Will You Catch Me If I Fall?

Addison’s POV

I looked at the ground, watching the cracks run through the ground as I walked. My head began to feel dizzy, as if it was hurtling towards the path I was looking at. The steady beat of my pace drummed within me and when I heard him shout my name, his voice high in desperation I began to run. I didn’t know if he tried to run after me, I didn’t know if he got up to chase me or if he just watched me disappear with a helpless look upon his face. I didn’t know because I didn’t look back.

I ran until I felt I was flying, the thump, thump, thump of my shoe soles on the ground created an erratic rhythm, that vibrated through my head as if played by oversized speakers. It matched the strange thumping of my heart as it fought to beat with the speed of my body, and my lungs wheezed a smoker’s effort.

It all began to melt away, the sounds, the smells, even the people around me who had started to look at me oddly as I raced past them melted into oblivion. I could just see him, everywhere. My mind was playing tricks unless I had smoked something without knowing it. There he was, waiting for the bus, looking back at me once before boarding and disappearing into thin air. And there he is again, at the shop door, a cigarette hanging from his coloured hand, smoke trailing obscenely from his demurely open lips and nostrils. As the smoke fades into the sky, so does he.

I kept on going, closing my eyes as I dashed across a road. Horns blare at me from all sides, both I ignore them all, even when my hand scrapes across the bonnet of cold steel, I can feel the air brush my legs as the vehicle screeches to a halt mere inches from my body. Someone grabs my arm, but I shove them away, sidestepping into a side alley and after twists and turns I step out onto another street in a derelict part of town.

Finally, I stop. I stop and I sink to my knees, my back against the cold wall. At the start I didn’t know where I was running to, but my feet led me here.

I breathe deeply, composing myself and wipe my sweaty brow. My barely healed wound aches at my side, and after placing a comforting arm on it for a moment, cross the road safely this time, and I step into the building I’ve been to thousands of times before.

I trail my hand up the peeling wallpaper as I remember all the times I’ve been up these staircases, these halls that smell so bad, so mangy but yet so familiar, comforting in that soon my problems will be over for a short period of release. I’ve stumbled up these stairs, being carried up them, I’m pretty sure at one point there was inappropriate public…fumbling in that corner over there.

I stop at the door, and raise my hand to knock. Before my fist reaches the door, it’s swung open, and he’s there, smiling at me, leaning against the door with a knowing look in his eyes.

I raise my eyes to meet his and he puffs on a cigarette he’s holding between two fingers and then offers it to me, which I take gratefully. He walks away, and sits up onto his kitchen counter, waiting for me to begin.

I take a long drag of the smoke and watch the smoke as I exhale it. Then I look at him, “he told me he loves me.”

I wait, watching Frank-E as he breathes out, and rubs a hand over his face. He knows what that would have done to me, knows that’s the reason for the haggard and scared look written across my face.

“That’s fucked up.”

“I know!” I raise my arms in exasperation and flop down onto his couch, my face becoming lost in the darkness of the fabric as I press my eyes into it. There’s a moment until I feel the weight of Frank-E on the structure as he sits beside me, placing my legs in his lap and rubbing soothing circles across my face. I twist my head to look at him through strands of my red hair, “You were totally right. I should never gotten myself involved with him. I should have known he would fall like that, that I would make him…love me.”

The word was poison in my mouth. Love.

Frank-E looked at me steadily. And I could see the wisdom in his eyes, wisdom of having lived and loved and lost.

“You’ve never been involved with someone like him before babe, never been involved with anyone except me for more than one night. What made him different?”

I shuffled on the couch, tucking myself under Frank-E’s protective arm and placing my head on his shoulder, thinking. “I don’t really know,” I admitted to him and myself, “I suppose he was always just so good and pure. He’s different to everything else he’s done. He had so horrible secrets, he doesn’t have a gaping hole inside of himself the way we do. He made me feel happy, like my world wasn’t…crumbling in on the edges. I even told him about Steph, everything about her. And he accepted how I felt about everything around me because she had died. He accepted me, for who I was. He always has.”

Frank-E sighed, his breath ruffling my hair and cascading in a warm rush down my face. He kissed the top of my head, and I looked up at him, my eyes tracing the lines and shapes of his lips, his strong jaw. I needed to forget about Trace now, I needed to leave him to forget about me. Because I would destroy him, and it had been a long time since I’d had Frank-E’s lips on me. Had him bite me and make me moan his name like he used to.

He looked down at me, and I watched his gaze rove over my face, my chest, and my legs like he was thinking the same thing. And then I smirked and he knew.

Our lips met simultaneously, our hot hands grabbing hairs, and clothes wildly. I moaned as he sucked my neck, flipping over so I was pinned underneath his body the way he knew I liked it. I arched underneath him as his palm slid down the front of my shorts and I bit into his neck. “Bedroom,” I managed to gasp, not quite horny enough to fuck on a pull out couch.

He pulled me up, my hands seeming tiny on his bulging muscled arms, he was a lot bigger than Trace. Less gentle. But he would always be my Frank-E.

He slammed me into the wall behind him, kissing down my neck, biting and rose his hands, pulling off my thin top, leaving me bare breasted. I hadn’t worn a bra this morning, how handy.

The moment took over us as his erection pressed into my thigh through his jeans and my hands traced crazy patterns on his muscled torso. I began to unbuckle his jeans, cursing at the stiff buttons, and he chuckled from where he was kissing along my collarbone, my legs wrapped around his waist.

My hands gripped the waist band of his boxers but then a cold feeling came over me, a feeling that I couldn’t do this even though it was Frank-E. I just couldn’t. It would hurt him too much.

“Frank-E! Frank-E…No, I can’t!” I began to push my hands against his chest and Frank-E sorted against my neck, and nibbled my earlobe. “Why not?”

“I just can’t Frank-E.”

“Why not?” he growled fiercely into my ear, and pressed me tighter against the wall so there was no way to escape.

“Because,” I gasped, his grip was beginning to hurt me. “because…I love him! I love Trace!”

I stopped dead as I said it, the breath freezing in my throat. Frank-E smiled, dropping me onto the ground, and shrugging back on his jeans, handed me my top. “Thought so,” he smirked.

I looked at him, taking my top and putting it back on. I loved him. I loved Trace. But hoe could he take me back after I ran away from him like that? How could he forgive me?

I then realised the whole ‘let’s have sex’ was a ploy of Frank-E’s to see if I did have feelings for the little electro boy as he liked to call him. I got up, hitting Frank-E in his solid chest, “You’re a right bastard, you know that?”

Frank-E smirked, “You weren’t moaning that a few minutes ago. Now go, find your lover boy and tell him. Chop chop!”

I squinted my eyes at him threateningly, and then smiled, kissing him lightly before running out the door. Running back to Trace.