Page 142 of Fall Into Me

I hadn’t expected it because it was everything I’d ever hoped he could believe—that he wasn’t responsible for the actions of those around him—that it was not his job to make amends for the sins of others.

This was new for us, because when I thought of us facing big things together, the reality was that…we didn’t. Not together.

I scrunched my nose at the tingling. The feeling, I knew, a result of that seed of hope that had been planted all those weeks ago reaching up to the sun. Growing and strong. Steady.

“Me too,” I said, because this whole being open and honest thing was really working for us.

That thought shot a pulse of guilt through me. At the words I had heard him whisper last night when he’d held me in his arms tight, the sound of his heartbeat steady beneath my ear.

Do you think you could love me again?

I had to be the worst kind of person to have held those words back from him. Words that were his anyway. I wasn’t even sure what it was that was terrifying me into not saying them.

Maybe it was the lingering fear that he could still leave. That even though it had broken both of us the first time, he’d still done it.

Maybe it was sitting and watching the bend in the street, waiting for him to fly around it and come home.

And he had. He’d come back to me.

Still, when I opened my mouth to say them, the total opposite came out instead. “I stabbed Declan in the ass.”

Fane’s head tilted back, laughter exploding out of him. Every note a splatter of watercolor dripping down the cabinets of our kitchen, and I stood there, grinning up at him in the same way I knew Jerry looked at him—like he hung the damn moon.

Maybe it was wrong, maybe it was totally fucked up to be laughing about the deceased, but there we were. Chuckling and hiccupping with laughter while the French toast—the reason I’d even managed to crawl out of bed—burned in the pan behind him. Me, incomprehensibly charmed by the boyish grin that bloomed across his face.

The silver lining here was that it was Sunday, which meant that this was the single day off I had during the week, and the moment we were fed and dressed, Fane and I walked down the street to his truck and drove straight to the vet.

Jerry was beside himself with glee at the sight of us walking through the door. He bolted toward Fane first, his tail wagging so hard he couldn’t control it. Eventually, it stopped moving from side to side and started twirling in a wild circle. Then he paused, his ears flicking toward me where I sat patiently and I held back the building pressure of sobs that were desperate to be released from my chest while my big, brave boy slowly walked over to me.

His steps were measured, like he was a little unsure.

Like he was disappointed in himself for what had happened.

His cold nose pressed to the bruised side of my face before gently sniffing the bandage on my neck and the other beneath my shirt that he couldn’t even see.

I knew my dog, and I knew that some people would probably think I was insane for thinking the way I did, but he was about as smart as they came. Smarter, actually.

No, we couldn’t talk the way people did, or even the way dogs did to one another, but we understood each other just the same.

With both hands holding his face, I leaned down and whispered into one of his floppy ears, my tears of terror, of worry, of relief, silently tracking down my face. His tail picked up speed slowly but surely until there wasn’t an inch of my face that wasn’t covered in slobber rather than tears, and the vet deemed him more than ready to come home.

Fane loaded Jerry into the back seat of the truck, carefully securing what had to be the largest dog harness known to man. On the way home, he turned to me with a knowing look, one brow arched.

“You told Jerry that you stabbed him in the ass, didn’t you?”

My grin stretched so wide it ached. “Yep.”

For the rest of the day, the three of us didn’t move from the couch, Jerry tucked between us and my hand in Fane’s. When the sun went down, we didn’t need to talk it through to know that when Fane got up, I would follow him into our bedroom to get our bedding and drag it outside.

This time, when Jerry started to make his nest before we’d finished setting up, we just walked back inside and got more blankets and cuddled in on either side of our four-legged giant.

The seconds ticked on, Jerry’s snores grumbling between us when Fane started to tell me about what the detectives had said. Who Declan really was and what he’d done. When he finally gotit all off his chest, I squeezed his hand a little tighter, pushed the hair off his face, out of his eyes and murmured, “It’s not your fault.”

When he replied a quiet but strong, “I know,” that little flower of hope in my chest grew a little bit taller.

* * *

I still didn’t have a phone, and when Fane refused to take me into work, letting me know that Ash and Sammy had it all covered, I got up and out of bed, buck-ass naked, and started trying to tie his limbs to the bedpost again. With every limb I got situated, he was up and out of my double-knotted bunny ear bows before I’d even started on the next one.

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