Summary

Eighteen-year-old Faryn is straddling two worlds---the constricted life of a Lutheran pastor's daughter and the exhilarating life of a young woman headed off to college, discovering the first bloom of her sexuality. Her mother Alyce straddles two worlds as well---keeping up appearances as a devoted preacher's wife, while struggling with her deeply neglected needs as a 38-year-old woman.

Alyce struggles with losing her daughter to college and her husband to an extended mission trip in Mexico. With an empty house and aching heart, she must suddenly face her growing attraction to Jacob, the handsome assistant pastor at her husband's church. Faryn longs to reinvent herself. She falls in love with an older man and makes reckless decisions that nearly destroy her.

Falling to Him explores the journey of both women as they come to terms with their primal needs, their hearts' desires, and their desperate longing to connect with God and the men in their lives.

Excerpt

The two of them stood frozen, immobilized by the possibility that someone may have spied them together and witnessed this. Their ears strained against the large volume of quiet, but they heard nothing.

“It must have been my imagination,” she explained. He nodded in agreement, in understanding.

He opened the door. The metallic release of the lock signaled the beginning of the end. They stepped into the hall as a unit. Their hands simultaneously parted. Jacob closed the door, and Alyce irrationally felt the need to tell him to leave it open. She saw it symbolically; by closing the door Jacob was sealing their past. As they walked down the hall side by side, she nostalgically looked back.

Alyce’s mind was flattened and broad; her senses fanatically aware of the details around her. The click of her seatbelt, the sound of his car engine turning over, the soft hum of his automatic windows, the chilly supple smell of leather seats. She absorbed it all as if she knew these were the last moments of her life, the last times she would record the ordinary details. But today was far from ordinary. It was extraordinary, and she was as far as one could get from being dead. She felt like she had just been born. Her mind and body were giddy and hot with raging endorphins. The emotions were perhaps more wildly thrilling because of the circumstances.

One thing she couldn’t allow herself to believe was that Jacob didn’t feel what she was feeling. He had to feel the same. A spooky sort of quiet had settled between them. It felt as if they hadn’t spoken for years. Alyce wanted to make a connection verbally, but her mouth felt like it was tacky with spider webs, her tongue a paralyzed victim. The deadening silence grew so that it became two distinct blocks dividing her and Jacob. The connection, both physical and verbal, was momentarily severed. Alyce knew why. They had moved to the stage of preoccupation. They were each dwelling on the adultery, the guilt, and the undeniable release of finally being together.

It was Jacob who reached over the gulf between them and placed his arm around her shoulder. He pulled her closer to him, as close as he could. Alyce unfastened her seatbelt and lay down in his lap. Her right hand rested intimately on the inside of his right thigh.

The bond, reestablished, made it easy for Alyce to speak. “Is there a way, Jacob?” She asked the question but was too cowardly to complete it. The implied, unsaid words, skimmed the surface between them.

He knew what she meant. “For us to be together?” Then he looked down at her. His eyes had aged tonight. “Do things like this ever work?”

His reflective question terrified her. “They can. They must.” Then, “I’m not sure.”