How We Fall by Kate Brauning Page B

of the sugar I would have and whisked it.
    “Is anyone else out of bed?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Don’t think so. Hey.” He paused. He wasn’t looking at me, which meant something was up. “I didn’t mean to be weird yesterday. Or make things harder.”
    I frowned at the bottom of my orange juice glass. I looked up to see him staring at me, a worried look in his eyes. I hadn’t noticed before, but they were bloodshot. “It’s fine,” I said. “You didn’t.”
    Except he had. He’d made it so, so much harder. He liked me. He wanted to be with me. And I so badly wanted to be a girl in high school with a huge crush on a guy who would kiss me slowly like that.
    “You kept telling me we had to keep things low-key, and I didn’t listen, and I’ve gone and made it worse.” He gripped the whisk, his frown deepening.
    “Shh!” I hissed. Chris could be up already. This conversation would undo a year’s worth of secrets.
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    He sounded scared. “I can do it, okay? I can keep things low-key. We’ll be more careful. We know we can’t go that far, so we’ll back off a bit. I won’t push you. I swear.”
    Being more careful might help. Give us the chance to calm down and not give everything up right away. “It’s fine,” I said.
    “Don’t be sorry. Let’s try to take a step back and see how it goes.”
    He balled the dishtowel up in his hand. “It’s not incest, you know,” he whispered. “We can’t—first cousins can’t get married in Missouri, but it’s not illegal for us—them—to be together.”
    Have sex. That’s what he meant. It wasn’t incest, but the fact that he’d had to check, had to see if us being together was illegal—that scared me. Maybe it wasn’t wrong in a legal sense, but real couples, normal couples, never would have had to do that.“I know,” I whispered. I’d researched it, too. Once again, we fell quiet.
    He sighed and hung up the dishtowel. “So, are we okay?”
    “Yeah.” We were not okay, but we were still here, still friends, still us. That mattered more than any limits we had to put on ourselves.
    His face relaxed, but his eyes stayed serious. He shifted his weight to the other hip as he leaned on the stove. His fingers gripped the edge of the counter. “It’s just, I’ve been thinking—”
    I waited for him to finish, but he set his jaw and shook his head. He cleared this throat. “Never mind. Want to watch a movie?”
    I blinked. “I was going to turn on Casablanca . But you can come if you want.”
    “Oh. Let’s watch Jurassic Park instead . ” He turned around and poured the cooling hot chocolate into a mug. He rinsed the pan, wiped a drip off the counter, and rearranged the flour, sugar, and cocoa canisters so they descended in height.
    “Sorry, but no way.” I went back to my room and put in the 72
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    DVD, Marcus tagging along. This felt normal. This was cousin stuff, friend stuff. I climbed back into bed and on top of the blanket. Limits. On top of the blanket, not under.
    He closed the door then climbed in beside me and slouched against the headboard. The Warner Brothers logo appeared on the screen as I curled my arms around a pillow. Marcus drank his hot chocolate as the narrator marked a path on the map from Paris to Marseille; Marseille to Oran; Oran to Casablanca.
    I exhaled and pulled the pillow closer. No one else here besides Marcus could stop moving long enough to enjoy a Saturday morning properly. Sometimes I felt like everyone else in this family was whirling in opposite directions and Marcus was the only one standing still, the only one looking right at me.
    The magic about Casablanca was that it was just one story in all of World War II. It wasn’t about a concentration camp or the Battle of Britain or D-Day or any landmark event. Ilsa and Rick’s story was just one of love in the middle of war. About heroism in small things, and how much of a difference those small things made. Wars weren’t made