Read Free Fall for Free Online

faced forward again. What could he do? Holding the bag of dress clothes in front of him like some kind of pathetic shield, he sucked in a deep breath and ran up the last few steps. It seemed like every muscle fiber in his body had tensed to the point of imploding by the time he jerked himself into the center of the hall to face the source of the noises he'd heard.
    The woman lying on the floor next to the door to his apartment didn't seem to notice his arrival. She was flat on her back; head propped on a dusty backpack, eyes closed. Her chest rose and fell in an even rhythm.
    He took a few cautious steps forward and looked down at her. She was wearing a purple sweatshirt and green cotton shorts. Other than that, nothing but a pair of black sandals that were partly held together with duct tape.
    Tristan let out the breath that he hadn't realized he was holding and dropped the bag of clothes on the floor next to her.
    "Darby. Jesus Christ."
    The young woman opened her eyes and a slow smile spread across her face.
    "Tristan!" she said, holding both arms out in front of her. He grabbed her right hand and with his help, she sprang up into his arms and gave him a hug that lifted him off his feet. When she dropped him back to the floor, she took a step back and ran her fingers through his hair.
    "My God, what did they do to you?" Her voice was just the way he remembered it, a little slower than most people spoke, but with the words slightly slurred together so she still got sentences out in roughly regulation time. A few years back, Cosmopolitan had done a brief article on her in a series entitled Extreme Women. In it they'd described Darby Moore's voice as "having a smile in it." He'd laughed for a good ten minutes at the sheer corniness of the statement, but had never actually been able to come up with a better description.
    Tristan managed a grin and covered his closely cropped hair with his hands.
    "The government doesn't go for the long hair thing. I kept the ponytail, though. If you're nice to me I'll let you see it."
    "Got a shrine, huh," she said, throwing her pack over her shoulder.
    Other than her nose, she'd hardly changed in the two years since he'd seen her last. Her already broad shoulders were maybe a little broader, making her look shorter than the five-six he knew her to be.
    The definition in the muscles in her forearms seemed a bit more pronounced, but that might have been an illusion brought about by the deep tan that uniformly covered all her visible skin. Her light brown hair was tied back in its ever present ponytail, though it had worked its way halfway down her back a good six inches farther than he'd ever seen it before.
    Tristan reached out and grabbed her chin, turning her head back and forth to examine spiders-web scars crisscrossing the sides of her nose, which now sat slightly crooked on her delicately featured face.
    "It's got character. I like it. But I thought they said they were going to make it good as new."
    "They told me better than new," she said.
    "What they didn't tell me was it was going to take like, three surgeries in all." She shrugged.
    "I figured having a perfect nose would be like having a new car. You'd always be worried about bumping it into something or leaving it out in the sun too long, you know?"
    Tristan pulled a key from his pocket and slid it into the door.
    "Darby, you're one weird chick."
    "Yeah, but I'm so much fun," she said, pushing past him into his apartment.
    "Man, look at this place! It's huge!"
    "It's a dump, Darb." Tristan stepped through and pulled the door closed behind him. For some reason, he felt some of the tension that had been slowly sucking the life out of him for the past twenty-eight hours fade as he watched her run the fifteen feet into the kitchen and look through the door at the back.
    "What? You have another room back here, too?"
    Tristan laughed quietly as Darby eyed his dishwasher and then stuck her head in his refrigerator. If you wanted to impress