How We Fall by Kate Brauning

him next and what would happen later on and what people would think. I didn’t care, I didn’t care. All the way out here, the only thing to stop us was ourselves. He came back to my mouth and kissed me until I had no air left at all.
    He was mine. I wasn’t using him, he wasn’t using me. I wanted this to be real and he did too. We were desperate hands and sun-warmed skin and his chest on mine.
    His hand slid up my thigh. Mine found his chest and trailed down his stomach. Blood pounded through my entire body. He closed his eyes while my hands wandered around the top of his shorts again. Being this close fixed everything. Everywhere our skin touched burned me. Everything from my bare feet touching his legs to his body pressing mine into the blanket and the grass to his hair brushing my neck as he kissed my collarbone hummed with energy. Skin, hands, heat. Light fingers trailing up and down, hands finding small places.
    His eyes were dark, his breathing harsh. He tugged on my shorts, fiddled with the button.
    I closed my hand around his wrist. “Wait. Hang on.” I couldn’t think what to say. I wanted him with me, like this. But I also didn’t. I wanted us to be real, but we couldn’t.
    We watched each other for a minute. His chest rose and fell.
    I could fool myself into thinking we could undo a year of hooking up, making out, being more than friends. We could adjust and go on with our lives after all this. But we couldn’t undo sex.
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    Kate Brauning
    He moved his hand and sat up.
    I took a deep breath. “We just can’t.”
    “Yeah. I know.” He reached for the water bottle.
    “That would change everything. We live in the same house.
    We’d see each other every day.”
    “We already see each other every day.” He took a drink.
    “I mean, if we did . . . this. Later on, we’d have that history, always there. It would make things that much worse once we—”
    His eyes darted to mine. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but he knew what I meant and I saw on his face it hurt him, too.
    It would make things that much worse once we quit, moved on, stopped messing around. Once we broke up.
    For once, he didn’t go silent and avoid the issue. He moved close to me and his eyes burned into me so intensely I looked away. He put his hand on my cheek and turned my face toward his. His voice went lower than usual. “Listen. I want you, Jackie. I want all of you.”
    I pushed his hand away. “We said no sex, and I don’t—”
    “Not sex. You.”
    My brain stuttered. “What?”
    “I like you. For real. I have for a long time.” He leaned closer. “When I look at you, sure, I see my cousin, but I also see a girl who’s smart and beautiful and will yell at me when I do stupid things. There are hundred wonderful things about us together, and none of them make me think it’s a bad thing. I want it to be okay for me to like you this way.”
    “But it’s not,” I whispered.
    He shook his head. “This is why we’re not working. We set these limits on how much we can care about each other, and it’s just—I’m so far past them, every time you won’t let me show it—” He took a deep breath. “Caring about you isn’t something I want to change. If you want it too, then why can’t we really be together?”
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    How we Fall
    I touched his hand. My throat was so tight it hurt. “But I shouldn’t and we can’t.”
    Something sparked in his eyes. “But you do want to be with me?” His hand closed around mine.
    He’d focused on the wrong part of that. Something wet streaked down my face. Another. “What I want is to not want this.” Something was wrong with me. Me sitting here, thinking these things about my cousin and doing these things with him and wanting to tell him I wanted him too.
    It was a minute before he said anything. His eyebrows drew together and the lines on his face deepened. “I’d thought maybe you’d changed your mind.” His hand came back to my face and his thumb stroked my