Page 89 of Fall Into Me

This?Whatever was happening now? I had no idea how to navigate it. How to survive it.

A rough hand wrapped around my arm, and I ignored the way my body sang at the contact. The way my heart tripped over itself. How the warmth of that single touch ignited my very fucking soul.

Instead, I ripped it from his grasp and whirled on it. The words died in my mouth. Shriveled up into nothing at the look on his face.

Defeated.

Like he’d been a man with one last thread of hope, and it had just snapped.

“I’ll drive,” he murmured, not even looking at me. All he did was walk around to the passenger side and open my door.

I was in a daze. He was going from hot to cold, and still, I felt like I knewnothing. That I was missing something, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t trust my judgment even if I wanted to, and that just made the tears fall harder.

I was out of the car before it had even stopped in the gravel drive of the cottage, desperate for some distance. To take a breath of air that didn’t smell like him, but I felt him at my back immediately, looming and haunting.

The tension sitting between us like a steel pole, keeping us from coming any closer, but stopping us from moving away as we found ourselves once again in the useless front room of my house.

“Not a single thing I have said to you since I got here has been a lie.” Fane’s voice was both the balm that soothed me and the blade that sliced, and I couldn’t make up my mind which was worse.

“I don’t even know who you are, Fane.” My voice held every ounce of the heaviness that had taken over my body. The weight of the words that I’d thought on, day after day, had become so much a part of me that I’d gotten used to the way they dragged me down.

It was a losing battle for me now. I could feel my knees threatening to buckle.

“Yes, you do.” He took a tiny step toward me before stopping himself. His jaw twitched at the same time his hands clenched at his sides.

He closed his eyes for a breath before speaking again. “You knowexactlywho I am, and I know you. I know you so thoroughly I don’t think I could even exist and not find my way back to you. Bepulledback to you. Every single thing I’ve done has been for you.”

He paused at the scoff that flew out of my mouth, and all it did was serve to make his eyes darken. His face drew in, and it was like I was actively watching all the light leave his body like he was trying to show me that this was all he had been for the last two years.

His voice was gravelly when he spoke again. “I’ll take everything you can throw at me. I want it. The anger, the pain, the fucking frustration. I willhappilytake it. I deserve it, I know I do.” His laugh was sad and empty, and so not like the one that left me with nothing but open blue skies. The laughter that sent those heavy, unforgiving clouds so far I couldn’t see them. This one drew them in, called out for them. Wanted to be suffocated by their darkness.

His eyes flicked up to meet mine, hard and unwavering. “Take your pound of flesh, Calista. Cut it from me any which way you like. I won’t fight you. I would rather you fight with me than nothing at all.”

I wanted to scream.

“Whatever you’re doing right now, it’s not going to last.” I was shaking my head vehemently. I could feel myself slipping, nearing that edge I’d fallen over once before with such a solid sense of confidence that I would not meet my end at the bottom. “You’re here because you’re sad. Maybe you’re lonely. Guilty? I don’t know, but there is nothing left here, Fane.” I waved a panicked hand between us. “Don’t you understand that? It’s all fuckingbroken, and I have cut myselfrepeatedlytrying to clean up the mess that was left behind, and I couldn’t. I…Ihateyou.” Those last three words had been the same lie I told myself consistently. The blanket that shrouded me, kept me safe and protected.

“I don’t believe you.”

“That doesn’t make it any less true,” I whispered, my voice trembling under the weight of it all. The urge to yell at himwas there, but the fight was draining from me, seeping out like a slow bleed. I felt like I was being crushed alive, suffocated by everything I’d been holding in. I needed to cut something loose, to let something go, or I wasn’t sure I’d ever find the strength to stand back up.

“I have two whole fucking years of memories, right here.” He pointed at his temple, taking another step closer to me. “That tells me hate isn’t something that couldeverexist between us.” He dragged a hand down his face. “Rose, I need to tell you…just, five minutes. Hear me out forfive minutes.”

I shook my head, turning away from him, desperate for space.

“Cali.” He was right behind me, his voice as jagged and broken as mine.

“I do. Ihateyou,” I sobbed, walking into different rooms of the house just to keep moving, past Jerry, who had never looked so lost in his life.

“No!”Fane yelled, voice cracking and splintering something inside of me. My anger didn’t leave, but it bent, twisted, reshaped itself into something closer to sorrow. A hollow ache I couldn’t hold back.

The weight of those years without him suddenly felt unbearable. The hold on the words I had wanted to scream at him, and also never wanted him to hear, shattering.

I whirled on him, chest heaving and vision blurred. Swallowing again and again to keep the sobs at bay. To make way for the words that were coming, whether I wanted them to or not.

Finally.

“Do you know what it’s like to try andwantsomebody, when you’re in love with someone else?”

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