Falling Into You (2 page)

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 advi
ce 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 slowl
y 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 s
econdary to what I realize
on my next glance
.
He’s
probably the best-looking boy I’
ve
ever
seen
in real li
fe.
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
som
ething 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 someth
ing. Shaking his head, he walks
away
, smiling
.

He
moves
to the other side of
the balcony. F
rom 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 ha
ng 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 p
rotruding 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 i
s really, really
, really good-looking. He smiles and nods
at me. No
t 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 interested 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 th
at 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.

I had never seen her before, so s
he obviously
hadn’t gone to Sampson
.
Probably someone’s college friend
, then
. I make a quick assessment from the distance.

Hot or not?

She’s tall and
slim
,
with
long
hair that defied a description of color—brown
and red and amber all rolled up into one.
The smattering of freckles on her nose make
s
her approachable-looking, although she’s still standing by herself.

She’s wearing
a really ugly pair of
jeans and a
blue shirt. The clothes aren’t doing anything for her, that’s for sure.
“
Shoes can te
ll you everything about a girl.”
That was a little piece of wisdom that
Diana, my older sister, had imparted to me several years ago. How high were the heels?

Actually, no heels at all. Flip-flops. In 30 degree weather. Interesting.

Girl-next-door-pretty, I decide. Except for the eyes. She had hardly even looked my way, but I did catch a glimpse of a pair
of
the bluest eyes I had ever seen. I couldn’t see them anymore.
Still, she’s not my usual type. That honor goes
to leggy, black-haired
,
black-eyed vixens who go by the name of
Sophia
.