Don’t talk,” I tell her. “Just suck.”

I close my eyes and listen. I can hear the spit pooling in her mouth and sliding out the corners. Her cheek makes a soft sound as it grazes my open zipper. She moans periodically, although I don’t understand it. She’s not getting anything out of this. My hand is on her head, pushing, pushing. Guiding her movements and her speed. I grip the hair at the base of her neck, winding it in my fingers; pulling it, releasing it, then pulling it again.

She moans again.

I still don’t know why.

I still don’t care.

I’m high as fuck.

And I don’t know her name.

Everything is a fog, except this moment. I tune out the crashing sounds of Lake Michigan to our right, and the sounds of the cars on the highway a few miles away. I block out the glowing lights from town. I tune out the roaring quiet and the occasional thought that someone might happen by and see us. No one is out here on the beach, not at eleven
P.M.
Not that I would care anyway.

Right now, all I’m focused on is this blow job.

I already know that I’m not ready to come, but I don’t tell her because I don’t want her to stop yet, either. I let her go for a few minutes more before I push her away.

“Take a break,” I tell her as I settle back into my seat.

I don’t bother to put myself away, I just sigh loud and long as I relax in the breeze. The girl turns her attention to the visor mirror, trying to straighten her mess of a face.

“Wait,” I instruct. “Hold on for a minute.”

She looks at me in confusion, her lipstick smeared. I smile.

“I know you want some of this,” I tell her, grabbing a little bottle from my jacket pocket. I dump a few coke pebbles onto a little mirror on my console and crush them with a razor, dragging the powder into two straight lines.

I offer her the little straw, and now she’s the one smiling with her distorted clown mouth.

She snorts at her line, coughs, then snorts it again.

Settling back into her seat, she tilts her face to the car roof as she lets the drug take effect. Her eyes are empty as she thrusts the straw at me, and I hesitate for only a second.

I’ve hit it hard today and I’ve done more than I usually do.

Of everything.

But for some reason, the need to disappear into the black is strong today, stronger than usual. And it’s on days like this that I hit the hard stuff. I grab the straw and do my line, breathing in the powder that never fails to take me away. Even when I can count on nothing else, I can always count on this.

The familiar burn immediately numbs my throat. The emptiness spreads throughout the rest of my body, dulling my senses, speeding up my heart. I can feel the blood pulsing through it, hard and pounding, carrying oxygen to my numb fingers.

I fucking love this shit.

I love the way it dulls everything but my attention. I love how it heightens my awareness while still turning everything else black and numb.

This is where I am comfortable. Drifting here into this nothingness, this obscurity.

Coke makes it easy to exist in the emptiness.

I run my fingers through the traces of the remaining powder and slide it along the skin of my erection before grabbing the girl by the back of the neck. I shove her head back down and she opens her mouth willingly. This is most definitely not against her will. She wants to be here.

Especially now that I have fed her habit.

Especially now that she can lick her habit from my dick. If she moans now I’ll believe it, because she’s getting something out of it, too.

“Finish,” I tell her. I stroke her back while she moves and I can’t feel my fingers.

Her head bobs for a few more minutes, and then without warning I come in her mouth. Her eyes widen and she starts to pull away as my ejaculate seeps from the edges of her lips, but I hold her fast by the back of the neck until my dick stops throbbing.

“Swallow,” I tell her politely.

Her blank eyes widen, but she swallows obediently.

I smile.

She gags, but she doesn’t heave.

“Thank you,” I say, still polite. And then I lean past her and shove open the passenger side door. It creaks as it swings wide, evidence that cars were still made from iron back in 1968. I pull out my wallet and hand her a dog-eared twenty.

“Get yourself something to eat,” I tell her. “You’re too skinny.”

She’s got the look that girls on nose candy get. The way-too-thin look. That’s one downfall of the stuff. It’s good for drifting away into oblivion, but it’s hell on your appetite. If you don’t make yourself eat, you’ll waste away and start looking like shit.

This girl doesn’t look like shit. Yet. She’s not ugly. But she’s not pretty either. She mostly looks hardened. Mousy brown hair, pale blue eyes. Bland, stick-thin body. I can take her or leave her.

And I’m leaving her.

She glares at me as she wipes her mouth.

“My car is in town. Aren’t you at least going to take me back to it?”

I look at her and note how there are three of her that blur into one, then back into three, before I shake the blurriness from my head and try to focus again.

Nope. Still three of her.

“Can’t,” I tell her, dropping my head heavily against the headrest. “I’m too fucked up to drive. It’s not that far, anyway. It’s not my fault that you wore five-inch stripper shoes. Just take them off. It’ll make it easier to walk.”

“You’re a fucking asshole, Pax Tate,” she spits angrily. “You know that?”

She grabs her purse from the floor and slams my car door as hard as she can. My car, Danger, shakes from her efforts.

Yes, I named my car. A 1968 Dodge Charger in pristine condition deserves a name.

And no, I don’t care that this coked up little bitch thinks I’m an asshole. I
am
an asshole. I’m not going to deny it.

As if to prove that point, I can’t even think of her name right now, even though it only took me one second to recall the name of my car. I might remember the girl’s in the morning or I might not. That doesn’t matter to me at this point. She’ll come back. She always does.

I’ve got what she wants.

I strip off my jacket and lay it on the passenger seat, zipping my pants back up as I watch her stomp away. Then I open my own door, dangling one black boot over the doorsill, letting the cool breeze rustle over my flushed, overheated body.

The landscape up and down the coast is jagged and rolling and wild. It is so vast that it makes me feel small. The night is inky black and there are barely any stars. It’s the kind of night where a guy can just disappear into the dark. My kind of night.

I rest my head against the seat and allow the car to spin around me. It feels as though the seat is the anchor that is holding me to the ground. Without it, I might drift off into space and no one will ever see me again.

It’s not a bad notion.

But the car is spinning too fast. Even in this state, I know it’s too fast. I’m not going to worry about it, though. I simply pull out my vial and take something to slow things down. My vial is like a magician’s hat. It’s got a little bit of everything in it. Everything I need: fast or slow, white or blue, capsule, pill, or rock. I’ve got it.

I wash the pill down with a gulp of whiskey. I don’t even feel the burn as it slides down my throat. I consider it for a minute, the speed that things are turning and blurring around me. I decide I should take another pill, maybe even two. I put them in my mouth and take another slog of Jack before I toss the bottle onto the passenger side floor. I realize that I don’t know if I put the cap back on or not.

Then I realize that I don’t care.

The drug-induced fog blurs my vision and all of the blacks and grays swirl together and I close my eyes against it. I still feel like I’m moving, like the car is spinning round and round.

The night swallows me and I am propelled into the darkness, far above the clouds and into the night sky, sailing through the stars, past the moon. Reaching out, I touch it with a finger.

I laugh.

Or I think I laugh.

It’s hard to say at this point. I don’t know what’s real or not real. And that’s just the way I like it.

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Twenty-four-year-old Pax Tate is an asshole. Seriously. He’s a tattooed, rock-hard bad boy with a tough attitude to match. His mother died when Pax was seven, leaving a hole in his heart filled with an intense guilt that he doesn’t understand. What he does know is that he and his dad were left alone, and they have never been close. Now, he uses drugs and women to cope with the black void in his soul. He pretends that the emptiness isn’t there and this has always worked… until he meets Mila.

Sweet, beautiful Mila Hill is the fresh air that Pax has never known in his life. He doesn’t know how to not hurt her, but he quickly realizes that he’d better figure it out because he needs her to breathe. When the memories of his mother’s death resurface to haunt Pax, Mila is there to save him from his overwhelming guilt. Mila restores his broken heart, even as she evokes his powerful, sexual desires. Now for Pax to keep Mila, he needs to work on his issues and stop being an asshole. But is that enough to make her stay?

Ex-Army Ranger Gabriel Vincent is a badass hero. Or he used to be. Home from Afghanistan, Gabe can’t stop thinking about that one horrible night on the battlefield, a night that changed his life forever. He knows he’s messed up, but with the help of a little beer and a lot more women, he’s keeping it together. Until he meets Madison Hill.

Madison is happily single—or so she thinks. After the tragic death of her parents, she took on the responsibility of running the family restaurant, and that’s just about all she has time to worry about. Until she meets Gabriel Vincent.

Though they don’t realize it at first, Gabe and Maddy will soon develop a weakness: each other. But Gabe has a secret, a hidden monster that he’s afraid Maddy could never overcome. And Maddy is dealing with issues she fears Gabe won’t understand. They quickly realize they need each other to be whole, but they have demons to fight—and the problem with demons is that they never die quietly. Can they find a way to heal the past… before they lose each other?

THE SECRET OF ELLA AND MICHA

A rule-breaker with a fiery attitude, Ella always wore her heart on her sleeve. Then she left everything behind to go to college, where she transformed into someone who follows the rules, keeps everything together, and hides all her problems. Now it’s summer break and she has nowhere else to go but home. But once there, Ella fears that everything she’s worked so hard to bury might resurface—especially with Micha living right next door.

Smart, sexy, and confident, Micha can get under Ella’s skin like no one else. He knows everything about her, including her darkest secrets. If he tries to tempt the old Ella to return, he will be impossible to resist. But what Ella doesn’t realize is that when she left, she took a piece of Micha’s heart with her. Now he’s determined to win back the girl he lost, no matter what it takes.

From the
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Secret of Ella and Micha
comes a new story of hope, heartbreak, and the power of young love.

THE FOREVER OF ELLA AND MICHA

Ella is back at school, trying to focus on her future and forget the darkness of her past. Still, her ongoing family drama is making it harder and harder to get through the days. All she really wants is Micha, but no way will she let her problems get in the way of his dreams.

Micha is busy touring the country with his band, seemingly getting everything he’s ever wanted. But deep down he knows something is missing. Being away from Ella is harder than he expected. And while he longs to have her with him, he won’t ask her to leave college just to be at his side.

When Ella and Micha are together, anything seems possible… but lately those shared moments aren’t so easy to find. When a new tragedy shakes their already fragile world, one of them will make a dramatic choice that could break them apart forever…

THE TEMPTATION OF LILA AND ETHAN

On the surface, Lila Summers is flawless: good looks, expensive clothes, and a big, beautiful smile. But a dark past and even darker secrets are threatening to bubble over her perfect façade. She’ll do anything to keep the emptiness inside hidden—which leads her into situations that always end badly. Whenever she hits bottom, there’s only one person who’s there to pull her out: Ethan Gregory.

Ethan set the rules a long time ago: he and Lila are just
friends
. He doesn’t do relationships. Although his tattooed, bad-boy exterior is a far cry from Lila’s pretty princess image, Ethan can’t deny they have a deeper connection than he’s used to. If he’s not careful, he could be in serious danger of becoming attached—and he’s learned the hard way that attachment only leads to heartbreak.

When Lila falls farther than she ever has before, can Ethan continue to help as a friend? Or is he also getting close to falling… for her?

The day Ella has waited for is just around the corner. It’s the day she’ll marry Micha, the love of her life, the light that guided her out of the darkness. It looks like it will be the perfect Christmas—until an unexpected package arrives with a harsh reminder of Ella’s past. Suddenly Ella doesn’t feel as confident about her future. Can she really have a “happily-ever-after” if she’s never even seen one?

Micha will stand by Ella no matter what she’s going through—though he worries that she might leave him standing at the altar again. When he’s offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to tour with his favorite band for three months, Micha knows he can’t leave Ella behind. But can he ask her to uproot her life to join him on the road?

Now Ella and Micha must find a way to balance their fears, their dreams, and their love… if they ever want to hear wedding bells.