Can't Help Falling

by Cara Bastone

  “What the hell is this?” Via asked as they approached, delicate hands on her slim hips, her eyes immediately clocking the way Fin’s hand rested on Tyler’s chest, the way Tyler’s fingers gripped Fin’s hand. “Is this a date?”

  Fin knew Via well enough to catch the giddy joy that was rising through her and to know that she’d just signed herself up for a very long spill sesh with her bestie sometime in the very near future.

  “Who’s on a date?” Matty asked, swinging his head around. And then standing almost on top of Tyler, pointing an accusatory finger about an inch from Ty’s eyeball. “Them?”

  “Watch where you’re pointing that thing.” Tyler batted Matty’s hand away. “This isn’t a date. We’re here with Kylie.”

  Seeming to regain his faculties, he stood, brushed off his pants and held out his hands to help Fin stand.

  “Well, where is she then?” Sebastian asked, looking for all the world like he was attempting to restrain himself from some combination of outright laughter and judgy eyebrows. The effect was rather constipating.

  “She’s with friends up the park,” Tyler grumbled. “And we were just...”

  The lingering pause at the end of the statement implicated them far more than the truth would have.

  Fin sighed and leaned into Tyler’s side. “I was just telling Tyler that I’m in love with him. For the first time.”

  “What’d he say?” Matty practically shouted.

  “He didn’t respond. You all walked up.”

  “Oh my god. Oh my GOD. Oh. MY. GOD.” Via tugged at her own cheeks, delighted laughter tearing out of her. Fin had never known that phrase could have so many separate meanings. “We have to go. We have to go.”

  Via tugged fruitlessly at her humongous boyfriend’s hand. Sebastian just kind of stood stock-still for a moment, staring between Fin and Tyler.

  “Seb!”

  “Right.” He shook his head, grabbed Matty by the collar of his shirt and started hauling his family away. “Right.”

  “Come over for dinner tonight!” Via shouted back over her shoulder once they were back on the path and practically tripping over her feet to get away.

  “Fat chance,” Tyler muttered, collapsing back down to the blanket and dragging Fin with him. “I’m ending my associations with those people,” he mumbled. “They come over here and ruin the single greatest moment of my life. They’ll be lucky if I ever darken their doorstep—”

  “Ty?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re mumbling to yourself.”

  He didn’t respond, just lunged forward and flattened Fin against the blanket. “Super in love with you,” he said, his lips against her lips. “Like a dumb amount. Ass over tits.”

  Fin burst out laughing. “How can you be so proper looking and so vulgar all at once?”

  “It’s a gift.”

  “Actually, it kind of is. It makes you unique, Ty.”

  “Everything makes you unique,” he said, his lips still pressed against hers, his weight pinning her down, every word pushed into her mouth like they’d die if they hit fresh air. “You’re the uniquest. I’ve never met someone else like you. And not just the psychic thing. It’s the everything thing.”

  She was laughing harder now, attempting to peel him off of her. “You’re like those fish that hold on to sharks with their mouths.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Ty, I’m not going anywhere. You can let me breathe.”

  He rolled onto his back and now Fin was the one pressing down on him, curled into his side the way they did when they watched TV on the couch together. She was sure they were making a spectacle of themselves and refused to care. The blueberry sky was their ceiling, the sun was just warm enough to have her feeling like they were snuggling into bed. Tyler was her home now.

  “I know I’m a broken record but I still can’t believe this is happening sometimes. I mean, less than a year ago you kicked me off the island for being a sad, lonely loser who clung to bachelorhood. And now you’re telling me you love me and I’m full-time taking care of a kid. What a world.”

  “I didn’t say you were a sad, lonely loser clinging to bachelorhood.” She pursed her lips and frowned.

  “You basically did. It’s okay. I’m over it now. But you told me that you could never trust me because of what my priorities were. That I put myself before everyone else and that wasn’t your jam.”

  Fin pushed up on her palms, an urgency pulling strings tight all across her body. Something had just occurred to her that never had before. “Tyler, you know I was wrong, right?”

  Her eyes searched his and with a plummeting stomach, she realized that he still believed some, if not all, of the horrible things she’d said to him that day.

  She reached out and gripped the sides of his face, needing him to hear her.

  “Tyler, that speech I gave you had, like, nothing to do with you. It was completely about me and my own fears. It was so inaccurate. I mean, I called you selfish, Ty. You! You’re so generous and sweet and caring. You always have been. You’ve given years of your life to Seb and Matty. And that entitledness I was so fond of pointing out? It wasn’t you feeling entitled because of your status in the world, it was you feeling entitled because of your place in their lives! You’d spent years basically being Matty’s other parent and then Via came along and you were displaced and totally unsure of what your role was anymore. I get that now, Tyler. But I was completely wrong at first. I had you down as sulky and entitled, but that was just dead wrong.”

  Slowly, he came up to a sit as well, his hands clasped over his knees as he looked at the ground, the sky, Fin. His navy eyes seemed to reflect the entire world in that moment. All the way down to the trees lining the path next to them and two tiny Fins living in his pupils. “What changed your opinion of me?”

  “I mean, getting to know you better, allowing myself to give you a chance.”

  “It wasn’t Kylie?”

  Fin frowned, getting the sense that this question was actually many questions all rolled into one. “Seeing you with Kylie was what allowed me to soften toward you in the first place. The way you worked to make her fit into your life, the love and tenderness you obviously had for her. I got to see who you really were from the way you interacted with her.”

  Tyler turned away then, his elbow on one knee, his chin in his palm. “Fin...my position as Kylie’s guardian is tenuous. In just over a year, her mother could get her back.”

  “Wow.” Fin sat back on her haunches and watched the clouds for a second, feeling all her rising giddiness and adrenaline freeze in place. “I—I’d thought she was with you until she was eighteen. But I guess that was only because that was how my own custody arrangement had worked, and I just sort of superimposed it.”

  Tyler was quiet and for the first time since she’d seen the ballet videos of him, his energy was completely unreadable to her. He was closed for business in a way she’d never seen before. It frightened her. Fin reached for his hand and to her immense relief, he immediately laced his fingers with hers.

  “Would you—” His voice scratched and he cleared his throat, took a deep breath. “Would you still want me if I wasn’t a package deal anymore?”

  Sudden understanding nearly whipped her hair back from her shoulders, and in the stiff wind of it, she felt an instant, biting sadness that he’d misunderstood her feelings so badly.

  “Tyler... I don’t love you because you happen to come with a kid. I love you because you having that kid showed me who you really are. You think I can ever unsee that? God, every time I look at you, you’re practically standing in a halo of gold, holding your heart on a silk pillow, mine for the taking. Whether or not the courts award you custody of Kylie has nothing to do with that.”

  His eyes were bright with shiny emotion as he let out a long breath, rested his forehead against
his knees for a moment. “But you want kids so bad, Fin. And I love Kylie, want her in my life forever. Hell, she’ll probably be the person who buries me. But babies? Little Leshuskis?” He grimaced. “You weren’t completely wrong about me at the baseball game. I don’t want a house full of screaming kids and dirty diapers. I’m not exactly sure what it is that you want. But I hope that me having Kylie in my life doesn’t imply to you that I’ve done a complete one-eighty on this issue. Being a dad... It’s not exactly my thing. It probably never will be.”

  * * *

  TYLER, FEELING VERY much like his heart was on that silk pillow she’d just mentioned, watched the woman he loved with his breath caught in his chest. This was a truth that he’d been holding inside, shifting from one side to the other for weeks. He watched her face and saw a complicated expression cross there. Confusingly, she landed on something that looked an awful lot like guilt.

  “You know I’ve been trying to become a foster parent for a few years now.”

  “Right.”

  “And every time my application has been denied. Over and over.” She paused, looked out over the field that yawned wide before them. Brooklyn really showed out for the first reliably warm Saturday. Frisbees abounded, and picnic baskets, and makeshift badminton, and kites on kites on kites. He had the feeling that she saw none of it. She might as well be watching a screensaver. She picked a piece of grass and worried it in her fingers. “When you’re in the middle of these things, you look so hard for the why, that sometimes there’s no chance of ever seeing it. I was looking with a microscope at every bullet point of my life, but I didn’t just sit back in an armchair and use my own two eyes to see the full picture.”

  “And what was the full picture?”

  “That I just wasn’t ready.” She laughed, but it was a complicated sound, filled with so much more than humor. “The universe knew. I mean, if I’d gotten a kid thrown my way, I wouldn’t have screwed anything up too badly, I don’t think. I have good judgment and a big heart. But all the reasons I wanted to be a foster parent, well, I was ignoring the biggest one.” She looked up at him and for the very first time, Tyler thought of her eyes as more than light or ice. They were warm and open and inviting, like a blanket of sand seen through two feet of the clearest water. What color were those eyes of hers? It struck him then that he’d never even tried to figure it out before. This woman had so many ways of keeping others just one step farther away than they’d like to be. Her tiger eyes, her sharp words, that emoji eyebrow. He understood then, as clearly as he could see her, what she meant.

  “You didn’t want to be alone,” he whispered.

  “Exactly.”

  He tipped her chin up, had her meeting his eyes again. “You don’t have to sound quite so ashamed about that, love.”

  “I’m not ashamed about wanting a family. I’m ashamed to have been so sure that that wasn’t the reason I was doing all this. To have transformed it into this wholly selfless desire in my head.”

  “Do you still want to be a foster parent?”

  “Yes. I’m positive that it’s part of the reason I’m here, on this earth.”

  Tyler knew better than to ask, “Then what’s the problem?”

  “You want to know what the problem is, then?” she asked, emoji eyebrow in full force.

  He laughed and kissed her lips and then that eyebrow. “God, you’re freaky. Yes. I do want to know what the problem is.”

  “It was two things, actually. Via’s logjam theory and watching you talk through that fight with Ky last month.”

  “What’s the logjam theory?”

  Fin played with his hand, tracing the lines there. He wondered if she could tell his date of death. “That you can’t expect to fully love with any part of your heart if some of it is dammed up.”

  “You’re not dammed up!” he protested, instantly irritated on her behalf.

  She smiled at his reaction. “Not anymore. Not since letting you in. Loving you. But I think I need to get used to it for a while. Loving you and Kylie. Using my whole heart. I have to build my muscles. It’s like not having used my left arm my entire life and then suddenly someone hands me a firehose and says, ‘Hold on!’”

  “A firehose, huh?” He kissed her knuckles. “That’s how much you love me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Listening to you fight with Kylie... Tyler, it was masterful. I know you don’t want to be a parent. And that’s fine. But as a mentor? A guardian? Jeez. I was blown away by how you handled that. With compassion and anger and honesty and so much love. You had all these tools in your toolbox. And it just hit me. Tyler uses the whole toolbox. And he has his entire life. You’re equipped to deal with Kylie because you love with your whole heart, Ty. I accused you of being stunted at that ball game. But I should have pointed that finger at myself.”

  “Quit calling yourself stunted,” he said grumpily. “You’re perfect. End of story.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Whatever you say.”

  “Is this your way of telling me that you’re not sure you want kids either?”

  “Biological kids?” She gave him crazy eyes. “Ah, no. We have that in common. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I wasn’t really raised by either of my birth parents, didn’t even know my father. But yeah. Not interested. There are so many kids in the world who need a hand and a home. That’s what I want.”

  He was quiet for a long time and, somehow, they found themselves seated against each other, Fin’s head tipped back onto his shoulder, their eyes watching the sky, using the other’s body to keep their own upright. “Fin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not asking you to go full psychic on me or anything. But if you had to wager a guess, based on how well you know me, am I gonna be into fostering a kid with you at some point?”

  “I don’t see the future, Tyler.”

  “I know—”

  “But, sometimes I get these images. Other people might call them visions, but everything in the future is so subjective, always prone to change, that I don’t usually put any stock in them.”

  “Do you have one about me?”

  “I can see you a few years older, hanging up after a call with Kylie. She’s at college, I think. Or maybe some kind of abroad program. You miss her so bad you kind of slump down over the kitchen counter. I’m there, and I ask if everything’s all right. You give me this look like, I have all this energy and love and time and nowhere to put it. And we both kind of know that it’s time to talk about fostering again.”

  “So...” he said slowly. “What color shirt am I wearing in this vision?”

  She laughed and pushed back against him. “It’s not a science, Leshuski.”

  He picked at the grass next to him and sighed. “It sounded right, though, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” she said in a low voice that he could feel echo through the cavity of her body and into his. “If I were a betting psychic, I’d guess that in a few years, we’ll have built the muscles we need to really do this the right way.”

  His stomach executed a perfect pirouette as he tugged a little too much grass out at the root. “Were we, uh, wearing wedding rings?”

  She went still for a moment and though he knew he’d never be able to sense energy in the way that she could, he felt momentary tension that almost instantly melted away into humor and sweetness and warm sun on warm skin under white skyscraper clouds. “Are you telling me that you’re a marriage type of person?”

  He grinned, even though she couldn’t see it. She’d thrown his own words back at him. Marriage type of person. What did that even mean? “I’m not sure. I never had a great reason to really ask myself that question before.” He lifted his fist and let the grass go in the wind. “I’m an in-love-with-you type person. I’m a committed-to-you type person.”

  “Me too,” she whispered, her head lolling back onto his
shoulder. “Tyler?”

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s okay that we don’t know the rest.”

  “My favorite part of that sentence is the we.”

  She jolted and reached back to lace her fingers with his. A static shock sparked between their palms, but at this point, they barely even noticed. “We is a very powerful word.”

  “It can mean so many different things at once,” he agreed. And propped up against the woman he loved, in a park he loved, in a city he loved, Tyler thought about we. All the different wes in his life. In this one park alone. He could almost feel a line of love arcing from him all the way to the north part of the park where Kylie sat with wes her own age. And down to the south of the park, where his best friend’s family had made their own we into an unbreakable unit. And to the woman leaning into him. He relished the weight of her, the trust and challenge of it. He looked at the sky and felt their place in the world. The green, rolling mat of the park underneath them, like the face of a clock in a city grinding its gears all around them.

  He looked at the sky and felt both massive and minuscule at once, a tiny cog in the universe perhaps, but imperative to the people who loved him. And what a relief. What a relief to need and be needed. What a relief to have created this happiness.

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FIRST AND FOREMOST, I’d like to say a with-cherries-on-top sort of thank you to my agent, Tara Gelsomino, and my editor, Allison Carroll. These two brilliant people not only helped me fine-tune this manuscript, but they also helped me chop out twenty thousand words. I can’t even begin to describe how much patience, how much muscle, that requires. I can’t thank you enough. Thank you to Michele Bidelspach. If Allison was the person who helped me get this book on the highway, you’re the person who helped me parallel park it. Thank you to Gina Macdonald, your attention to detail is unmatched. I’m so grateful to you! To the entire team at HQN, you’re a radiant and gorgeous group of people. You’ve got vision! Talent! You’ve got the juice!