Can't Help Falling

by Cara Bastone

  He didn’t usually enjoy sleeping on a floor, or really anywhere but his Serta mattress and Egyptian-cotton sheets. But so far with Fin he’d slept a night on a crappy antique couch and taken a very satisfying catnap on the rug on her bedroom floor. Had he ever felt more refreshed? He didn’t think so.

  He sat up and something rolled off his forehead. Squinting in the dark he found it with a soft grin. It was a clear, almost round crystal that she’d laid there. He held it in the palm of his hand and gazed down at the little rock. It was warm from his forehead, but he almost felt like it was warm from her. Like although she’d gotten up, she’d left a piece of herself behind. He stood, stretched and found his pants, remaking her bed from the mess they’d torn it into earlier. He took one last look around the room that he was quite certain had changed the path of his life before he went to look for Fin.

  He found her in the kitchen. Her hair was knotted in a huge pile on top of her head, and she wore his button-down shirt and her purple socks. There were miles of leg in between. Her back was to him as she slid something chopped up and orchid-purple into a pot on the burner. He heard her say something but couldn’t quite make it out. Something moved over him, almost like a static shock without the shock.

  He watched quietly as she chose herbs from her drying rack and those went in the mixture too. Almost instantly, a fragrance curled out into the air, riding on the back of the steam.

  “Smells good in here,” he said, stepping toward her.

  She jolted under the touch he smoothed over one of her hips, but softened immediately, leaning back into him, letting her head fall back onto his shoulder as he wrapped his arms around her front.

  Holding her like this just felt right. It had fond memories attached to it, considering he’d held her like this the first time he’d touched her naked body, just hours ago. But there was something about them sandwiched together like this, both of them facing forward, that made him feel allied with her. Like they were staring down the future together.

  He kissed her temple, rested his chin on top of the messy pile of her hair. “Whatcha makin’?”

  “Uh, it’s a kind of celebration tea.”

  He knew instantly that she wasn’t telling him the whole truth. He leaned forward, over her shoulder and sniffed the pot. “Smells...sexy.”

  It was true. Something about the scent was romantic, made him think of dark rooms and whispers and warm, smooth skin.

  She said nothing, just turned the heat down, put a dash of something in the pot and put the lid on.

  “What’s it called?” he urged her, catching a view of one pink cheek of hers and feeling beyond intrigued.

  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. And look at that, he had nervous Fin in the circle of his arms, her breasts resting on his forearm, the cradle of her head pressing into his shoulder. He suddenly felt giddy with holding her.

  She turned all at once, her light eyes defiantly on his, but her cheeks still tantalizingly pink. “It’s...it’s called love tea, okay? It promotes relaxation and calm, but also celebration for when—” She mumbled the rest, but he didn’t need her to say it clearly.

  He twisted a fallen strand of her hair back into her bun and finished the sentence for her. “It’s for when you’ve just made love to someone.”

  She nodded tersely, her eyes on the notch between his throat and chest. “For when you’re happy about it. It sort of seals it all in.”

  He jolted, as she had, when she landed one palm on his chest. He knew now that she was showing him her energy, her palm energy. But she was also messing around with his chest hair. He felt giddy and nuzzly and ridiculous.

  “Some people smoke cigarettes after sex. You brew magic tea.”

  She smirked up at him.

  “I want a glass,” he told her.

  She frowned, but he could tell that it was simply to hide her pleased smile. “It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

  “Are you hungry?” He glanced around then, realizing he had no clue what time it even was. “Jeez, your house is like a wormhole where time bends and means nothing anymore.”

  “It’s 6:45 p.m.,” she told him.

  He shook his head and laughed. “It’s so weird to spend time with another adult at this time of day. Well, not so much right now, but we started hanging out at like two in the afternoon. On a weekday.”

  “Yeah.” She scratched at her head and made the whole mess of her hair move as one organism. Tyler felt obscenely charmed by this. “I don’t know anyone else who’s freelance.”

  “Our weird schedules mean we’re going to start eating dinner at five every night.”

  “At least we could benefit from the early-bird specials.”

  He smiled. “I wonder how Kylie will feel about that.”

  His smile faded as he considered his own question and truly did wonder how Kylie would feel about that. About all of this.

  Fin, one eye on him, tilted back toward the stove and lifted the lid. “One thing at a time, Ty. Tea’s ready.”

  She poured two cups of the tea, which was a surprising shade of pink. Tyler eyed it somewhat dubiously the moment her back was turned, smiling wide and innocent when she turned back. She led him into the living room, where they piled onto her couch, their limbs tangling, most of her weight on his lap. He winced and lifted and yanked one of her heels out from under his thigh. He liked how uncareful she was with him. She was womanly and graceful as she moved through the world, but get her alone and she was suddenly coltish and slightly clumsy. It felt like a secret that only he knew and he could feel himself locking it tight within him, somewhere that no one else would ever find it.

  He eyed the tea. “So, do we say a prayer or something?”

  “A prayer?” she asked, looking confused. “Like, bless me, father, for I have—”

  He cut her off with a loud laugh. “No! And that’s not exactly a prayer. That’s what you say when you go to confess your sins. I meant, like, is there a spell we’re supposed to say?”

  Now she was the one laughing and rolling her eyes. “No, Ty. The magic is in the sitting and drinking. You and me together. There’s nothing hocus-pocus about it.”

  Holding her eye, he leaned forward and took a sip, readying himself not to wince against the flavor. But to his surprise, it actually tasted good. A little like taking a bite out of a flower bouquet, but there was cinnamon in there. It was warm and light and she’d made it for him. Love tea. He’d have drunk a gallon of it if she’d asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE NEXT MORNING, Fin could feel Tyler’s anxiety before she even opened her eyes. She’d slept again, which was unusual for her. With a man in her bed, which was even more unusual. She couldn’t remember that ever happening before.

  It’s because you trust him.

  Jetty’s voice in her head. Her aunt, who had known so much at a glance. She’d probably had more clairvoyance than Fin’s mother, who’d worn silk scarves and sat on a curb chirping ominous warnings to passing tourists in the French Quarter. Her mother, who hadn’t ever minded parting a dope from a dollar. Who’d had the gift and abused and ignored it at every turn. Who’d let it drive her straight to that half-hinged life she’d barely held on to, like the edge of a sail in high winds.

  All these years later, the common-sense intuition in Fin’s head still sounded just like her stolid aunt. It was still Jetty who was trying to keep Fin from running from herself.

  Tyler’s anxiety was bright and specific, like how lime green was almost never just called green. He was worried about Kylie. Fin could feel it. It was a personal worry and Fin knew, without having to ask, that it wasn’t one he’d talk about if she asked. Not right now.

  No. Right now he needed a distraction.

  “I don’t know how to trust a man,” she said into the morning light that she still hadn’t opened her eyes to
see. She stayed behind the comforting, warm curtain of her eyelids and felt him turn toward her, the blankets pulling tight against her breasts and then loosening when his warm hand traced over the plane of her stomach.

  “I didn’t know you were awake over there.”

  “Doing some early-morning worrying, just like you.”

  He chuckled, pressing his lips into her hair. His soft, warm lips transformed into a sharp bite over the lobe of her ear, and she jumped, her eyes flinging open, his smiling, sleepy face filling her vision.

  “Morning,” he whispered.

  “So it is,” she whispered back.

  “Why don’t you trust men?” he whispered to her, his face light and open and playful.

  “Because I never knew any,” she said simply. “No father. My mother never had boyfriends. No uncles. No friends. No cousins. No brothers. My mother was very clear that all they do is take and never give. That they wreck you.”

  “And your aunt?” Tyler asked, his voice still low, but the playful whisper long gone. He painted a picture over her hip bones with the palm of his hand, but it was more soothing than arousing.

  “Never married. They’d had a brother who’d died when they were little, Jetty and my mother. But my time with Jetty, in her home, it was very female. Just me and Jetty and Via. And after Jetty passed, it was just me and Via.”

  “You dated.”

  Fin nodded. “Yes, but sort of in the same way that someone visits a zoo.”

  Tyler laughed and absently snuggled her closer in a comfortable way. “Out of curiosity?”

  “And because you know for sure that the animals stay locked in their cages. They can never really get to you.”

  “Ah.” The mirth in his eyes dimmed. “Have I gotten to you, Fin?”

  “Ty, you never even had a cage.” She traced his eyebrows, so light in color sometimes she forgot they were even there. “That’s why you were so scary to me. You were always a wild animal. All I knew how to do was hurt you enough to keep you very far away.”

  “I don’t want to be far away.”

  She sighed and looked at the ceiling of her apartment, her haven, her fortress. It was at that moment that the weak morning sun finally peeked around the edge of the neighboring building and hit her window, an orange cloud of light that turned her room into a candle.

  “Have you ever done this before? A relationship?” she asked him.

  “Yes and no. I dated a woman for a few years after college. Sam. She was sweet and never nagged me about my weird hours. I was doing an a.m. sports radio show at the time and had to leave the house at 4:30 every morning. I was usually in bed by 8:00. Not exactly a ton of fun in your midtwenties. We called it quits when it became clear that she was waiting for me to ask her to marry me. And later I was regularly seeing a woman, Alicia, back in California, but when Seb’s wife died and he needed me, I called things off and moved home.”

  “You were relieved to leave her behind,” Fin intuited, fascinated, despite the pacing feeling in her gut, to hear about Tyler’s past.

  “Yeah. Or rather, I was relieved to have a good reason to leave her. She was a cool person. There was no reason that it wouldn’t have worked except for the fact that I just didn’t care that much. And leaving town to go take care of my best friend made it so that I never had to tell her how little I cared.”

  He slid up a few inches and nudged her back so that they could both share her pillow, their noses just a few inches apart, that steel rope braiding itself between their eyes again. “But I’ve never done this before, Serafine. I’ve never waited and waited for someone I wanted so bad. Well, it’s not want exactly. It’s...attraction.”

  The lonely teenage girl who still lived somewhere in her heart immediately deflated. She’d thought he might say love.

  “No, don’t get me wrong,” he laughed as he read her expression. “I don’t mean attraction in the cheap, shallow sense of the word. I mean it in the...magnet sort of way. Wherever you are, I want to be. When you move, something in me follows you, even all these lonely months, when I haven’t let it be my eyes that follow you, something in me still followed you. Attraction. I was, am, stuck to you. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  “Energy,” she whispered. “Our energy knew how it felt about each other before we did. I could sense that all the way back since the first time we met. It was instant for me. I just didn’t like it.”

  “I didn’t like it much at first either. I didn’t want to chase you. But, then, yeah. I did.” His eyes went distant for a moment, the murky orange room glowing all around them. Fin got the strange feeling that the room had detached itself from the apartment building. They were simply floating haphazardly toward the sun. “So, what do we do about this trust thing?” he eventually asked her. “You’re not used to trusting men. Neither of us know much about relationships. How do we keep from driving this spaceship straight into the sun?”

  She smiled, hearing his words. He’d been thinking about crashing into the sun the same way she had. Explain that one, universe.

  She went to groom his bedhead, realized that his villainous hair was already falling in that perfect way that it usually did. Frowning, she moved her hand to his beard instead and was soothed by the imperfection there. The beard that had grown in overnight, even though she’d sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him painstakingly shave it off not even nine hours ago. She liked the incongruous nature of it. Perfect hair, pesky beard. Something about that was perfectly Tyler.

  “We go very slowly,” she said, the answer coming to her from somewhere in the heart of their glowing morning room, almost as if there were a spotlight shining on them and them alone, of all the people in the world. “And we make it up as we go along, even if it only makes sense to the two of us. And Kylie. This doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but us.”

  He nodded, his eyes closing in contentment for a moment before they shot back open. “Fin, are you a, uh, marriage type of person?”

  She laughed at his obvious discomfort, charmed that he’d made himself ask. “Ty, up until about seventy-two hours ago, I wasn’t even a sleep-the-night-in-the-same-bed-as-a-man sort of person.” She nipped his lips with hers. “This is what I meant by taking things slow.”

  He nodded, somehow managing to look both soothed and argumentative at the same time. “I get that. But we haven’t really taken things slow at all, love. You know what I mean? Because I’m in your bed. While you’re naked. We’re about to tell Kylie about us. Three days ago, we hadn’t even kissed.”

  “Sure, but we’ve both had feelings for a long time. And what do you mean I’m naked? Are you not naked?”

  Instead of lifting the covers, she explored with the pads of her fingers, harrumphing in disapproval when she reached the band of his underwear. He grunted when she gently snapped the band against his hip bone. “I can’t sleep naked. I always end up thinking, what if there’s a fire and I have to run outside in front of all the neighbors?”

  She laughed and ducked under the covers, relishing the sudden darkness, the closed heat of the cave of blankets, his chest hair against her cheek. She couldn’t hear his heart beating, but she could feel it, racing against the morning, his breath sprinting to catch up as she slid his underwear to his knees and rested her head on his thigh in the darkness under the blankets. She found his hardness with the palm of her hand and pushed it to one side and then the other, giving him a lazy, wet kiss on the crown and making him bend one of his knees up, almost as if he were protecting himself against the sharp pleasure of it all.

  He said her name, Serafine, the whole name. Fin got the same feeling she had as she’d watched him sign her birthday into his calendar. Her full name, her given name, was a contract of sorts. He was signing her into his life with every desperate groan, his hands reaching under the covers, finding her forehead, her hair, her ears. His fingers traced the cir
cle of her lips where she was stretched around him as if he wanted, needed, to feel the place where they were connected.

  She took him hard to the back of her throat, swallowing around him and then blinking at the sunlight that was suddenly everywhere as he threw off the blankets and sat up. Taking her by the chin, Tyler sat her straight up, his tongue in her mouth and his hand scrabbling for the condoms on the nightstand. They scattered onto the floor and Fin dived for them, draping herself over the side of the bed. One of his hands snaked up her thigh and she felt the firm press of his thumb between her legs, testing her, teasing her, marveling. She sat up, tore the condom open and sheathed him tightly before crawling forward onto his lap. She gasped as she sat down on him, taking him in faster than she should have, the pinch of discomfort she felt somehow emphasizing just how intimate it was to do this with another person, to invite a man into her body. She would have chased that discomfort, ridden him too hard and too fast, just to understand it all better. But Tyler held her hips still and let her adjust to the raw size of him. His stubble scraped over her nipple, her collarbone, her neck, her temple. His arms were steel bands around her back. She could feel the individual press of each finger as he finally started to move underneath her.

  Fin tipped her head back to stare blindly at the glowing ceiling and felt his hands tangle in her hair, trapping her there so that his lips could trace her pulse, so his teeth could gently test the elegant length of her throat.

  But there was nothing elegant about the way they ground themselves together, barely pulling apart, just deep and then deeper. He was barely withdrawing and she reveled in the desperate, inarticulate nature of it. There was something unschooled and primal about all that skin, the tight grasp of him. It was uncouth and overwhelming and so ungodly personal.

  It was that thought that ignited the quickening deep inside of her. Just how personal this man was.