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  Finding Autumn

  A Falling for Autumn Novella

  By Heather Topham Wood

  FINDING AUTUMN

  Copyright: Heather Topham Wood

  Published: July 15, 2014

  The right of Heather Topham Wood to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Dedication

  To my boys, who inspire me every single day.

  “You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.”

  -Anaïs Nin

  Prologue

  “Got into another fight, Blake?”

  My mom’s boyfriend, Thomas, launched the football in my direction. I was startled by the question and dropped the ball to the ground. Thomas frowned at me—I wasn’t sure if he was displeased by the bad catch or that I got into another fight at school.

  My mom hadn’t understood, but I had to punch Caden in the face. He’d found out from his parents that my dad was dead. Caden had begun chasing me around the playground and making spooky sounds—saying he was my zombie dad back from the grave. I made sure to give the kid one good whack in front of the class. If I hadn’t, the rest of the kids would start on me, and I’d hear about my zombie dad over and over again.

  “Caden’s a shit,” I muttered, shocked at my own daring since I never said the word out loud before.

  Thomas gave me a look and I felt myself shrinking under the weight of his gaze. I hated the feeling that I was a disappointment. My mom had been happy since Thomas started coming around and so had I. Being home had been lonely before him—my mom was usually too busy to play with me or too exhausted after working all day. Since the first day he had come to our house, he made time to go in the back yard to play football with me, every visit.

  “There will be a lot of shits in your life, Blake,” said Thomas.

  I was shocked, but then I had to hold in my giggle. Mom would flip out if she heard Thomas cursing in front of me.

  “They’ll try to cut you down because they know you have something special inside,” he said gently. “Do you know there are certain stars in the galaxy that steal energy from other stars to survive? People are the same. They see someone shining brighter and they want to take away some of that shine.”

  I tilted my head to the side as I listened to Thomas. I liked how he talked. It made me feel important. And my mom said he was a very important man. According to her, Thomas was the best player Penn State had ever seen before he got hurt and couldn’t play football any longer. Mom had told me he hadn’t dwelled on having his dreams taken away and instead decided to go into teaching and coaching.

  “I won’t hit him again, sir,” I promised.

  Thomas laughed loudly and I grinned back in response, although I had no idea what he found so funny. Thomas’s laugh was something to take notice of. His whole body shook as his laughter died away. His twinkling blue eyes were full of joy as he stared at me. He seemed larger than life to my six-year-old brain. He was built like a brick house with broad shoulders and a solid chest.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  The humor faded in his expression. “I was laughing because you called me sir. I don’t want you to feel that formal around me.” He stooped down to my height and set the football at his side. He shielded his eyes from the sun as he regarded me. I had no idea what he was about to say. The sudden seriousness in his face was terrifying. I wanted him to be laughing again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. The reason I’m saying that I don’t want you calling me sir is that I’d like to be part of your life… for good.”

  I didn’t answer. I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t sure if I should. He beckoned me forward and I walked cautiously in his direction. It felt like an eternity passed as I crossed the back yard to stand in front of him.

  “I’d like to marry your mom, son. But I’m going to ask your permission first.”

  I give him a confused look.

  He continued on, “What do you say? Will you be okay with me marrying your mom?”

  Happiness started to swell inside of me. If Thomas married my mom, maybe it would mean he’d really stay for good. He wouldn’t leave me like my real dad had. My mom told me not to blame my dad for getting into a car crash, but it still hurt to not have anyone to show me how to do man stuff. My best friend, Tuck, and his dad went fishing, and he coached tee-ball. The only things my mom taught me before Thomas were the names of the characters on General Hospital.

  “Yes,” I answered softly, and Thomas opened up his arms wide. I fell into them; and when he wrapped them tightly around my body, I felt like I was finally home. Thomas would be here for my mom and me and maybe he’d stop her from crying alone at night in her room. I couldn’t seem to fix things for her, but maybe he could.

  When he released me, he kept the smile fixed on his face. “I’m not going to try and replace your dad, Blake. No one can. But I’ll do my best as your stepfather. Your mother means the world to me, but I want you to know—so do you.”

  I believed him. Thomas had a certain quality about him that made me eat up his words. Before him, I felt like an outcast. But since he had come into our lives, the sensation was gradually fading.

  The thing was, I didn’t mind him replacing my dad. I only knew my father from old pictures my mom kept hidden in her dresser. I wanted a real dad—one who would love me and do all of the stuff fathers were supposed to do. If Thomas were willing to take on the job, I wouldn’t put up a fight. I would do whatever it took to keep him from leaving my mom and me. I’d change and become the exact kind of son a man like Thomas would want. That meant no more fighting—even when the angry feelings inside took over. I would learn to love football as much as Thomas did. I’d practice and practice until I became perfect at the game… because a man like Thomas only deserved the best.

  Chapter One

  There were very few key moments in my life I felt truly defined me: losing my dad, picking up a football for the first time, and watching my stepfather get hauled off to prison. Each of these incidents took seconds to happen, yet each had shaped everything about my life from that moment on. But the final, pivotal moment that changed my life was when my eyes landed on Autumn Dorey from across the room at a party.

  Going to the Football House for the start of the semester party hadn’t been a priority. My roommate Darien practically dragged me out of our off-campus apartment with the insistence of a dog gnawing on a bone. According to him, I had fallen into one of my dark moods since we had returned from winter break, and he insisted the party would be the thing to get me out of my funk. Football was over, and classes hadn’t started yet for the spring semester of our junior years, so he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking forward to partying and finding a girl to bring back to the apartment. Getting us both drunk and probably laid was the first thing on Darien’s agenda.

  But winter break had sucked, and it was hard to let go of the dread I’d felt lingering since I left home to head back to school. Usually, I stayed at my apartment near Cook University for semester breaks, but my little sister, Delia, had insisted I come back to my hometown of Clark for the four weeks between s
emesters. Delia was sixteen and a skilled manipulator. She had pouted and played up the disappointment imprinted onto her pretty features, and I was powerless to say no when she begged me to take up residence in my old bedroom.

  Clark was a mid-sized Pennsylvania town and about an hour from the college. Cook University was in the town of Fairfort, and it had all of the trappings of a college town: bars, pizzerias, ice cream shops, and Cook University gear stores. In a few short years, Fairfort had come to feel more like home to me than Clark ever had.

  During winter break, the humiliation had taken hold, again, as soon as I lay down in my old bed. I had run away from Clark as a way to escape the stigma and the notoriety that had been brought on almost two years ago, and it had not gotten any easier with time. It was far easier to stay in Fairfort and continue the sham of being just another college student with a supportive family back home. But Delia, still in high school with no escape route yet, was more important than my disquiet over being the man of such a shamed house.

  I had tried my best to make it through the holidays, but my family was still crumbling, and there was nothing I could do to save them. The year before we had skipped Christmas altogether since Mom couldn’t deal with a celebration directly following Thomas’s sentencing. We had escaped to Florida for a weeklong stay at a beach resort to delay trying to celebrate the first Christmas without our father.

  Even now, Mom sobbed over the smallest things while Delia continuously filled her voice with false cheer. She was trying to salvage the holidays while I wanted to skip them completely. My mother was despondent, and Delia and I, for all intents and purposes, were fatherless. How long would we have to continue pretending for her benefit that everything was going to be okay?

  But late at night on Christmas Eve, I had found Delia alone downstairs in front of the Christmas tree. There was a bottomless ache in her eyes, and I knew what it must have been costing her to put on the charade. I wasn’t alone in paying for Thomas’s poor choices. Delia had appeared trance-like, watching the white string lights on the decorated tree blink in a constant pattern. She was no longer a child pretending to believe in miracles; she was just a lost girl who wanted back what was stolen from her.

  “Hey Del, what are you doing?”

  Her straight blonde hair was pulled away from her face and secured in a hair tie, and her tear-stained cheeks reflected the flickering glow from the tree. My chest hurt after seeing so much unfiltered pain directed at me. I was supposed to be the fixer, and I obviously wasn’t healing the broken thing taking residence up inside of my sister.

  “I miss him,” she choked out. “Every Christmas Eve, he would wake me up and we’d sneak downstairs while you and Mom were still sleeping. He would say we were on a Santa stakeout, and it would be the year I’d finally see him.” Her eyes went hazy and her lips tilted upward. “Of course, after an hour of waiting, I’d be fast asleep. In the morning, I’d wake up surrounded by a pile of presents.”

  I scrubbed my jaw. “Del, I know how much it hurts, but—”

  Delia shook her head and curled her lip in disgust. “Don’t say it, Blake. Not tonight. Not on the night when he gave me something so magical.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything bad.” I insisted. “I was going to say I may be a piss-poor substitute, but wanna have a Santa stakeout?”

  Delia laughed then. The sound was real and beautiful and so far removed from the artificial giggles she’d given me since I arrived home. The rest of the break I’d have to deal with my mother’s meltdowns, but Delia and I would have that one perfect night. A night when the only thing that mattered was, in spite of our world ripping apart at the seams, we had each other.

  Delia was on my mind when I entered the Football House, back at Cook, after the break. Our goodbye had felt formal, and I noticed her emotional cracks showing during the icy way she sent me off. Leaving her alone with my unstable mom was the last thing I wanted to do, but I tried my best to see Delia as often as I could. Since it was only an hour from Fairfort to Clark, I drove to visit at least once a week to have dinner with my family. I tried to tell her things would be easier once she graduated high school in two years and could escape how suffocating our house had become. To Delia, two years stretched endlessly before her.

  The basement of the Football House was overrun with people. The air was freezing outside, but sweltering inside of the party. Darien had disappeared as soon as we arrived together, and I knew I was stuck there until he found someone to bring home. Darien was solid most of the time, but could flake out when he was looking to get laid.

  Across the room, my eyes settled on a beautiful girl with blonde, curly hair who was undressing me with her crystal blue eyes. She was attractive, and I thought she’d be the perfect distraction for the night. I wasn’t looking to get serious with anyone, but after a month-long sabbatical at home, I wouldn’t mind hooking up with someone new.

  Her tank top was plastered to her curvy body and my eyes were drawn to her chest when she rested a plastic cup against her torso. Her breasts were large, and I could make out her nipples pushing against the fabric. My lips curved into a small smile, and I gave her an approving nod. The wicked gleam in her eyes hinted she wouldn’t be opposed to getting screwed senseless for the next couple of hours.

  The girl turned to her friend, and when they both looked my way… the room disappeared. As I took in the friend’s unforgettable dark blonde hair and brown eyes, I forgot everything, including the curly-haired girl I’d been fantasizing about bedding seconds earlier. If someone had decided to ask me my name at the moment, I’d likely be stumped—because I was floored.

  I rubbed at my eyes, wondering if I’d finally cracked enough to start having hallucinations. How could she be here? I’d never seen Autumn Dorey in person before, but one look was all it took for me to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, she was standing less than twenty feet away.

  Autumn met my stare head-on and didn’t flinch. I couldn’t look away, and I wondered what she was thinking. Did she know who I was? I figured she had to. When she destroyed Thomas, didn’t she look into the collateral damage left behind?

  She seemed irritated by the way I was gawking at her and spun her head away. After talking to her friend for a couple of minutes, she glided through the crowd and headed to the back door. My feet moved of their own accord and I found myself following her outside.

  The screen door slammed behind me, and I watched Autumn jump at the abrasive sound. Spinning to face me, she spilled most of her beer out of the plastic cup in her hand, and it arced directly into me. I could feel the cold seeping through my boots into my socks.

  “Damn! You scared me!” Her voice broke the quiet of the back yard, and I started at the sound. It was too surreal to stand in front of Autumn Dorey and hear her say I scared her. My entire focus was on her and I didn’t notice if we were alone in the back yard or not. I couldn’t tear my gaze from her.

  I made an offhand comment about drenching my shoes, but it was automatic. I couldn’t actually form coherent thoughts at the moment.

  Autumn’s appearance had changed in the years since I last saw photos of her. Most of the pictures had been of Autumn in her high school cheerleading uniform and were overly sexualized versions of the girl before me. A fellow cheerleader from their high school squad had a public Facebook page and used it as a platform to shatter what she claimed was Autumn’s contrived innocent act. As Autumn stood, staring at me with confusion, I ran a greatest hits reel through my head of the pictures I’d seen: Autumn in tiny shorts straddling a boy, Autumn doing body shots off of another girl, Autumn flashing her sheer white bra at the camera. What I hadn’t been expecting was Autumn Dorey in a shapeless black t-shirt and jeans with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “Why are you here?” The words were out of my mouth before I could wish them back. Her expression was confused, and I understood in that moment she had no clue who I was. I started feeling a bit of righteous indignation. Cook was supposed t
o be a neutral place for me to live my life. If Autumn was a student at the college, she was shattering the peace I had held onto here.

  Autumn laughed half-heartedly, but I could see by the wariness in her expression I was making her nervous. “What do you mean? In the physical or metaphysical sense? Like why I’m at this party, or why was I ever born?”

  “Why are you at this party?” She had unwittingly supplied me with a good cover. “I’ve never seen you at the house before,” I added. I was losing it and had to reel it back in before I had a meltdown. I wasn’t normally such a freak, but it also wasn’t normal to run into the girl who was responsible for my family’s undoing. I had so much I wanted to say to her, but I was too shell-shocked to decide how to handle things.

  Autumn obviously decided she wanted a refund on the freak show I had going on and made a move to head back inside. I panicked. I was wasting an opportunity. How many times had I wondered what it would be like to talk to Autumn Dorey? Probably hundreds since Thomas was arrested. Only Autumn and Thomas knew the truth of what happened between them, and I had already heard Thomas’s version of events. What could I learn from her?

  “I’m going. Nice meeting you, I guess,” she said, sarcasm coating her words. “I know you didn’t bother asking me my name, but it’s Autumn, by the way.”

  “Sorry, I’m being an ass… I’m Blake.”

  I watched her to see if I saw any kind of reaction to the reveal of my name. Her face showed nothing. What had she and Thomas talked about during their time together? Had he told her about me? I pictured whispered confidences between her and a man twice her age and my stomach revolted. She looked young to me, barely older than Delia. Autumn had a fresh-faced look to her—pretty, with small, round features and apparently zero makeup on.