Page 7 of Fall Into Me

Touching him felt like something entirely new, and at the same time, it was deeply known by every cell in my body. The rightness of it all when I looked up into his violet eyes and followed him onto the dance floor.

3

Fane

After

It honestly felt like I’d been tripping balls for the last seventy-two hours.

I hadn’t slept at all for the first twenty-four, and everything after that was now too grimy to recall.

Cali looked at me like she’d seen a ghost, and then she started to blink rapidly. So fast it was kind of alarming.

I wanted to move toward her, but I doubted that would help. No, Iknewit wouldn’t.

When her eyes popped open, she reached up like she was about to rub them before stopping herself and clamping them shut again.

I cleared my throat and felt like I might be drowning. “Are you—”

“Mother of God,” she gasped. “You’re real.” Her eyes flew open, one hand immediately landing at the base of her throat.

“Hi.” Good fucking Lord. I had never been very good with words, but I had at least been able to stay away from being some sort of monosyllabic dickhead. Until now.

“Hi.” Her brow furrowed as her head tilted to the side. The move was so familiar to me that I knew exactly what was going through her head. Even when I had no real right to anymore.

“Fane.” She said my name like it had sat on a shelf at the back of her mind, and she was blowing the dust off it. For one small, minute moment, I had no idea how this was going to go, and then she narrowed her eyes at me, and I knew I’d been wrong.

I was fully aware of exactly how this was going to go.

“What the hell are you doing here, Fane?” She was pissed.

“The sign out front said coffee.” I gestured back toward the street to where the group of contracted tradesmen loitered.

“We’re closed.” She crossed her arms and took a single step back further into the kitchen.

There was a huge sign in the window of Cali’s café that said, “We are open until 5!” I saw it when I walked in. I knew she knew it was there too, because I’d wager she was the one to put it there.

I took my time looking from her face to the clock on the wall on my right that showed four thirty p.m. before looking back at her face. And God help me, I tried, but I couldn’t stop the way my mouth curved at the side because I knew she was full of shit.

Turns out, that was not the right reaction to have in the presence of a woman harnessing what I am sure rivaled the wrath of the devil.

“We’re still closed,” she bit out between clenched teeth, crossing her arms and jutting out her hip.

She was so familiar to me. And every single move she made, every second I could drink her in, my ability to breathe got easier and easier. It wouldn’t last, this moment of peace I’d found. I knew that. But I’d be damned if I wasted even a second of it.

I opened my mouth to say something else, overcome with this sudden need to ruffle her feathers. I wanted to push her buttons. I wanted to see that flush I knew hid just under the collar of her shirt spread up her neck.

I hadn’t seen Calista Grey in almost two years, and every single scenario that I had imagined, every moment that I’d played out in my head and memorized what I’d say, no longer meant a single thing in the light of seeing her in the flesh.

“Why are youhere, Fane?” Her voice wavered, and I wanted to tell her exactly why I was there. I wanted to tell her where I’d been, too.

The thought of the last two years made me clench my fists. Made me want to crack my neck over and over and fucking over.

However, showing up out of the blue and saying, “Hey, remember my dad? The one I hate, the one I swore I’d never be like? Well, surprise! I ended up working for him, and now he’s got his sights set on Darling.YourDarling. And I didn’t know what else to do, how else to stop it.” That didn’t feel like the best approach.

Instead, I just said, “Work.”

“Work?You’re here for work? In Darling? You’re here to work, here in Darling?” With every word that came out of her mouth, her eyes got bigger, and the bigger they got, the harder I clamped my mouth shut.

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