Page 107 of Can't Help Falling

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THENEXTMORNING, Fin could feel Tyler’s anxiety before she even opened her eyes. She’d slept again, which was unusual for her. With a man in her bed, which was even more unusual. She couldn’t remember that ever happening before.

It’s because you trust him.

Jetty’s voice in her head. Her aunt, who had known so much at a glance. She’d probably had more clairvoyance than Fin’s mother, who’d worn silk scarves and sat on a curb chirping ominous warnings to passing tourists in the French Quarter. Her mother, who hadn’t ever minded parting a dope from a dollar. Who’d had the gift and abused and ignored it at every turn. Who’d let it drive her straight to that half-hinged life she’d barely held on to, like the edge of a sail in high winds.

All these years later, the common-sense intuition in Fin’s head still sounded just like her stolid aunt. It was still Jetty who was trying to keep Fin from running from herself.

Tyler’s anxiety was bright and specific, like how lime green was almost never just called green. He was worried about Kylie. Fin could feel it. It was a personal worry and Fin knew, without having to ask, that it wasn’t one he’d talk about if she asked. Not right now.

No. Right now he needed a distraction.

“I don’t know how to trust a man,” she said into the morning light that she still hadn’t opened her eyes to see. She stayed behind the comforting, warm curtain of her eyelids and felt him turn toward her, the blankets pulling tight against her breasts and then loosening when his warm hand traced over the plane of her stomach.

“I didn’t know you were awake over there.”

“Doing some early-morning worrying, just like you.”

He chuckled, pressing his lips into her hair. His soft, warm lips transformed into a sharp bite over the lobe of her ear, and she jumped, her eyes flinging open, his smiling, sleepy face filling her vision.

“Morning,” he whispered.

“So it is,” she whispered back.

“Why don’t you trust men?” he whispered to her, his face light and open and playful.

“Because I never knew any,” she said simply. “No father. My mother never had boyfriends. No uncles. No friends. No cousins. No brothers. My mother was very clear that all they do is take and never give. That they wreck you.”

“And your aunt?” Tyler asked, his voice still low, but the playful whisper long gone. He painted a picture over her hip bones with the palm of his hand, but it was more soothing than arousing.

“Never married. They’d had a brother who’d died when they were little, Jetty and my mother. But my time with Jetty, in her home, it was very female. Just me and Jetty and Via. And after Jetty passed, it was just me and Via.”

“You dated.”

Fin nodded. “Yes, but sort of in the same way that someone visits a zoo.”

Tyler laughed and absently snuggled her closer in a comfortable way. “Out of curiosity?”

“And because you know for sure that the animals stay locked in their cages. They can never really get to you.”

“Ah.” The mirth in his eyes dimmed. “Have I gotten to you, Fin?”

“Ty, you never even had a cage.” She traced his eyebrows, so light in color sometimes she forgot they were even there. “That’s why you were so scary to me. You were always a wild animal. All I knew how to do was hurt you enough to keep you very far away.”

“I don’t want to be far away.”

She sighed and looked at the ceiling of her apartment, her haven, her fortress. It was at that moment that the weak morning sun finally peeked around the edge of the neighboring building and hit her window, an orange cloud of light that turned her room into a candle.

“Have you ever done this before? A relationship?” she asked him.

“Yes and no. I dated a woman for a few years after college. Sam. She was sweet and never nagged me about my weird hours. I was doing an a.m. sports radio show at the time and had to leave the house at 4:30 every morning. I was usually in bed by 8:00. Not exactly a ton of fun in your midtwenties. We called it quits when it became clear that she was waiting for me to ask her to marry me. And later I was regularly seeing a woman, Alicia, back in California, but when Seb’s wife died and he needed me, I called things off and moved home.”

“You were relieved to leave her behind,” Fin intuited, fascinated, despite the pacing feeling in her gut, to hear about Tyler’s past.

“Yeah. Or rather, I was relieved to have a good reason to leave her. She was a cool person. There was no reason that it wouldn’t have worked except for the fact that I just didn’t care that much. And leaving town to go take care of my best friend made it so that I never had to tell her how little I cared.”

He slid up a few inches and nudged her back so that they could both share her pillow, their noses just a few inches apart, that steel rope braiding itself between their eyes again. “But I’ve never done this before, Serafine. I’ve never waited and waited for someone I wanted so bad. Well, it’s not want exactly. It’s...attraction.”

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