Just Fall
Authors: Nina Sadowsky
Just Fall
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Nina Sadowsky
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Sadowsky, Nina, author.
Title: Just fall : a novel / Nina Sadowsky.
Description: New York : Ballantine Books, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037179 | ISBN 9780553394856 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780553394863 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Romance / Suspense. | FICTION / Suspense.
Classification: LCC PS3619.A353 J87 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037179
.
ebook ISBN 9780553394863
Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook
Title-page image: © iStockphoto.com
Cover design: Caroline Teagle
Cover photo: © Martin Dimitrov/Getty Images
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Contents
My darling Ellie,
I am so, so sorry.
Please follow the instructions enclosed with this letter exactly and it is my fervent hope all will be fine.
You are my love, and always will be, believe that.
You are everything.
Rob
Salt tang and the slight, sickly sweet scent of alcohol, sugar, and fruit too long in the sun. Orange-tipped sun, baby-blue skies, sand fine as powder, azure waves lapping dreamily against the shore.
The room in question is on the third, the top, floor of the hotel. The building runs long and lean, a jagged spine along the pristine shoreline, rooms staggered for optimal views.
The rooms are broad and deep. Each opens out to a private terrace or patio. Sliding glass doors pair with plantation shutters in the event of a desperately necessary lazy afternoon nap. Or fuck.
Juxtaposed against the beauty of the beach, a juicy array of the human species: pale, bronzed, brown, sunburned, leathery, crispy; thin, fat, plump, beefy, curvy, lanky; reading, sleeping, drooling, floating, swimming, sailing. Kissing, snoring, drinking, flirting.
Hotel staff circulates, offering menus, bringing cocktails and towels and sunscreen, planting thatched umbrellas, jerking open extra chairs. You are lucky indeed to be a guest at this hotel.
Directly in front of the room in question, hard-muscled young men toss a football in the surf. They shout and laugh and grunt, their sounds wafting up on balmy air caresses.
At the window of the room in question, a woman watches the men play.
The woman, blond, graceful, is poised just on the lip of the balcony, half in the room and half out. A shadow slices her lovely face in half, leaving her eyes recessed in darkness.
She leans out to better watch the game below. Her skin is pale, but for two spots of flush, high on her cheekbones. A slight, sudden inhale through her plummy mouth as one man dives for a catch, his taut body arcing into the air and slicing down hard into sand. He grunts on impact and then groans theatrically before springing up with a laugh.
The blonde backs away from the window.
Behind her, in the room, in the soft white bed, a man is sprawled. A drunken arm crooked across his forehead, a swath of cool sheet twisted over his naked torso, he is completely still.
He looks healthy. That would be anyone’s first impression. His legs are strong limbs, and deeply tanned, fading paler toward his thighs. A man who lives outdoors, wears shorts, uses his body. His shoulders are thick, his arms powerful. His hands are palms up, open, relaxed.
What do these two mean to each other? Let’s hazard a guess. Or two.
A holiday hookup, the pure anonymity of it, the thrill? Possible. They don’t seem quite a pair, somehow.
Newlyweds, finally alone together after the pageantry of their wedding? Or more telling, after a tearful and regretted fight, the very first bitter sticks of marital kindling upon which the funeral pyre of their relationship would be built? Don’t think this cynical. Open-eyed pragmatism is actually romantic.
Or could they be longtime best friends, passion unleashed by mojitos—only to face uneasy regret? Adulterous lovers, mixing their urgent guilt and needy thrill-seeking into a heady cocktail? John and hooker, sex as transaction, the body quite separate from the mind or heart?
Let’s look closer.
The blonde gives us little at first. Her lovely face is composed, her beautiful body at ease. There is that high flush on her cheeks. Could be sunburn. Or fever? But note this: Her eyes look everywhere but at the man in the bed.
Two wineglasses on the dresser. One empty, one full. A bottle of wine lolls on the floor. A joint smolders on the nightstand, burning a small char into the finish, right next to the placard declaring this a No Smoking Room. There was some kind of party here. Maybe it’s still going on.
The blonde crosses to the smoldering joint and considers it. Then crosses to the bathroom and flushes it down the toilet. Returns to rub her thumb over the burn mark it has left on the nightstand.
She lifts the bottle of wine from the floor and empties its contents down the sink, rinses it thoroughly. Rinses both glasses.
The blonde crosses to the man on the bed. It’s time to at least check. She can’t put it off any longer. She looks at his face.
A shock of sun-streaked hair drapes onto his forehead. He looks peaceful. She darts a glance down toward his abdomen.
Is that blood? Yes, it is. No other signs of violence. Just a sticky carnation of blooming blood in the twisted sheets. And the knife that caused it to grow.
Well, that changes things.
Accident? Misadventure? Attack or defense? What happened here? We still have more questions than answers.
Has she done this to the man?
She’s delicate, but she has confidence in her young, strong body. She’s athletic, at home in her skin. Still. She’s half the size of the man on the bed.
No blood sours her lime-green bikini or the white gauze cover-up, with its angelic float around her body. That seems in her favor.
But then what is she doing here? What does she feel about this dead man?
She pulls the wisp of white cover-up over her head, wraps it around her hand, and wipes down the room. The phone, the desk, the sink and shower and bathroom counter, the book of guest services. The wineglasses and bottle and bed frame and mirrors. Thoroughly. Methodically. Even the handle of the knife in the man’s belly, careful to avoid the well of blood. Meticulously.
There’s no anger here. Or fear. No sorrow or loss.
Resignation maybe? Calculation? Shock?
Or all three?
A shudder of revulsion courses through her like an electric shock as she notices a strand of her long blond hair on the pillow next to the man’s graying face. She plucks it up. Walks to the balcony and releases the hair into the wind.
A pair of joyful, leaping dolphins appears on the horizon, their freedom and exuberant beauty a reproach. She is not free. Her face twists. As she turns to exit the balcony and reenter the room, the raucous hoots of the young men on the beach float up as if to mock her.
Carefully, she spreads a beach towel over the room’s sole armchair, a large, cushy bucket of crisp navy cotton. She settles in, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.