Page 119 of Can't Help Falling

Fin burst out laughing. “How can you be so proper looking and so vulgar all at once?”

“It’s a gift.”

“Actually, it kind of is. It makes you unique, Ty.”

“Everything makes you unique,” he said, his lips still pressed against hers, his weight pinning her down, every word pushed into her mouth like they’d die if they hit fresh air. “You’re the uniquest. I’ve never met someone else like you. And not just the psychic thing. It’s the everything thing.”

She was laughing harder now, attempting to peel him off of her. “You’re like those fish that hold on to sharks with their mouths.”

“Thanks.”

“Ty, I’m not going anywhere. You can let me breathe.”

He rolled onto his back and now Fin was the one pressing down on him, curled into his side the way they did when they watched TV on the couch together. She was sure they were making a spectacle of themselves and refused to care. The blueberry sky was their ceiling, the sun was just warm enough to have her feeling like they were snuggling into bed. Tyler was her home now.

“I know I’m a broken record but I still can’t believe this is happening sometimes. I mean, less than a year ago you kicked me off the island for being a sad, lonely loser who clung to bachelorhood. And now you’re telling me you love me and I’m full-time taking care of a kid. What a world.”

“I didn’t say you were a sad, lonely loser clinging to bachelorhood.” She pursed her lips and frowned.

“You basically did. It’s okay. I’m over it now. But you told me that you could never trust me because of what my priorities were. That I put myself before everyone else and that wasn’t your jam.”

Fin pushed up on her palms, an urgency pulling strings tight all across her body. Something had just occurred to her that never had before. “Tyler, you know I was wrong, right?”

Her eyes searched his and with a plummeting stomach, she realized that he still believed some, if not all, of the horrible things she’d said to him that day.

She reached out and gripped the sides of his face, needing him to hear her.

“Tyler, that speech I gave you had, like, nothing to do with you. It was completely about me and my own fears. It was so inaccurate. I mean, I called you selfish, Ty. You! You’re so generous and sweet and caring. You always have been. You’ve given years of your life to Seb and Matty. And that entitledness I was so fond of pointing out? It wasn’t you feeling entitled because of your status in the world, it was you feeling entitled because of your place in their lives! You’d spent years basically being Matty’s other parent and then Via came along and you were displaced and totally unsure of what your role was anymore. I get that now, Tyler. But I was completely wrong at first. I had you down as sulky and entitled, but that was just dead wrong.”

Slowly, he came up to a sit as well, his hands clasped over his knees as he looked at the ground, the sky, Fin. His navy eyes seemed to reflect the entire world in that moment. All the way down to the trees lining the path next to them and two tiny Fins living in his pupils. “What changed your opinion of me?”

“I mean, getting to know you better, allowing myself to give you a chance.”

“It wasn’t Kylie?”

Fin frowned, getting the sense that this question was actually many questions all rolled into one. “Seeing you with Kylie was what allowed me to soften toward you in the first place. The way you worked to make her fit into your life, the love and tenderness you obviously had for her. I got to see who you really were from the way you interacted with her.”

Tyler turned away then, his elbow on one knee, his chin in his palm. “Fin...my position as Kylie’s guardian is tenuous. In just over a year, her mother could get her back.”

“Wow.” Fin sat back on her haunches and watched the clouds for a second, feeling all her rising giddiness and adrenaline freeze in place. “I—I’d thought she was with you until she was eighteen. But I guess that was only because that was how my own custody arrangement had worked, and I just sort of superimposed it.”

Tyler was quiet and for the first time since she’d seen the ballet videos of him, his energy was completely unreadable to her. He was closed for business in a way she’d never seen before. It frightened her. Fin reached for his hand and to her immense relief, he immediately laced his fingers with hers.

“Would you—” His voice scratched and he cleared his throat, took a deep breath. “Would you still want me if I wasn’t a package deal anymore?”

Sudden understanding nearly whipped her hair back from her shoulders, and in the stiff wind of it, she felt an instant, biting sadness that he’d misunderstood her feelings so badly.

“Tyler... I don’t love you because you happen to come with a kid. I love you because you having that kid showed me who you really are. You think I can ever unsee that? God, every time I look at you, you’re practically standing in a halo of gold, holding your heart on a silk pillow, mine for the taking. Whether or not the courts award you custody of Kylie has nothing to do with that.”

His eyes were bright with shiny emotion as he let out a long breath, rested his forehead against his knees for a moment. “But you want kids so bad, Fin. And I love Kylie, want her in my life forever. Hell, she’ll probably be the person who buries me. But babies? Little Leshuskis?” He grimaced. “You weren’t completely wrong about me at the baseball game. I don’t want a house full of screaming kids and dirty diapers. I’m not exactly sure what it is that you want. But I hope that me having Kylie in my life doesn’t imply to you that I’ve done a complete one-eighty on this issue. Being a dad... It’s not exactly my thing. It probably never will be.”

TYLER, FEELINGVERYmuch like his heart was on that silk pillow she’d just mentioned, watched the woman he loved with his breath caught in his chest. This was a truth that he’d been holding inside, shifting from one side to the other for weeks. He watched her face and saw a complicated expression cross there. Confusingly, she landed on something that looked an awful lot like guilt.

“You know I’ve been trying to become a foster parent for a few years now.”

“Right.”

“And every time my application has been denied. Over and over.” She paused, looked out over the field that yawned wide before them. Brooklyn really showed out for the first reliably warm Saturday. Frisbees abounded, and picnic baskets, and makeshift badminton, and kites on kites on kites. He had the feeling that she saw none of it. She might as well be watching a screensaver. She picked a piece of grass and worried it in her fingers. “When you’re in the middle of these things, you look so hard for the why, that sometimes there’s no chance of ever seeing it. I was looking with a microscope at every bullet point of my life, but I didn’t just sit back in an armchair and use my own two eyes to see the full picture.”

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