Page 90 of Can't Help Falling

There was something about kissing her under the moonlit clouds, with that water vapor mouth of hers that just—

“’Scuse me!” the driver’s loud voice had them breaking apart, their foreheads pressing together, huffing curlicues of breath against one another’s mouths. “You coming or going, lady?”

“Right,” Fin muttered. “The world still exists.”

Her eyes were fuzzy and nervous and...happy. Would it just be the stupidest thing ever to assume that this had been a positive experience for her?

She stepped back from him, loosening his grip, and folded herself into the cab. “Night, Ty.”

“Night, Fin.”

He closed the cab door and she popped her head into the window, lit in an orange stripe by the streetlamp overhead. She gave him a small smile and one quick glance of those eerily light eyes of hers before the cab pulled away from the curb and off they went.

He stood on the curb and watched the cab go. Even though they’d said very little to one another in the last half an hour, he couldn’t help but feel like she was leaving smack-dab in the middle of a conversation.

FINWASLUCKYenough to have back-to-back appointments with clients in two different corners of Brooklyn the following morning. It meant that she didn’t have the time to dwell on Tyler. Or to dwell on what had promptly become the best kiss of her entire existence.

Her first client, a noob to this whole energy thing, had been exhaustingly gung ho, asking a million and two questions about how it all worked and chattering so compulsively that Fin had demanded the client, Ana, get quiet. Fin then balanced crystals on several different points of her body, hoping it would calm her down a bit. Her second client, someone Fin had been seeing for years, had been much calmer.

But when, just after three p.m., Fin locked her apartment door behind her, she found that there was not much else to think about besides Tyler at that point. It was almost as if her brain had tossed a sheet over him for the morning and now that she’d pulled the sheet away, she could see that he’d been there the entire time.

She’d eaten lunch between clients, her indoor herb garden was tended, she was up-to-date on tinctures and teas, all her crystals were cleansed. She sighed. There was nothing to do but to clean the house.

She strode back into her room, slid all her jewelry off, changed into some leggings and a baggy T-shirt for cleaning and gathered her hair into a high ponytail to keep it out of the way.

Four minutes later, she was staring around her living room, realizing that the place was already perfectly clean.

In a huff, irritated at herself and at her stupid clean house that didn’t offer a single distraction, she finally admitted that it might be time to reach out to Tyler. There was nothing more she could reasonably do without her actions tipping down into avoidance territory.

She went back into her room and took her phone off the charger on her nightstand and plunked down on the edge of her bed, opening a text window to him.

Can we talk?

She deleted it. Too ominous.

Hey.

She deleted that too. Too juvenile.

How are you?

Delete. Too formal.

Got any free time today?

That one she stared at for a while. It was a solid maybe. But she still wasn’t sure.

There was a knock on her front door, and Fin automatically flung her phone away from her, open text box and all, as if it had somehow summoned a visitor.

She took a breath, closed her eyes and knew exactly who it was. She’d recognize that energy across a football field. In a rainstorm. With her back turned and her fingers stuffed into her ears.

Well. She’d attempted to climb inside his skin in his kitchen and it was time to actually discuss that particular phenomenon.

She strode through her living room, took a deep breath and swung open her door. And there he was.

His peacoat was unbuttoned—she still couldn’t believe she had feelings for a man who wore peacoats—his hair flopping to one side. He was breathing through his mouth, like he’d taken the stairs, and the expression on his face looked downright curmudgeonly.

“Tyler,” Fin said warily, not quite able to pin down his mood.

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