The Fall Risk: A Short Story

How’s it going in the Eagle’s Nest?” Gabe asked from my speakerphone.

I took my boot off and looked at my bruised ankle. I’d put too much weight on it today, it was throbbing. I shouldn’t be doing half of the lifting and moving I’d been doing, but the urge to do things for Charlotte was overriding my common sense. We’d spent the whole day painting her apartment. It looked great. It was after 8:00 p.m. now. We’d just eaten dinner—pizza and beers on the landing—and we’d split up to shower. We were meeting back outside in half an hour to eat inappropriate cookies and watch a show on my laptop that we’d both been wanting to see.

“It’s going,” I said.

“Is she cool?” Gabe asked.

I tossed my boot next to the bed. “She is beyond cool. Cool doesn’t even cover it.”

I felt like we were on some epic twenty-four-hour first date. It wasn’t a date, of course. It was just a weird circumstance that we found ourselves in that she was probably just making the most of.

I was afraid to imagine it was more than that.

It was definitely more than that for me.

I liked her.

I hadn’t felt this way in a long time. It was like fate conspired to place the perfect woman in the apartment across from mine, and then it knocked out the stairs for good measure, and my only job was to make her interested in me, which I wasn’t sure I was actually doing.

We had a little moment earlier, but I think she was just being playful? The flirty stuff from her ceased after John showed up. Maybe it wasn’t flirting at all?

“I need to ask you a favor,” I said, peeling off my shirt.

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Can you deliver something to me tomorrow? And don’t tell Izzy what it is.”

“I’m not gonna tell Iz—”

“You better fucking tell me,” a woman said in the background.

I paused with my thumbs hooked to pull my pants down. “Is she there?”

“Technically, I’m at her place?”

The phone muffled like he had a hand over it. “If my best friend doesn’t want me to tell you something, I’m not gonna—ow! Shit, stop that! No!” There was shuffling. Then Izzy got on the phone. “What exactly is it that I’m not supposed to know?”

“I just want to surprise Charlotte with something,” I said, tossing my pants in the hamper. “I don’t care if you know, but please, can the two of you keep it a secret?”

She paused. “It’s a nice thing?”

“Of course.”

“Fine.”

She handed the call back to Gabe.

“Damn, that hurt,” he said to her. “We need to have a safe word. And you should not be biting people while they’re on the phone. Wait till after.” He came back to me. “So, what’s the thing you need me to get?”

“I’ll text you.”

I sat on the end of the bed. “The ladies showed up today,” I said.

“Shit, for real?”

“Yup.”

Gabe started cracking up. “What’d she think of that?” he asked.

“She thought it was hilarious,” Izzy said from the background. “Also, she wants to see the abs.”

I snorted.

I said I didn’t want to be treated like a piece of meat. I actually didn’t mind. At all. Not from Charlotte, anyway.

There was a shriek on the other end of the line. The shriek was Gabe’s. Then he started giggling.

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

“I’m hanging up now,” I said.

He hung up first.

I got up, shaking my head, hopping on one foot to go feed my fish. The fish I’d saved from a life of imprisonment in a too-small cell.

I think the reason I pushed myself today the way I did was because I hated the way Charlotte’s world had been shrunk. If she was going to live in a cage, I wanted to help her make the most of it. Soften it any way I could.

I always thought of the famous quote: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” I didn’t want her to suffer anymore. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her, and the insult to the injury was the way she was forced to live because of it.

I knew it was really early on, and we didn’t know each other very well, but I was protective of her. Whether she knew it or not, I was in. And once I was in, that was it. I’d do anything for the people I cared about—and I cared about her.

Probably more than I should.