Fear of Falling

to know how I felt, but I didn’t want to scare her. I also wanted to know how she felt about me, but I was too chicken-shit to ask.
    “Blaine?” she whispered, breaking the ice. “Can I ask you something?”
    “Anything.” And she could. She could ask me absolutely anything.
    “Your mom… What CJ said… What did he mean?”
    Anything but that.
    I rolled onto my back with a huff and scrubbed a hand over my face. Shit. I didn’t want to go there. Not with her or anyone else.
    “If you can’t talk about it, I understand,” she muttered, sensing my discomfort. She was giving me an out, and, dammit, I wanted to take it. But I had promised her honesty. And if I had any chance at cracking the mystery behind those green eyes, I had to prove myself.
    “My mom died when I was 13. I was sent to live with my uncle and his family right afterward,” I answered, my voice devoid of all emotion. Over the past twelve years, I had the said the same lines over and over again until they didn’t hurt anymore.
    “And?”
    She knew there was more. I just didn’t know if I could give her more than that. Not when it came to my mother.
    I shook my head. “And that’s all. People die. We move on. We learn to deal.”
    “But you haven’t,” she interjected, placing her small hand on my bare chest to cushion the blow. “You haven’t learned to deal. You’re still hurting.”
    I placed my own hand on top of hers and gripped it, holding on to any semblance of peace. “We all hurt, Kami. It’s a part of life.”
    “Can you tell me about it?” she asked, her small voice filling me with foreign emotion. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but everything about her felt sincere and humble. Like she actually cared about me and wanted to share my pain. Like maybe she felt for me what I couldn’t help feeling for her.
    I took a moment to collect my thoughts, sifting through the memories in the forbidden Rolodex of my mind. I didn’t revisit my past if I could help it. It wasn’t a place anyone wanted to stay for long.
    “My mom killed herself,” I finally said. There was no way around it. The best way was to tear off the band-aid as quickly as possible. “It was always just the two of us when I was growing up. She was always so happy, so free-spirited. So it came as a shock when I found her dead on the bathroom floor. She had overdosed.”
    Kami moved closer to me, close enough for me to feel her warm breath on my arm as she gasped at my mournful account. “I’m so sorry,” she croaked, her voice thick with emotion.
    “I later found out that my mother suffered from schizophrenia. I just thought she was eccentric. She’d get these hare-brained ideas, and we’d be off on an adventure. She’d pull me out of school for impromptu road trips. Let me eat ice cream for dinner. Throw me birthday parties when it wasn’t even my birthday. She was my best friend, and I didn’t even know she was sick.”
    “Blaine…” Kami stroked my cheek, letting her fingers travel up into the locks of hair that had fallen over my forehead. “You know it’s not your fault, right? You know that it wasn’t your responsibility to save her?”
    I turned on my side to face her, revealing the ugly scars I still bore after all these years. “Wasn’t it? I was all she had, and I didn’t even know my mom was dying inside. I could’ve helped her. I could have done something to stop her and get her help. But no. I thought I had the coolest mom in the world when all the while she was suffering. Don’t you see how fucking selfish that was of me? Don’t you get why I hate myself for letting her die?”
    I turned away from Kami, utterly disgusted with my self-loathing. “How unhappy must she have been to take her own life? How unhappy must she have been with me ? To not at least try to survive?”
    Kami hands tugged my bicep, pulling me, until my back was once again flat on the bed. Then she was straddling me, her small body pressed into mine while she buried her face into my chest.
    “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, kissing my chest. She rained light pecks along my upper torso, her sorrowful eyes leaking with sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Blaine. It’s not your fault. I swear it!”
    I wrapped my arms around her and cradled her head against my chest, stilling her movements. It’s not that I didn’t want Kami to kiss me. Shit, that was all I wanted. But I wanted it to come from a place of desire. A place of affection. Not pity. I