Can't Help Falling

by Cara Bastone

  Fin, still thinking about the articles, nodded absently before she did a double take back to Kylie. “What dancing stuff?”

  She was suddenly inundated with imaginary images of Tyler caught on YouTube doing a choreographed dance with buddies at a wedding. Or Tyler doing the Dougie on a subway platform and slipping on a banana peel.

  “You haven’t seen the videos?” Kylie asked, a devilish light in her eyes. “Oh my god. You have to. Just for the outfits.”

  “Outfits?”

  Oh boy. There was a really good chance Fin was about to see something megaembarrassing online about Ty. A surprisingly vocal part of her conscience spoke up. He probably wouldn’t want her to see it, whatever it was. Maybe she should decline—

  Kylie shoved her phone under Fin’s nose and any thoughts of turning away from the video went immediately up in smoke. “That’s Ty?”

  Fin was utterly stunned.

  Because there was a much younger Tyler, shirtless, in black tights and bare feet, leaping across a stage.

  He...was a ballet dancer.

  This right here, was not embarrassing. Not in the least. This was incredibly impressive. In the somewhat grainy video, he was dancing alongside a slim, lithe female dancer, also dressed in black. He effortlessly lifted her, before he set her down and pirouetted himself at least a few feet off the ground. Gravity need not apply.

  Fin, mouth agape, watched his muscular arms and shoulders rise above his head. She watched the complex play of muscles at his back. The thighs that actually made her eyes bulge—

  “There’s other ones too. I think he’s supposed to be Romeo in this one.” Kylie took the phone back and handed it over again.

  He wasn’t shirtless in this one. But he was in tights again and the tunic he wore was open almost to the waist. She couldn’t make herself stop watching the triangle of golden, sweaty skin exposed on his chest.

  It was definitely Tyler. No question. Young twenties, a little bit thinner and floppier, like a puppy. But Tyler all the same. There was no mistaking that long, handsome face, his friendly eyes and light brows. But she simply couldn’t reconcile her current image of him with this graceful, athletic man who radiated light.

  She’d guarded herself from Tyler’s energy before because she’d always been able to sense his attraction to her and it made her wary. But there was no turning away from it now. He powered across the stage on the screen. He dived to his knees, every muscle in his forearms apparent and shadowed.

  His energy was nuclear, vibrant, explosively appealing as the man on the screen did what he was born to do.

  His energy was undeniably golden. So gold it was almost green.

  She’d always thought that if she looked hard enough into Tyler’s aura, it would be red. Obstinate.

  Um. NOPE.

  Blind spot.

  The man in this video was sweet, caring, open, brave. There was no unseeing this.

  “You’re drooling.”

  Kylie was watching her with a smile on her face. Fin figured she could either lie completely or she could minimize it. “Well, there’s an awful lot of sweaty muscles in this video. I’ve always been a sucker for sweaty muscles.”

  Kylie laughed. “I thought you’d think it was funny. Like I did. But you seem...”

  “Really impressed. Ballet is hard. And it looks like he was semi-professional.”

  “Yeah. The internet says he was pretty good before he quit to be a writer.”

  Fin handed the phone back. “He looks pretty good.”

  Kylie laughed, and Fin blushed.

  “I didn’t mean it like that!”

  “Sure you didn’t.” Kylie nudged Fin’s boot with her own. “Are you sure you’re not into him?”

  Yes! She was positive. One hundred percent sure. Tyler Leshuski was a convertible-door-jumping, collar-popping, ’80s baddie who...was really sweet to his kid sister, and actually kind of funny, and was considerate of his friends, and had faithfully honored her desire to have nothing to do with him romantically, and never hit on her, and made good curry, and made her heart skip when he shouted in her ear at a loud basketball game.

  Crap.

  “I...don’t get crushes,” Fin responded.

  “Uh-huh,” Kylie answered knowingly. “Got it.”

  For a moment, Kylie didn’t look like a kid. In the dim back seat, streetlamps rhythmically splashing light across her face, Fin saw just what Kylie was going to look like in a decade. Her deep red hair twisted over one shoulder, those freckles on her nose bringing out the color of her eyes, her intelligent gaze always tinged with humor. And then, just like that, every illusion of adulthood melted away as Kylie leaned toward her window, her eyes round and childlike, her mouth opened wide enough to parallel park a Chevrolet in there.

  “Oh. My. GAWD. This is what we’re going to see?”

  Fin laughed. “This is how they do Christmas in Dyker Heights.”

  She paid the cab driver, thanking him, and then they scooted out of the cab. Fin felt oddly overinflated, like if she pushed off the ground she’d take Neil Armstrong steps along the sidewalk, but she didn’t want to waste these moments with Kylie being stuck in her own head. So she pushed her revelations aside and concentrated on the girl standing beside her. “Are you warm enough? Or do you want to find a place to get hot chocolate before we walk around?”

  “Yes,” Kylie answered dimly, her eyes still rounded as she took in the sight before her.

  Fin was thrilled to have wowed Kylie so soundly.

  And this was just the edge of the neighborhood.

  Fin steered Kylie through the crowds of tourists, which were nothing compared to the crowds at Rockefeller Center, but were quite sizable for this rarely visited BK neighborhood. They found a hot chocolate vendor and Fin bought a hot pretzel with mustard and hot sauce for good measure as well.

  The houses in this part of Dyker Heights were more mansions than houses, four-story old-money monstrosities that sat thirty feet back from the street and had century-old trees in their yards. And if anyone had any questions about just how old the money was in this neighborhood, the incredibly elaborate Christmas-light displays answered the question.

  Each house, obviously in competition with one another, was more grand than the last. These were not your uncle Ted’s strings of tangled lights that stayed up on the house until Fourth of July. These displays were professionally orchestrated, sheer walls of color and light. There were more lights than there were houses visible in most places. The neighborhood was as bright as noon even though the sky overhead was as close to black as it ever got in New York. And it wasn’t just the lights. There were animatronic Santas that sang Christmas carols and skated on tracks around the yards, reindeer on pulleys that landed gracefully on roofs over and over again. Entire lawns were piled with white lights to make them look like they were covered in drifts of glowing snow.

  “I was reading that some of these people spend around twenty thousand dollars to decorate each year.”

  Kylie mouthed the words twenty thousand dollars and kept looking, the lights turning her face a blinking rainbow of surprise as she turned from house to house. “You think that includes their electricity bills?”

  Fin laughed. “I hope they do something during the year to offset the carbon footprint of this.”

  Kylie gave her an arch look. “If you’re willing to spend twenty thousand dollars on Christmas decorations, don’t you think you’re probably flying in private jets and eating endangered animal canapés for dinner?”

  “Yes, but they probably drive Teslas. That’s sort of green.”

  “That sort of happens to be green,” Kylie corrected, making both of them laugh again. They strolled on, chatting and sharing the pretzel and re-upping on hot chocolate when they started to get chilly. And Fin saw that neither assessment of Kylie tonight had been right. Kylie
wasn’t grown up yet, and she wasn’t a child. She was in that amazing time right smack-dab in between. Teenagerhood was so often defined as a transition from one thing to the next. But it wasn’t, not really. It was an age as valid as any other, Fin reflected. And Kylie wore it well.

  * * *

  A FEW DAYS before Christmas Tyler grimaced at the sound of his own key in the lock. At midnight, everything seemed too loud. He was late as hell, though Mary, who’d agreed to babysit, had assured him a hundred times that day that she would just be snoozing on his couch so whenever he got home would be fine.

  He heard noises on the other side of the door and was surprised to hear his television on. Mary was not a TV watcher.

  He stepped inside and froze, door open, when he realized that it was not Mary sprawled out on his couch but Fin. His first clue was the river of black hair that fell in a waterfall over the arm of his couch. She rustled when she heard him come in and sat up, her hair resuming its place around her shoulders and down her back.

  “Hi,” she said, stretching her arms over her head, though her eyes looked alert. She hadn’t been sleeping.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Mary had an early morning and I was helping her out at the shop tonight so I volunteered to take Ky home. I sent you a text about it.”

  His shoulders sagged as he locked the front door behind him and put his shoes and coat in the closet. He emptied his pockets into the loose change dish he kept by the door, saw his crystal in the mix and repocketed it. “Phone’s dead.”

  “Ah.”

  “I guess I should get one of those portable battery packs to carry around with me now that I have a kid to care of.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Too exhausted to really say much of anything else, Tyler disappeared into his room and quickly changed into sweats. They were fashionable and euro-cut, but all the same, they were the closest he’d ever come to slouch-wear. He diverted back through the kitchen. “You want a beer?” he called.

  There was a pause from the other room. He winced internally. No, she didn’t want a beer. She wanted him to say goodbye and order her a cab so that she could get home before one o’clock in the freaking mor—

  “Sure. Sounds good.”

  ...Or she wanted to drink a beer.

  He cracked two beers open and carried them into the living room. He handed her one and plopped into the armchair kitty-corner from where she sat on the couch, both of their feet propped onto the coffee table. “Did Kylie have dinner, do you know?”

  For some reason, that question made Fin smile a little bit. Not that full, goofy grin that never failed to give Tyler goose bumps, but a small, satisfied smile that he’d rarely seen before. “She and Mary had tacos around eight, I think.” She paused. “I raided your fridge for dinner when we got here. Hope you weren’t saving those enchiladas for something special.”

  He waved his hand through the air. “All yours.”

  For some reason he couldn’t identify, it pleased him immensely that she would eat his food without asking. It was the same jolting feeling he’d had when he’d stepped through his door and seen her hair against his couch. It was basically the opposite of the feeling he’d had whenever she’d perch against his windowsill, as if everything in his house were mildly disgusting to the touch.

  “You’re a good cook,” she said after a minute, her tone telling him that the information had come as a surprise to her.

  “And you’re a watcher of crappy television,” he replied in the exact same tone of voice.

  She bit back her smile and used her beer to gesture at the television. “Home-improvement TV is not crappy. It’s informative and uplifting.”

  She sniffed haughtily and he laughed.

  “It’s mind-numbing nonsense, and you know it.”

  “Oh, and I suppose all the sports programs you have DVRed are high art?”

  He laughed again. “I’m not pretending to be an intellectual.”

  “And I am?”

  He rolled his head lazily from looking at the television to looking at her. Her pale skin was a light blue in the light from the television and her eyes were strangely dark. He was used to them being the brightest thing in the room. But he could see that fatigue was hooding her eyes, and the dim room was doing the rest.

  “You don’t think that bingeing crappy TV kind of wrecks the whole spooky psychic image you have going on?”

  “You expect me to be, I don’t know, brewing potions in the kitchen and staring into my crystal ball 24/7?”

  He laughed and shrugged, but didn’t concede the point.

  “Ty, do you think we’ll ever get to the point where you realize that this isn’t an image, it’s who I am? And who I am is someone who reads energy and watches crappy TV?”

  Her question twanged a chord inside him. So far, since she’d asked to be a part of Kylie’s life, Tyler had felt like a byproduct of that equation. He’d been something Fin had to tolerate to get time with Kylie. But here she was, sitting on his couch, drinking a beer and asking him about the direction in which their relationship might grow.

  It was...confusing.

  Plus, her hair was in that sheet down her back, instead of braided carefully away, and that only further discombobulated him.

  He had absolutely no idea how to answer that question so instead he asked one of his own. “Do you think we’ll ever get to a point where you don’t think of me as an entitled douche who thinks he should get everything he wants?”

  Something flashed in Fin’s eyes that was gone before Tyler could identify it. Guilt? Embarrassment? Nerves? He couldn’t say.

  “I will if you will?” she offered after a moment, a spark in her eye.

  Tyler couldn’t help but laugh. “Ah. I see. Schoolyard rules. Fair enough. No more hippie-dippy psychic, no more entitled douchebag.”

  He leaned forward and held his beer bottle out to her. That same spark in her eye, Fin cheers-ed him. “RIP.”

  They drank their beers and watched TV in what Tyler categorized as companionable silence.

  The show cut to commercial, and Fin stretched, drawing his attention to her feet on the coffee table. She pointed her toes and switched the way her ankles were crossed, bringing her socked feet within a few inches of his.

  He zeroed in on the feet in front of him. “Fin,” he said tonelessly. “Your socks don’t match.” He set his beer aside, leaning forward for a better look. He could barely stand to look at what he was seeing. “Oh my god, one of them is wool and one of them is cotton.”

  “So?”

  He looked up at her, seeing her in a whole new light. She’d always been this mystery he couldn’t quite solve. Elusive and interesting and mysterious. But now, looking at her one striped purple sock and one black sock, he knew the truth. She wasn’t a sphinxlike enigma. No. She was an absolute wacko. A crazy person who could tolerate the feel of two completely different socks.

  She wore long, flowy pants and without too much thought on the matter, he reached down and lifted the hems of both her pant legs by a few inches.

  “Hey!” she squeaked, leaning forward and kicking his hands away.

  “Oh, for the love of all that’s holy, Fin.” He dragged his hands down the sides of his face, in full horror at what he was looking at. “One of them is a knee sock and one of them is an ankle sock.”

  She raised that insufferable emoji eyebrow at him. “I repeat... So?”

  He could have sworn she waggled her toes at him to provoke him.

  “Your socks are not only two different colors and fabrics, which is bad enough, but they’re different lengths? That is utterly appalling. How can you stand it?” He gesticulated wildly at her feet. “That’s my version of torture.”

  “God, I hope you never uncover any national secrets.” She wryly swigged her beer, that emoji
eyebrow still firmly in place.

  He leaned back in the armchair and just gaped at her for a moment. He knew she was provoking him. But what was he supposed to do? Just sit there and watch a kitchen get made over while he knew that the woman next to him wore one sock up to her knee and one down around her heel? It was enough to make him want to tear his skin off! He stood up suddenly. “I can’t look at this. No. I can’t even go on knowing this is taking place. It’s a travesty.”

  She said nothing as he stalked out of the room. Later, he’d realize that he was acting as crazy as he was internally accusing her of being, but he didn’t care. He kept his shoes in neat rows on the floor of his coat closet, his toothbrush in its cup, his vegetables in the crisper and his motherfreaking socks always matched. It wasn’t an opinion thing. It was a necessity.

  “Wearing unmatching socks is like only washing half your head when you take a shower. Some things just aren’t done,” he informed her as he stalked back into the living room, a pair of his socks in one hand.

  “Ty, forget entitled douchebag, I’m starting to think you’re clinically insane.”

  He waved her comment away and plunked down on the couch next to her, scooping her feet off the coffee table and twisting her body to face him. He put her feet against his knees and reached under the hems of her pants legs to strip her socks off.

  “Tyler!”

  Sitting there, her feet in his lap and her warm socks in his hands, reality finally caught up to Tyler. He cleared his throat and looked up at her shocked eyes, her hair that had tumbled forward when he’d moved her.

  “I...might be getting carried away,” he said confusedly. He looked at her socks in his hands, feeling as if he’d just woken up from a dream to find himself standing in his neighbor’s kitchen.

  To his enormous surprise and relief, she burst out laughing. It was that huge, eye-pinching, wolf-toothed smile of hers that had been so elusive in the past, but this time it was accompanied by great, husky bursts of laughter. She shook her head at him. “You think? Clearly I broke your circuit board or something.”