Page 108 of Can't Help Falling

The lonely teenage girl who still lived somewhere in her heart immediately deflated. She’d thought he might say love.

“No, don’t get me wrong,” he laughed as he read her expression. “I don’t mean attraction in the cheap, shallow sense of the word. I mean it in the...magnet sort of way. Wherever you are, I want to be. When you move, something in me follows you, even all these lonely months, when I haven’t let it be my eyes that follow you, something in me still followed you. Attraction. I was, am, stuck to you. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“Energy,” she whispered. “Our energy knew how it felt about each other before we did. I could sense that all the way back since the first time we met. It was instant for me. I just didn’t like it.”

“I didn’t like it much at first either. I didn’t want to chase you. But, then, yeah. I did.” His eyes went distant for a moment, the murky orange room glowing all around them. Fin got the strange feeling that the room had detached itself from the apartment building. They were simply floating haphazardly toward the sun. “So, what do we do about this trust thing?” he eventually asked her. “You’re not used to trusting men. Neither of us know much about relationships. How do we keep from driving this spaceship straight into the sun?”

She smiled, hearing his words. He’d been thinking about crashing into the sun the same way she had. Explain that one, universe.

She went to groom his bedhead, realized that his villainous hair was already falling in that perfect way that it usually did. Frowning, she moved her hand to his beard instead and was soothed by the imperfection there. The beard that had grown in overnight, even though she’d sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him painstakingly shave it off not even nine hours ago. She liked the incongruous nature of it. Perfect hair, pesky beard. Something about that was perfectly Tyler.

“We go very slowly,” she said, the answer coming to her from somewhere in the heart of their glowing morning room, almost as if there were a spotlight shining on them and them alone, of all the people in the world. “And we make it up as we go along, even if it only makes sense to the two of us. And Kylie. This doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but us.”

He nodded, his eyes closing in contentment for a moment before they shot back open. “Fin, are you a, uh, marriage type of person?”

She laughed at his obvious discomfort, charmed that he’d made himself ask. “Ty, up until about seventy-two hours ago, I wasn’t even a sleep-the-night-in-the-same-bed-as-a-man sort of person.” She nipped his lips with hers. “This is what I meant by taking things slow.”

He nodded, somehow managing to look both soothed and argumentative at the same time. “I get that. But we haven’t really taken things slow at all, love. You know what I mean? Because I’m in your bed. While you’re naked. We’re about to tell Kylie about us. Three days ago, we hadn’t even kissed.”

“Sure, but we’ve both had feelings for a long time. And what do you mean I’m naked? Are you not naked?”

Instead of lifting the covers, she explored with the pads of her fingers, harrumphing in disapproval when she reached the band of his underwear. He grunted when she gently snapped the band against his hip bone. “I can’t sleep naked. I always end up thinking, what if there’s a fire and I have to run outside in front of all the neighbors?”

She laughed and ducked under the covers, relishing the sudden darkness, the closed heat of the cave of blankets, his chest hair against her cheek. She couldn’t hear his heart beating, but she could feel it, racing against the morning, his breath sprinting to catch up as she slid his underwear to his knees and rested her head on his thigh in the darkness under the blankets. She found his hardness with the palm of her hand and pushed it to one side and then the other, giving him a lazy, wet kiss on the crown and making him bend one of his knees up, almost as if he were protecting himself against the sharp pleasure of it all.

He said her name, Serafine, the whole name. Fin got the same feeling she had as she’d watched him sign her birthday into his calendar. Her full name, her given name, was a contract of sorts. He was signing her into his life with every desperate groan, his hands reaching under the covers, finding her forehead, her hair, her ears. His fingers traced the circle of her lips where she was stretched around him as if he wanted, needed, to feel the place where they were connected.

She took him hard to the back of her throat, swallowing around him and then blinking at the sunlight that was suddenly everywhere as he threw off the blankets and sat up. Taking her by the chin, Tyler sat her straight up, his tongue in her mouth and his hand scrabbling for the condoms on the nightstand. They scattered onto the floor and Fin dived for them, draping herself over the side of the bed. One of his hands snaked up her thigh and she felt the firm press of his thumb between her legs, testing her, teasing her, marveling. She sat up, tore the condom open and sheathed him tightly before crawling forward onto his lap. She gasped as she sat down on him, taking him in faster than she should have, the pinch of discomfort she felt somehow emphasizing just how intimate it was to do this with another person, to invite a man into her body. She would have chased that discomfort, ridden him too hard and too fast, just to understand it all better. But Tyler held her hips still and let her adjust to the raw size of him. His stubble scraped over her nipple, her collarbone, her neck, her temple. His arms were steel bands around her back. She could feel the individual press of each finger as he finally started to move underneath her.

Fin tipped her head back to stare blindly at the glowing ceiling and felt his hands tangle in her hair, trapping her there so that his lips could trace her pulse, so his teeth could gently test the elegant length of her throat.

But there was nothing elegant about the way they ground themselves together, barely pulling apart, just deep and then deeper. He was barely withdrawing and she reveled in the desperate, inarticulate nature of it. There was something unschooled and primal about all that skin, the tight grasp of him. It was uncouth and overwhelming and so ungodly personal.

It was that thought that ignited the quickening deep inside of her. Just how personal this man was.

“I was so wrong,” she gasped, pushing him backward and planting her hands on his chest, riding him hard enough to slam the bed against the wall.

“What?” he asked, his eyes squinting through his own pleasure, trying to make sense of her words on the other side of it.

“I thought you were shallow and superficial, Ty.”

He banded an arm around her waist and tumbled her to her back, disconnecting long enough to have her huffing in frustration, only to sink back into her so fast she tightened and groaned and kept chasing that quickening.

“Dowehavetotalkabouthisrightnow?” he choked out, burying his face in her hair, inhaling sharply, trailing his teeth down the side of her neck, pinning her hands onto the mattress.

“Yes!” she moaned, both in answer to his question and because the hip-twist thing he was doing was just so good. “Because you’re not shallow. You’re so personal, Ty. Even the way you have sex. No one does it like this. Just you. Oh!”

“Say that last part again.” He stopped thrusting, his mouth open, her hands pinned, his body buried deeply inside of hers. He held, held, held, panting, his pupils expanding and contracting, trying to capture the light, the moment, the very image of her.

“Which part?”

He released her hands and went down to his elbows, his forehead against hers. He caged her in gorgeously, keeping the rest of the world out. There was nothing but them. “The part where you said it was only me. Is it only me for you, Fin? Just me?”

He was asking her for words, but she couldn’t oblige him just then. There were no words for this feeling. She locked her ankles around his back, her wrists over his shoulders. She was hugging him so tightly she was doubling back and hugging herself. And wasn’t that just the way it was supposed to be? Wasn’t loving someone like this supposed to involve loving yourself? Wasn’t that what Via had been trying to explain all those weeks ago? You couldn’t logjam one part of your heart and expect the other rivers to flow freely.

“All or nothing,” she eventually gasped, not even capable of caring if he understood what she meant. Just you. But it wasn’t just him. It was only him. “All. Everything.”

A deep, almost helpless sound was coming out of him as he worked himself against her, his forehead dropping to her collarbone as his back curved hard into a C over and over again. She felt the rough scrape of his leg hair, the desperate tug and slide of his hand up and down the curve of her body. She whipped her head to one side and watched him ball up her pretty purple sheets in one white-knuckled hand. His movements went tight and jerky and then he was saying her name again. Her full name. His arms were all the way around her, all his weight on her chest as he spent himself inside of her.

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