Page 92 of Can't Help Falling

“Oh.” She put her hand up to the high hair tie and fiddled around with it. “I was just going to do some cleaning when you stopped by.”

He looked away from her hair, his eyes bottoming out on her yoga pants, and his expression got even more pained. He jammed his hands into his pockets and turned away from her, going to sit down in the armchair on the far side of the room.

She took a moment to get some iced tea for each of them and then joined him in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the couch and leaning forward over her knees.

“Please,” he said after a moment, dragging his hands through his hair again. “Please, just put me out of my misery and answer my question.”

She fixed him with a stare and spoke slowly. He was extremely hard for her to read right now and getting harder by the moment. “You want to know who kissed who.”

“Yeah,” he said gruffly, dropping his hands from his face. “I do.”

“Who do you think kissed who?”

“Fin!”

She laughed. “All right, all right. I don’t know, Ty. We kissed each other.”

He screwed up his face in frustration.

“That can’t be true. It’s never true,” he insisted. “That’s like when people say a breakup was mutual. It’s never real.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course those things can be real. Rare, maybe, but real. Ty, did you want to kiss me last night in your kitchen? Did you lean in?”

He cleared his throat and slanted a look at her with those navy blues of his. “Yes.”

Her heart feebly attempted to get back into its normal position and grotesquely failed. She took a steadying breath. “Okay, then. There’s your answer. We kissed each other.”

“So.” He stopped, leaned forward over his knees and attempted to brush his hair down as he stared at the floor. “You leaned in too.”

She balanced her chin on one fist. “Considering it was this side of twelve hours ago I was literally sucking on your lip, I’m not sure how much clearer I can make this, Tyler.”

He stood and paced to the far side of the living room, absently touching the rainbow-making baubles that hung in her window. “Okay. Okay, so I kissed you and you kissed me.”

“You know when you say a word over and over again and it starts to lose its meaning?” she asked dryly, her chin still on her fist. “Kisskisskisskisskiss. Doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

He turned from the window, his face serious, his voice low. “It meant something to me, Fin.”

Her blood did that backward thing again. “I can see that,” she said in a voice equally low. And she could see it. She’d never seen his energy so chaotic. So out of whack. He was scrambling as fast as he could, trying to make sense out of their kiss while also trying not to ruin everything. She rubbed a hand over her breastbone, trying to make her heart settle back into its normal position, but she just couldn’t make it go.

“Okay,” he said again. “Okay. Normally, I’m a see-how-it-all-turns-out kinda guy. But I’ve got Kylie and that’s hard enough even when I’ve got my head on straight. So, I’ve got a few things to say, I guess.” He strode back over to the armchair and plunked down in it, rubbing the palms of his hands over the knees of his slacks. When he looked up at her, there was something in those navy eyes of his that she hadn’t seen since that day at the ball game.

“Look,” he said. “It’s obviously no secret that I used to have a big thing for you. And it’s not like I’m at home writing your name in my diary or anything. But still. You’ve helped me out so much with Kylie. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you these last few months. And... God, I can’t believe I’m saying this to Serafine St. Romain.” He tossed his eyes to the ceiling for a moment but then they were back on her, more confident than they’d been out in the hallway. “But that—last night—it meant something to me. And confused the hell out of me. And if it didn’t—doesn’t—mean anything to you, then we can’t do it again. Okay?”

Fin, sitting on the couch, her chin on her fist, let her eyes drop for the first time since they’d sat down in the living room. She felt chastened, and a little silly, and extremely humbled. Here she was, making wry jokes, deleting texts to him, dancing around her feelings. And there he was. In person. Admitting how he felt. Asking questions. Being honest.

She suddenly felt like a cad of the first degree. Protecting oneself from actual harm was one thing, and she’d had to do that a thousand times in her life, warning off men on the street, blocking people on the internet, that kind of thing. But this? This dance she was doing with Tyler right now was simply protection as habit. It was a hard-worn groove in her internal hardwood floors and she was walking it simply because that was what she knew how to do. Meanwhile, he, for the second time, was putting himself right out there. Even after the first time he’d done it she’d eviscerated him like a pasture-raised chicken carved up for market.

This right here, staring at her in a V-neck and slacks, was what bravery looked like. This was what it looked like to ask for what you needed. And, damn, it looked good.

Fin found herself looking at her own hands folded in her lap, her thumbs playing an in-house thumb war tourney.

What’s it gonna be, Finny? She was surprised by the voice she heard then. It wasn’t her own intuition. No. That was Jetty’s voice. Challenging Fin, knowing just how good she could be if she tried.

What’s it gonna be?

“And if it did mean something to me?” she said quietly, and forced her eyes up to his. “If it meant something when I kissed you, could we do it again?”

His eyes went from round nickels to half-moons to almond slivers in a matter of a few breaths.

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