The Risk of Falling

Chapter Fifteen: Spin, Dance, Fall

A/N: Hi everyone! Better late than never, I guess. This was a bit longer (God, what happened to my promise of keeping chapters short?!?!) but I felt I couldn't finish it with just the earlier scenes. I needed to close this issue before we move on to new complications in Luke and Max's lives.

Have fun reading!

***

I had just applied a purplish black mud mask on my face when my cell phone started to ring with a number I didn’t know.

I was in pajamas with my hair in a braid, steeping my tea and doing a little calming night ritual to right all the things that went wrong tonight in some way. 

It was nearly midnight but it took a while for me to wind down after I got home—to empty myself of feelings I had no business feeling. Well, except for being pissed off with Luke because I was entitled to that. Whoever he was with didn’t matter. He shouldn’t have stood me up like that.

I didn’t cry or bring home a bottle of tequila or crumple in a sobbing heap on the bathroom floor. There were other truly devastating things in life—being disappointed by a guy one should’ve suspected all along to be capable of it wasn’t one of them.

I didn’t like answering phone calls from people I didn’t know especially since most of them tended to be a telemarketer so I let the phone ring and boy, did it ever ring. 

It was like my poppy ringtone on a manic loop that I was sure to have last-song syndrome for the next century.

It was fun at first until it drove me crazy so I put it on mute and cranked up the volume of the CSI episode I was starting my possible TV marathon with.

I had just curled up in my couch when someone rapped quite aggressively on my door.

“Who is it?” I asked as I put the TV on mute and walked up to the door. My only answer was another nasty knock.

I had a pretty good feeling who was on the other side.

The door didn’t have a peephole but it had a chain so I cranked it open slightly.

Luke’s face appeared in the small strip of space, dark and brooding. 

“Hey,” I said feebly, not because I didn’t know what to say to him (I actually had a few choice words on reserve) but mostly because my face was stiff from the mask that it took some effort to loosen up my cheeks.

“Can I come in so we can talk?” he asked, not even blinking at the sight of me. 

“No,” I said. “You’ve wasted enough of my night. But thanks for inviting me to Peggy’s party. It was, hmm, enlightening at the very least.”

He just looked even grimmer. “Why won’t you answer my calls?”

“Which calls?” 

“The ones I’ve been making in the last fifteen minutes,” he said in exasperation. “Do you know how hard it is to actually buy a cell phone at this time of the night, no matter how much money you offer someone to open a damn store for you?”

I blinked in surprise. “Um, no, not really because I don’t tend to buy things with the snap of my fingers and actually expect them to materialize out of thin air.”

He didn’t find that amusing. “Then I had to track down a few different people so I could get your number.”

“You could’ve asked Ryan for it.”

“I would’ve but Ryan’s number, along with yours and several other people, were all in my old cellphone which probably still litters the VIP lounge in Haneda Airport in small bits and pieces after it was smashed on the floor and pounded into with a six-inch high heel shoe.”