Break My Fall (No Limits) (12 page)

Chapter Twelve

There were times when my curiosity go
t the best of me and I would type my name into Google. Although Kevin hadn’t posted any personal information of mine—name, address, school, etc.—there was always the chance that someone from school would see my pictures on one of the sites and post a response saying something like:
I know her! That’s Leah Austin. She goes to USF and we had a class together.
I dreaded the day that happened, thankful that it hadn’t yet, but sure that someday it would.

I got up early and as I ate a couple of hard-boiled eggs and toast, I ran the search and got nothing alarming in the results.

I’d been curious about so-called “revenge porn” ever since it happened to me, but I had never researched it. I finally did that morning, though, and found an astounding number of articles on the topic, many of them on websites geared toward young women. All of them offered advice on how to deal with having your pictures posted publicly. All of them denounced the guys who posted the pictures.

Somewhat surprisingly, a few articles blamed the female victims for having the bad judgment to let a guy take pictures like that in the first place. I saw it as nothing
short of slut-shaming, and it pissed me off.

There’s nothing wrong with a woman expressing her sexuality, especially in the context of sharing it with a guy she trusts. It’s not a woman’s fault that some of those guys t
urn out to be untrustworthy, vengeful assholes.

Blaming the female victims disgusted me
. It was obviously one of the main reasons why only two states had passed any kind of law protecting the victims. New Jersey had done it a while back, and California only recently.

I’d never been politically active. Only one presidential election had occurred since I’d turned eighteen and I didn’t even bother to vote. But the more I read about this, the angrier I got that more wasn’t being done to protect victims of this type of monstrous violation of privacy.
Maybe it was a lack of awareness. Maybe it had something to do with the vast majority of victims being female and the vast majority of people in elected office being male. And I couldn’t deny that maybe part of the reason was that, just like me, so many people were apathetic and rarely made their voices heard when it counted.

I browsed through articles and blog posts
containing the personal stories of women who had gone through this nightmare. What struck me most was how similar they were—all resulting from betrayal by a trusted boyfriend (even a few soon-to-be ex-husbands). All of them ended the same way, with the woman left twisting in the wind, with very little or no legal recourse whatsoever.

A few even had to change their names and leave their hometowns for good. It was something that had crossed my mind, but I was determined not to let Kevin steal my life, and with it, my entire identity.

.  .  .  .  .

“So, when are you going to see him again?” Rebecca asked.

“I’m not sure. We didn’t make any plans.”

“That sounds about right for him. Mr. Spontaneous and all that.”

We were at the surf shop. It
was just after ten a.m., and business hadn’t picked up yet, so I had been catching her up on my trip to Vegas. Most of it, anyway. I couldn’t tell her about Drew counting cards, and I couldn’t tell her how the trip ended, with Drew making that comment and me kicking him out of my house. To do so would have forced me to tell Rebecca about Kevin and the pictures, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

I grabbed some paper towels and Windex to clean the glass case where we kept the watches.
Rebecca was restocking the board wax and sunblock.

“You have way more control than I do,” she said. “
I would have jumped his bones.”

“Really?” I ripped another towel off the roll. “I doubt Kyle would approve of that.”

She laughed. “Yeah.”

It was then that I realized I’d all but forgotten about her situation. “Speaking of that, what’s going on
?”

She stopped what she was doing. “Oh, shit. I forgot to tell you. I took the test. It’s all good.”

“Close call.”

“Yeah,” she said. “No more being talked out of using condoms. The hell with that.” She looked at me. “
Did you make Drew wear one?” She moved her eyebrows up and down.

“Nice try, but I’m telling you we didn’t do it.”

“Okay, okay. I believe you.”

Earlier, as I
had recounted the Vegas story, or most of it anyway, she had pressed me on the sex issue. It took me several minutes to convince her that Drew and I hadn’t done it, but she obviously wanted to give it one more try.

As the day went on, I found myself still angry with Drew
. He had belittled my pain. That’s how I saw it, anyway, but later in the evening, I would see it much differently.

.  .  .  .  .

“You overreacted,” Liz said.

“You think so?”

“Uh, yeah. Big time. Like, the worst overreaction I’ve ever heard.”

It was just after nine
that night, and I was lying on my bed, talking to her on the phone. My day at work hadn’t gotten any better. It was long and boring, I couldn’t get my mind off of Drew, and I couldn’t talk to Rebecca about it, so I was left turning it over and over in my mind, alone. Later, just after I ate dinner, I decided that I didn’t have to face this alone after all. So I called Liz, told her the story, and she quickly put me in my place.

“
First of all, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this guy until now. Second…I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear, but it’s something you need to hear.”

I closed my eyes, bracing for it. “Okay.”

“You’re taking your anger at Kevin out on Drew.”

“What?
No, I’m really not.”

“Yeah, you
really
are. The way you’re telling it to me, all he did was say he thought it was going to be worse, like you were going to tell him you were molested as a child or something, right?”

I didn’t want to admi
t it, but she was right. I didn’t say anything.

“
I’ll take that silence as you agreeing with me,” she said. “So he says something that you take the wrong way and because of all this anger you have at Kevin—which I understand, I really do—you lash out at Drew. This is the first guy you’ve let get close to you since Kevin and when he does something that you interpret wrong, you freak out.”

We were both silent for a moment.

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“Oh, I’m right.” She laughed. “Or I’m wrong and you’re in love with him and you were looking for a reason to push him away.”

Hearing those words was a shock. Even more surprising was that I didn’t immediately dismiss the idea. Could I have done that? Pushed him away on purpose because I was starting to feel something for him? I couldn’t rule it out, but I also didn’t want to admit it. Not to myself and not to Liz. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. Anyway, call him or text him. And keep me updated.”

“I will.” I dreaded the thought of calling Drew and apologizing, while at the same time I couldn’t wait to get off the phone with Liz so I could do it. What the hell was going on with me? I needed to get a hold of myself.
“So, anything new going on down there?”

She knew what I meant. I wanted to know if she had heard anything else about Kevin. I should have been well on my way to delet
ing him from my life, but curiosity got the best of me after Liz’s last update of Kevin getting out of control.

“Oh, shit,
” she said. “I almost forgot to tell you with all of your own drama going on.”

“
Anything that starts with ‘Oh, shit’ can’t be good. Tell me.”

She laughed. “Okay, so two nights ago Brad and Wendy are over in Clearwater for Wendy’s cousin’s engagement party. They left early because there was hardly any food there and they end up at
The Breezeway. Remember that place?”

“I think so.”

“You and I went there once. Remember the rubbery oysters?”

That was
the only reminder I needed. “Oh, God, yeah. We just left some cash on the table and got out of there.”

“Right. That place.
Anyway, guess who’s waiting tables there…”

I gasped.
“No shit.”

“Yup. No one had heard from him in like a week. I guess
he didn’t want anyone to know that he’d gone from an internship at an engineering firm to carrying buckets of steaming, chewy, gross oysters.”

“So what happened?”

“He avoided their table the whole time,” she said. “And they eventually decided not to say anything to him because he was obviously embarrassed.”

To me, a job was a job and ther
e was nothing wrong with what he was doing. Other than the gross food they served there. But the thought of Kevin doing it was surprising. I couldn’t count the number of times he talked about getting a good education so he wouldn’t have to end up in the service industry like his older brother, Andy, who had dropped out of high school and had spent the last eight years job-hopping from restaurant to restaurant. Kevin was determined not to have a life like that. At times, it was almost an obsession with him. Clearly, he was having a bad summer.

Once again
, I found myself battling over feeling sorry for him, and feeling triumphant for myself, like the Universe was acting on my behalf and making Kevin’s life difficult.

A
s always when this came up in my mind, I reminded myself that we were finished, I didn’t want anything to do with him, and I needed to move forward.

Which, at the moment, meant getting in touch with Drew.

.  .  .  .  .

I texted him around ten p.m. and got nothing back
, so forty minutes later I texted him again and decided I’d leave it at that. Two texts were enough. I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was desperate to talk to him, even if I was a little bit.

I woke up the next morning and checked my phone, finding no response from Drew.

The minutes ticked by like seconds at work. It was busy most of the day. An overcast day with light but steady rain forced people off the beaches and into shops, restaurants, and any other indoor activities they could find.

A light breeze joined the persistent rain in the afternoon
, and by four o’clock the typical afternoon storms were firing up along the coast.

The wind kicked up some good waves, so after work I s
pent the early evening surfing and thinking, sorting out what had happened over the last few days, wondering why Drew was ignoring me.

Surfing brought me the peace it always did…

I’m on the wave. It’s powerful. Rough. Almost violent. It pushes me. Lifts me.

I’m free.

My mind is clear of all trouble. Clear of my past.

It’s just the ocean and me.

Forty-five minutes later, I was exhausted from riding hard. My legs felt almost numb from the intense workout, and as I dragged the board onto the beach, I sat down in the sand and looked out at the ocean, catching my breath. That’s always when the peace and serenity of surfing starts to fade and my life comes back into focus.

I sat there for about thirty minutes, letting the
rain wash the salt water off my body and out of my hair.

I thought about Drew not texting me back and the more I thought about it the more my disappointment turned to resentment.
Sure, I had kicked him out of my place, but what was this ignoring all about? That didn’t seem like the Drew I knew. Or thought I knew.

When I got back to the house, I thought about asking Drew’s grandmother if she knew where he was, but I didn’t see any lights on in the house and I knew they sometimes went to bed very early. Maybe it was better that I not drag her into our little quarrel.

I went into my apartment, showered, made a quick salad with some tuna chunks and watched Netflix until I fell asleep.

.  .  .  .  .

I worked over the weekend, but did get a chance to go out Saturday night. That afternoon, Rebecca asked me if I wanted to go with her and Kyle to a Charleston RiverDogs game.

“I’m not really into baseball.”

“Neither am I,” she said. “I actually can’t stand baseball. But this is fun. It’s like a party.”

I looked at her with disbelief. “Baseball? Like a party?
Maybe a slumber party where everyone falls asleep early.”

“Okay, fine, it’s not like a party. I just go sometim
es because Kyle likes to go. Plus, I made him watch
Love Actually
with me a couple of nights ago, so I owe him. And they have these awesome beer-shakes there.”