Page 31 of Can't Help Falling

He had to admit, it was nice to feel at least a little bit cool in front of his skeptical sister and his biggest hater.

He got to feel cool again when they walked down a long, private hall, reporters and basketball players alike calling his name as he passed. It had been a while since he’d been there.

He shook hands, did a few backslapping man-hugs, and refused his usual seat in the press box, showing his mediocre tickets for the three of them.

“Seems like people really like you here,” Kylie said as they made their way to their seats.

Tyler couldn’t help but laugh. “You don’t have to sound so surprised, Ky.”

She slanted a glance at him, and he couldn’t interpret the expression on her face.

He stood back to let both Fin and Kylie walk up the aisle in front of him, but caught sight of the scowl on Fin’s face. He tapped her shoulder, taking care to touch mostly coat. “Everything all right?”

She frowned more. “There’s so much man energy in here.”

He laughed at her assessment. “You would have preferred the ballet?”

“I’ve never been. But from what I’ve seen on YouTube, ballet is a graceful, athletic sport.” She sniffed, like she’d slam-dunked on him.

The thing was, Tyler completely agreed with her. And he probably knew more about the world of professional dancing than she could have possibly gleaned from perusing YouTube. Unless she’d really been scouring old YouTube channels and found...

No, he inwardly grimaced. Those videos were thankfully buried in the bowels of the internet. She’d have had to be a psychic to find those.

He outwardly grimaced. Right.

Figuring the fourteen-year-old and the clairvoyant could find their way to their seats just fine, he turned away from them and looked down at the basketball court. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it from this vantage point before. Usually he was up in the crowded press box, swigging a beer, slamming some dinner and joking around with colleagues. This midlevel view was new for Tyler. It wasn’t so bad, he supposed.

“Man energy,” he mumbled to himself as he looked around at the crowds. There were almost as many women here as there were men. Kids too. It was a family atmosphere. Then he reflected on their walk through the back tunnel. All the men who’d greeted him, every pair of eyes that had seemed to stick to Fin’s face and body as they’d walked past. No one had said anything to her, of that he was almost certain, but was that kind of attention enough to put her in a foul mood?

Shampoo commercials led a person to believe that a woman enjoyed having her every movement tracked by men who were willing to lay down in traffic for her. But maybe it grew tiresome over the years. Or—he turned and looked up at the crowd behind him, spotting Fin and Kylie settling in—maybe, in the right circumstances, that kind of attention was even threatening.

With his natural, unschooled grace, Tyler took the steps two by two, catching a vendor’s eye as he slid into his seat next to Kylie.

“Whatcha want for dinner, kid?”

She wrinkled her nose at the bags of cold popcorn the vendor was selling. “I saw burritos downstairs.”

Tyler’s eyebrows raised and he waved the vendor off. “Twenty-five-dollar burrito it is.”

“Oh. I didn’t—” To Tyler’s surprise, Kylie’s face went bright pink. “I didn’t think it would be that much. Popcorn is fine.”

He blinked at her. Not once since she’d come to live with him had she given any indication that she was aware that her presence in his life was costing him money. He would have been surprised to learn that she ever thought about money. Hell, she’d just accepted her monthly MetroCard without a word of thanks, as if the city handed them out to citizens for free. The same went for the lunch card she swiped to buy food at school. But he griped about the cost of one stadium burrito and she was suddenly Suzy Frugal?

He frowned in confusion and looked up to see Fin frowning at him. “Actually, a burrito sounds really good to me too, Kylie,” she said. “I’m sure they’re not twenty-five dollars. Either way, they’re on me. Let’s go check it out.”

The girls were up and scooting past him before he could object. He lifted up to grab his wallet, but Fin shook her head at him as they went past. “It’s fine, really.”

And then they were sweeping down the stairs and were gone before he could say another word.

Feeling like he’d just been checkmated and having no clue how or why, Tyler stared unseeing down at the crowd below him.

He grabbed his phone from his pocket and frustratedly texted the number he’d programmed in earlier that week.

You don’t have to pay for dinner just to point out that I was a dick to say that to Kylie.

A few moments passed and then his phone buzzed in his hand. An emoji with a single eyebrow raised.

What the hell did she mean by that? Could she have chosen a vaguer, more judgmental emoji??

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