Page 43 of Fall Into Me

I had also dutifully ignored the word of the day that pinged on the lock screen of my phone.

Maybe it was a convenient excuse to avoid trying to figure out what the words meant and how to include them in my day somehow. It felt a little like karma for ignoring that stupid app when it pinged on my bedside table, waking me up and telling me my new word of the day had been delivered.

Waiting for me to fail at expanding my vocabulary.

As I slowly came to on Saturday morning, I internally groaned at the way my cheek was pressed firmly to Fane’s chest.

I liked to believe that the reason I was constantly in this situation since Fane decided it would be fine to invade my bed was thathewas the one pulling me to him while we were both asleep. That was a big fat lie, and I was surprised he hadn’t used it as ammunition in our verbal sparring wars.

We both knew it was me.

Fane was still firmly on his side of the bed. The wall of pillows had somehow been scattered around haphazardly, and my side of the bed was gloriously empty. The sheets were cold, cementing what I already knew: I had been here for a long while.

His breathing was steady, his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek. His heartbeat thumping steadily beneath my ear.

I slowly let my head move back to take him in. Lips parted, and long, thick lashes fanned out on his cheeks. The scowling glare he had on consistently since arriving in town was smoothed out.

He looked peaceful, likemyFane. The one I had learned with painstaking detail over two years.

I swallowed, knowing I should move. This was so far over the line of inappropriate that it was unrecoverable if he opened his eyes and found me ogling him. Instead, I let myself take a secondto look at him. To let my heart pang painfully at the fact that I’d never been this close to him before without him being mine.

Without beinghis.

I’d made a point of not looking at the tattoos he’d added to his body in the last two years. Fane had already had two full sleeves when I met him. A tapestry of things that he liked for no reason, things he liked for serious reasons, things that had resonated with him in some way or another.

He had tattoos all over his chest, legs, and arms. They had always fascinated me because so many of them were opposites to one another. There was a grim reaper on his back. It was this huge, shadowed depiction of it, and then he also had the phases of the moon going up his side and over his ribs. A skull with a snake coming out of its mouth and wrapping down his arm, and then a bunch of butterflies on his torso. A wolf, also on his back, howling in sorrow, and then a rubber ducky on his thigh.

I loved it because it explained him perfectly. He wasn’t just one version of himself. He was so many different parts pulled together, and I loved every aspect of him without any hesitation.

The new tattoos on his neck were things I had no idea the meanings behind, but I wanted to. It was almost hard to sit still; how much I wished I knew. It was a mismatch of things. A rose, a timepiece, a mandala design that went up the column of his throat.

It made him look even more imposing than he did before. Like maybe he’d done it just so people would leave him more alone than they already did.

The hand he had resting on his stomach used to be unmarked on the top. Now it held what looked like a constellation. I had no idea which one it could have been.

That thought brought me back to reality.

Of course, I didn’t know. Why would I? I had no right to know. It wasn’t my business, and letting myself get soft wasn’tgoing to help me when he left. The only thing I could do was make sure the only thing that was caught in the crossfire was me, not Darling.

I managed to extract myself from the firm hold he had around my waist, determined not to wake him. Desperate to have a second where I didn’t need to be on guard. Where I could let my walls down and admit that this was getting harder, not easier.

I was not an angry person. Being constantly angry at Fane was already taking a toll on me, but it was the only way I knew how to keep my guard up—to keep myself from unraveling completely.

I just needed to endure it.

Grabbing my phone on my way out of the bedroom, I tiptoed to avoid the floorboards I knew would creak. My gaze flickered briefly to the dark lump of his belongings piled in the corner, an unwelcome reminder of how much my house had changed in just one week. Even the air felt different, saturated with the woodsy, warm scent that clung to the man in my bed like a freaking pheromone.

He smelled like a mix of hot showers and wilderness: fresh pine and clean soap. It was the kind of scent that made you lean in without realizing it—intoxicating.

I wouldnotthink about it. Starting now.

Before grabbing Jerry’s lead to take him on his walk around the block, I checked my word of the day.

Beleaguered.

“Oh, perfect,” I muttered. Apparently, the universe had jokes.

Jerry was sprawled belly-up on the couch, his legs sticking straight into the air. One eye cracked open as I approached, and his tail thumped a lazy rhythm against the cushions.

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