Page 38 of Can't Help Falling

Fin waved and headed down the street toward her train stop, but deviated at the last second, opting to walk home instead. Cobble Hill was far from her Ocean Avenue apartment. She’d have to walk all the way across Gowanus, Park Slope and through the park. But it was a brisk December day, early afternoon, and Fin decided she felt like a walk.

Mary’s words played in her head, not because of what she’d been saying about Tyler, but because of what she’d inadvertently been saying about her.

“Blind spot about what?” Fin wondered to herself, wincing when she thought of the way Mary had straight-up told her that Tyler would always be kind to her, but that she couldn’t be trusted to be kind in return.

Was that really true?

It was definitely true that she valued other things, like honesty and clarity, over kindness. So, did that translate into her being stone-cold?

Think of the thing you want the most in this world...

She blocked thoughts of her mother and tightened the buttons on her coat, though she was physically warm. The picturesque brownstones of Cobble Hill gave way to the longer avenues of bodegas and apartment buildings, fenced-off parking lots surrounding public schools. When the wind changed, she could smell the noxious soup of the Gowanus Canal. People passed her, but her head was down, her eyes on each step directly in front of her. Fin didn’t always love Brooklyn, but at that particular moment, with too much on her mind and so many steps to take before she was home, Fin was grateful to live exactly where she did.

“TYLER, WHYISN’Tthere beer in the fridge?”

Tyler, distracted by the recipe he was reading, swam up from the depths of his thoughts. He focused on Kylie, who stood in front of the open fridge.

“What?”

He hadn’t been sleeping well since the basketball game. His editor had loved the piece he’d written, but had been on his ass for more of the same, and Tyler simply didn’t see how the games were going to fit into his new schedule with Kylie. He couldn’t be out of the house two to four nights a week. It wasn’t fair to her. But also, they needed income. For things like the beef Stroganoff he was about to attempt. And the overnight field trip fees she’d asked for this morning. And—hold the phone. Had she just asked him about beer?

He blinked his scratchy eyes and tried to catch up.

She closed the fridge and turned to face him, her arms crossed over her chest and an almost ornery expression on her face.

“Yesterday, when we went out for dinner, you got a beer.”

“And...that bothers you?” he guessed.

“No. It doesn’t bother me...” She let her words hang, as if he was supposed to be able to stitch together her meaning from simply that. But...yeah. He was coming up with nothing.

“Then what the heck are we talking about here?”

She squinted at him, chewing the inside of her lip. “It’s because of me, isn’t it? You don’t want to have beer in the house because you think I’ll steal it or something?”

He barked out a laugh of surprise because that thought had simply not occurred to him. Worried she’d steal the beer? “No! No. I just—” He cut himself off, knowing that the strength of the fishing line suspending this entire moment depended on whether or not he said the next part right. “I just, I know that your mom drank around you, and uh, maybe drugs? I guess I just wanted you to know that that isn’t going to happen here. You don’t have to worry about that in this house.”

Something went flat in her dark eyes and she turned away from him, taking two steps back toward her room.

It had been weeks of painful silences between them with Tyler stepping dubiously around all sorts of fishing lines, and in a sick way, he was almost glad to have swiped one clean in half. He’d been feeling like there was no room for error with her and that kind of precision was exhausting.

She was walking away from him; he’d said something he shouldn’t have—apparently—but that was weirdly much more his comfort zone than the awkward silences in which he stewed over the perfect words to say next. He wasn’t a perfect-words kind of guy.

“Wait, Kylie.”

She paused.

“Don’t go. Look. I know sometimes I end up saying the wrong thing...”

She turned and shrugged like, Yeah, what about it?

He couldn’t help but laugh. “But I guess I just want you to know that you can tellme if I’ve said the wrong thing. If what I just said hurt you or made you mad, well, you have to tell me.” He knocked his knuckles against his skull. “This is more than just a pretty place to rest a hat. I can learn, Kylie.”

She pursed her lips and looked at him like he was an idiot, but the expression seemed like a win. She was trying not to smile, he was almost certain. “Yikes. You get the ladies with jokes like that?”

Tyler let out a puff of an unexpected chuckle. She’d never razzed him before. “Not lately.”

She gave him a skeptical look, like she doubted the fact that he’d ever had the ability to get girls. “I’m going to finish my homework before dinner.”

Okay. So. Conversation over.

Before it had even really started. He watched her go and sagged back against the counter.

The kid was a master at getting information while revealing nothing herself.

He turned back to the recipe, read it once more and started pulling things out of the fridge. For a moment, he stared at the empty shelf where he usually kept a six-pack of beer. They’d had a quarter of a real conversation, a world record for them.

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