Page 22 of Fall Into Me

Ah, this expression I knew.

He was confused. Not just regular confused but freaking perplexed.

His hand stayed curled around the duvet for a second longer before he released it one finger at a time and walked around to the other side of the bed. Strides stiff and body rigid and only in his black briefs and a shirt.

I threw my hands up, stomping out of the room and grinding my back teeth together. My heart was beating so fast, pumping what had to be gallons of desperately frustrated, fiery anger all over my body. He made me want to break all the plates in my kitchen, and I really loved my plates.

Instead, I grabbed a spare toothbrush from the cupboard in the hall and stomped back into my room, thrusting it at him without a word.

Bad hostess, my ass.

If he had to be here, that was fine.

I mean, it wasn’t, but whatever.

I would eventually make my peace with that. Maybe. After all, this was a hole I had dug for myself a long while ago. I had no one else to blame.

Sure, my level of forethought on all potential ways it could play out started and ended with telling everyone I knew he was on the other side of the world, like somehow my passionate will alone would make it happen.

Instead, he showed up like he hadn’t decimated my heart, saw the hole I’d dug, and just dove right in, taking me with him via a running tackle.

He was here, but that didn’t mean I had to acknowledge him.

I wouldn’t see him, speak to him, or notice him.

Within the walls of this house, Fane Mackenzie ceased to exist to me.

8

Fane

Before

“I knew you were too good to be true,” Cali said, hopping out of the truck and rounding the front.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m here to meet my fatal end.” She shrugged one shoulder and looked around.

I rolled my eyes at her. “No, you’re not.”

“That’s exactly what the person leading me to my doom would say!” She heaved a sigh. “At least I get a good view as I’m going out.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose, looking back at me. “No, I meant this pleasant junkyard you’ve brought us to.”

I’d known Cali for four months. It had been four months of feeling like I’d known her my whole life. Of getting up and moving through each moment, each shift, each mundane taskonly because I knew that doing all those things brought me closer to seeing her again.

She was so completelydifferentfrom anything I’d ever had in my life before that the way she made me laugh stopped shocking me a long time ago. I tipped my head back and released the bubbling, foreign feeling that started in the very center of my chest and pushed out of me with determination.

I shook my head and walked to the back of the truck to set up all the blankets and pillows I’d thrown back there. I looked back at her, her face soft with this sort of starstruck expression that she made every time I laughed. Like she was constantly in awe that I found her funny.

“You coming, Rose?”

It only took us minutes to turn the back of my old, beaten-up truck into one of the pictures Cali had pinned to her Pinterest board about date ideas she thought would be cool. She didn’t know this was what we were doing until she saw the blankets I’d hidden under a tarp at the back, and it was worth spending the money I didn’t really have on blankets I’d probably never use again just to see that look on her face.

We were quiet for a long time, shoulder to shoulder, looking up at the clear, black sky above us. We were a little ways outside of Artington, but my best friend Ash’s cousin owned this junkyard, and it had always been the perfect place to see the stars.

---