Page 87 of Can't Help Falling

But there Tyler was, writing her name into his calendar like locked doors didn’t exist. He wrote her name down in careful handwriting as if all he could see at the end of the hallway was light. Maybe a corner that led in a new direction. Maybe even a quiet, comfortable room where it could be just the two of them.

“Don’t you want to ask when my birthday is?” he asked as he turned, a smile on his face that slid off the moment he caught her expression. “Shit, are you crying?”

He strode toward her, his eyes wide, his hands suspended in the air like he was ready to catch her should she fall off into space.

“No,” she answered in a husky voice, thick with emotion. “I mean yes. Yes, I’m crying. No, I don’t know your exact birthday.” Her last few words were muffled by the shoulder and neck that were suddenly pressing against her face, her breath stolen by the arms that banded around her, yanking her into his chest.

Here was the hug that she thought she’d been dreading. But why would she ever have dreaded something as warmly sparkling as this? He had one palm cupping the back of her head, his other hand spread, fingers in a perfect star, against the middle of her back. She was buried against him, her brow pressed into his collarbone, halfway covered by the collar of his T-shirt. She felt stubble against her temple, and when his breath huffed into her ear, she knew that he’d bowed his head down.

She should have known that Tyler was not a back patter. She should have known that he hugged with his entire body. In fact, on an intuition, she moved her socked feet an inch to either side and encountered his socked feet. Even his feet were hugged up against hers.

The sting of her tears gone, her temple brushed his cheek. “I don’t know your birthday,” she whispered. “But you’re obviously a Gemini.”

He laughed, and she felt it in his chest. A rumble of vibration and sound and heat that, for a moment, pressed them together even more intimately. She liked the way his sound felt against her. Coming from deep inside him, rumbling through her. She wanted more of it. She wanted him to speak while he held her so tightly.

“June 12th,” he said, and she got her wish. She felt the rumble of his voice. Was it her imagination or were his arms even tighter around her?

Her arms were still pinned between them, and she didn’t want them there. She started to move them and he loosened his hold against her. He thought she was breaking the hug and the idea panicked her. Quickly, she slid her arms out from between them and around his back, gripping her own wrists as she held him just as tightly as he’d been holding her. Instantly, his release on the hug was ruthlessly eliminated and she was back to being embraced fiercely, her front pressed to his.

“How’d you guess that? My sign?” he asked.

This time, she wanted to see his face. As long as they weren’t looking at one another they could kind of pretend that this hug wasn’t happening. So, she tilted her head all the way back and he lifted his an inch or two.

This, she knew, was the kind of embrace that balanced on that skinny bridge she’d been walking for so long with him. This was not how friends embraced. But that didn’t make them lovers either, just because they were breathing each other’s air and gripping the shirts on one another’s backs.

Mostly because she knew, without a doubt, that she’d warned him away so well in the past that he had no confidence on whether or not she was actually inviting him back in, even when they were heartbeat to heartbeat, her toes gently laid over his. She knew what she had to do.

“I know you’re a Gemini because you’re curious. Adaptable.”

She felt his energy change. It was subtle. Where it had been skating around in confusion, now it just sort of slowed, like the motion of a cloud swirling lazily across the sky.

“Affectionate,” she continued, listing his characteristics that absolutely slayed her the most. And now his energy slowed and swirled even more. She felt those goose bumps again. Whether he knew it or not, he was tangling himself with her, allowing some part of himself to get lost in her.

“Gentle,” she whispered. “Generous.” Her eyes dropped down, unable to keep from looking at his mouth. “Passionate.”

When she lifted her eyes to his navy blues again, she felt his energy shift completely. Irrevocably. Moving as one, they eliminated all but an inch of space between their mouths, and she was overwhelmed by his energy, the delicious mixing of the two of them together.

She was liquid lightning, her blood slicking backward through her veins, her heart beating madly against his. She knew, without a doubt, that whether she’d meant to or not, she’d just busted the lock on a treasure chest of feelings that he’d meant to keep locked up forever. She could feel him, helpless against the onslaught of desire between them, but still desperately trying to cling to yesterday, when everything had been easier. When none of this had even been an option.

“It won’t be easy,” she whispered, her lips a breath from his.

His eyes widened and his nostrils flared. “You read my—” But she cut his words off when they pressed their lips together.

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