Page 88 of Fall Into Me

“Cali—”

“No. Fuck you, Fane.” I pushed away from him in earnest now, wading through the water to get out. My heart was thrashing, and I felt so incredibly foolish. “News flash, letting you stick your face between my legs doesn’t eradicate anything that’s happened between us. It doesn’t mean that, all of a sudden, the way I feel about you is miraculously different.”

“Cali, that’s not what I fucking meant. If you just wait one—”

“You’re not the only one here who has thought about what they’d say if we ever saw each other again. God, I fuckinghate—”

Fane was right behind me while we moved out of the water. “If you say you hate me one more time, I swear tofuck—”

“You have no idea what I do or don’t feel. No idea at all. And if you think that by somehow making me vulnerable and giving in, then hold back like some fucking noble jackass is going to make me, what? Soften up and want to hear anything you say more than I did before? Well, you’re sorely mistaken.”

“I wasn’t trying tosoften you up.”

I didn’t need to look at him to know he was tugging at his hair. He’d always struggled to find his words, therightwords, and yes, there was a part of me that wanted to just fucking stop. To give him the patience and space to figure it out the way I used to. But also, I was well within my right to rip him a whole new asshole.

There was a crack behind us that made me turn around. Fane was there in an instant, an arm circling around my chest protectively, both of us barely breathing while we looked over the forest around us.

I had to double-take the arm slung across me before I realized what he was doing. “Get your hands off me!” I turned around and shoved him again, which did a whole lot of nothing. The man was fucking huge.

“And that”—I point at the words on his chest—“that’s a sick fucking joke, you…you fucking sicko!”

“Stop yelling at me, and listen to me fortwo seconds.”

“No.” The word came out a deranged laugh and really said it all about my mental state. “I’m leaving, and if you’re not at the truck when I get there, I’m leaving without you.” I pulled my dress over my head and tugged my shoes back on. I knew he would catch up to me in less time than it would take to blink.

“Ask me when I got the tattoo.” His footfalls were steady and sure behind me.

“I don’t care,” I said, tripping for the second time.

“Ask me, Calista.”

“I don’t fuckingcare, Fane.”

“I got it the day you left.”

“Stop it!”

“The day you left, I took one of the notes you always use to write for me. That you left around the house.”

“Stop!” I was all but screaming at him now. Because I could see it, what he was describing. My linked letters on bright pinksticky notes on the fridge, the closet door, the bathroom mirror. Because I hadn’t wanted him to ever forget how much I fuckinglovedhim.

“And I got it tattooed, in your writing, right over my heart. So that I’d never fucking forget that for as long as I live, even if you’re not next to me, it’s beating the same as yours. Because Ican’t—” His voice broke, and he cut himself off.

I didn’t want to listen to his words. They didn’tmatch up.

“Do you remember writing that for me? What that meant?”

Don’t listen, don’t listen.

“Every fucking day, you wrote them for me. ‘Forever synced.’”

Nothing about him being here, showing up, made anything match up.Hewas the one who didn’t wantme. He saidno.

I was so busy going through that moment over and over, and the way his presence now felt like an assault on everything I’d forced myself to believe.

Wiping furiously at the tears still falling, I stormed for the driver’s side, hoping I’d somehow lost him on the way back. Hoping that he would just disappear from my life again.

That, I had learned to live with.

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