Page 23 of Can't Help Falling

“Me either,” Kylie admitted after a minute. She looked down at her feet, back up at the wall, her eyes ricocheting off Fin. Her nervousness was bright and sour between them. “Are you, uh, as uncomfortable with sitcom Thanksgiving as I am?”

Fin laughed again. “Sometimes. But I promise that as cheesy as it all seems, nobody in there is faking it. It’s just the way they are.”

Kylie’s shoulders came back an inch. The word they drew a line through the people under this roof. It put Fin and Kylie on one side and everyone else on the other. Fin found she liked being on the same side as Kylie.

Fin tipped her head back toward the dining room, where everyone was waiting, inviting Kylie to head there with her. And when Kylie fell into step beside her, it felt right.

Thanksgiving dinner passed in the expected way: too much food, deft avoidance of politics and lots of moaning and groaning over distended tummies once the dishes were cleared away. Fin, the only one there without a buddy, excused herself early and headed back to her own neck of the woods.

It wasn’t until much later, when Fin, full and exhausted, climbed into her own bed, relishing the dark quiet of her apartment, that she realized the other half of her inclination to get to know Kylie.

When she’d been talking to her in the hallway and then later, seated next to her at the dinner table—the meal loud and laced with the complicated energies of each person stuffing their faces with stuffing—Fin hadn’t felt that guilty chill. It was almost like interacting with Kylie had canceled out the bad things she’d said to Tyler. Maybe, karmically, if she could help ease Kylie’s transition to Brooklyn, she could erase some of the pain she’d caused him with her harsh words at the ball game.

She knew that there was a kid out there, a few neighborhoods away, who needed her help, and there was a man whom she’d been feeling guilty over for months. And maybe there was something she could do about both.

---