Free Break My Fall (No Limits) by J.T. Cameron Page A

But she just wasn’t the athletic type, so watching was the extent of her involvement.
    As always happened, the conversation turned to what was going on back in Tampa. And of course, she had something to tell me about Kevin.
    He was still in touch with some of the guys from our group of friends, and he hung out with a couple of them a few times, but he was no longer a regular part of the group. This, I figured, was mostly due to the girls not wanting to have anything to do with him. And to their credit, a few of the guys felt the same way.
    Invariably, o ne of our friends would occasionally run into him at a bar or a concert, and a couple of times she even told me she heard he was seeing someone. I didn’t ask who, and she didn’t volunteer the name of the girl, so maybe it was the girl he cheated on me with, or maybe it wasn’t—either way, I didn’t care.
    This time, though, she had some other news about him.
    Kevin got ripped one night at a party and fell into a pool. I almost laughed at the image, until Liz told me he hadn’t just fallen, he had passed out, and if a couple of girls hadn’t seen it he probably would have drowned. It was so unlike Kevin. Sure, he drank, but no more than anyone else I knew, and never to that extent. The last time Liz heard anything about him, he had gotten fired from his summer internship with an engineering firm for not showing up to work twice in one week because he’d been drinking around the clock.
    “What a loser,” she said. “Karma’s a bitch.”
    “Yeah. Wow. No shit.” I agreed with her only because I didn’t want to admit that I felt badly for him. I also hated the fact that I had any sympathy at all for him after what he did to me. So I just wanted to leave it at that, and it worked out because she immediately raised another issue.
    “When are you coming back? Classes start on August twenty-fifth, you know.”
    I hadn’t given any thought to exactly when I’d go back. I had a general idea that I’d probably arrive back in Tampa a few days before classes began, but I hadn’t done anything in the way of planning yet.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Well, when you figure it out, let me know?”
    “I will.”
    “Because I’d really like to have my old roommate back. I miss you.”
    It was comments like that—genuine and well-meaning as they were—that cut me the deepest and made being away even harder.
    “I miss you, too,” I said, wanting to avoid this part of the c onversation going any further.
    Thankfully, it seemed that she did as well, because we were instantly on to chatting about relatively mundane things, the kind of everyday chatting I’d always loved to have with her.

Chapter Eight
     
    I barely slept at all Sunday night. I kept tossing and turning, my thoughts running wildly from the report of Kevin’s recent troubles to why I hadn’t seen Drew in several days. The thoughts about Kevin ran a distant second to my curiosity about Drew, though, and how strange all of this was.
    I didn’t know where he lived, where he worked, who his friends were…nothing. And it seemed odd to me that he had been so persistent in his attempts to get close to me, and just when we have a date that ends with an amazing kiss, he practically vanishes.
    The cynical side of me chalked that up to guys being guys. And once again I found myself fighting the urge to ask his grandmother.
    I had to be a t work by noon on Monday, and I planned to hit the beach for a little while before going in. But doing laundry was priority number one, since I had neglected it for too long.
    Mrs. Russell had offered to let me use the washer and dryer in their house, but I had politely declined, knowing I would have felt like I was imposing on them. Whenever I needed to wash clothes and my bedding, I went to a Laundromat a few blocks from the house.
    I killed time by listening to music and browsing the Internet on my phone. I brought up Facebook and searched for Drew, finding nothing. Either he