Page 95 of Can't Help Falling

“Fear?” he asked gently. “Am I scary, Fin?”

“Am I?” she asked, arching that emoji eyebrow.

“Good point,” he conceded. But his mind was chewing over her admission and it was important to him to clear something up. “Fin... I hope what you mean is that me, as a concept, is scary. Not me as a man. As the person standing in front of you.” She opened her mouth but he pressed one finger there for one moment, needing to finish. “Because I know that you’ve had to grow all sorts of weapons and armor just to be able to live your life in peace, and I hate that. I hate that for you. I wish it weren’t true. And I guess I just want you to know that if you ask me to leave, I’ll go. Simple as that. You don’t have to shove me away. I’m not going to push you, Fin. I’m going to listen. If you talk, I’ll listen.”

“If I talk, you’ll listen,” she repeated, looking at him like he’d just spoken Finnish.

“Simple as that. I promise you I will.” He ducked his head from one side to the other. “I’m stubborn. So, there’s that. But I don’t ever want to make you feel unsafe. Ever. In any capacity. Obviously physically. But I mean that emotionally as well. Mentally.” He paused, searching for the right words. “Psychically? Mystically? I don’t really know what you’d call it. But I know you well enough now to know that you’re operating on a different plane than I am sometimes. And if I’m ever doing something wonky...with my energy. Just clue me in. Give me a chance to fix it.”

She took her eyes away and pressed her forehead to his collarbone. He could feel her fingers plucking at the hem of his sweater. “You’re asking for communication.”

“Well.” He adjusted his grip around her waist and rested his chin on her head. “I’m a talker. Just ask Sebastian.”

She laughed, tilting her head back and catching his eye again. “But you’re so bad at communicating with Kylie.”

He laughed now. “Ky seems to kind of be the exception to my rule. But she and I are figuring out how to talk to one another. For a while, you were an exception too. I had no idea how to talk to you. But I wanna figure it out. Even if, in the end, we’re just friends who made out a few times, I wanna be able to really talk to you, Fin.”

She plunked her head back down and spoke into his sweater again. “You’re saying you want to know me. Really know me.”

“Bingo.”

She sighed and mumbled something he couldn’t quite hear. But he could have sworn he caught the words peacoat-wearing feelings-haver and maybe even Hamptons hair, but he couldn’t be sure. When she looked back up at him, she was chewing her bottom lip. “All right,” she said. “Let’s order takeout.”

THEYATETAKEOUTSUSHIfor dinner, sitting on her living room floor. Tyler asked questions about her work, and she asked questions about his. She made them tea and Tyler tried very hard to drink his with a straight face but she saw right through him, laughing and getting up to add cream and sugar to his.

They hadn’t turned on any lights in the apartment and by the time Tyler mentioned that he should probably get home, she was simply a blue shape on the floor next to him, silhouetted only by the dim natural light filtering in from the kitchen.

She agreed to walk him to the train, and they got bundled up in the dark, neither of them wanting to turn on any lights, knowing it would burst the bubble of the warmest, most exhilarating afternoon he could ever remember having. When they got out into the February air, it was fresh and crisp, all of yesterday’s low fog long gone.

“The moon is even smaller than yesterday,” he observed as they strolled along, his hands in his pockets and her arm crooked through his.

“It tends to do that,” she said with a smile.

She chatted to him about moon phases and different cultural beliefs about them. Neither of them said anything at all about the fact that they’d bypassed the train stop and headed straight into Prospect Park. They strolled the pedestrian path, and a dry, crisp snow began to lightly fall. There was something exciting and renewing about this particular snowfall. It was nothing like the usual stomach-plummeting, face-palming dread that typically accompanied a February snow in Brooklyn.

They turned back and exited the park, walking along the cobblestone sidewalk that lined one side of Ocean Avenue. They were headed back toward the train, sure, but also back toward her house.

“Weirdly,” Tyler said. “I’m kind of hungry again.”

Fin glanced at her phone and laughed. “You are never going to guess what time it is.”

“10:45.”

“It’s 8:15.”

“What?” Tyler confirmed the time on his own phone. “Jeez. We let the light fade naturally in your apartment and it got me all turned around, I guess.”

“We ate that sushi at like 5:00 and called it dinner.”

“And then took a three-mile stroll. No wonder I’m hungry.”

“Ty?”

He looked down at her, snow in her hair, an innocent question on her lips, cars honking and revving past on one side, the park, dark and peaceful on the other side. And he knew two things then, unequivocally. One, his feelings for her last year had not just been a crush. They’d been real and intense and meaningful. And two, she hadn’t extinguished them with her speech at the ball game. Nope. She’d just locked them in a back room, and he’d mistaken them for gone. But here they were. Intact and restless after all that time locked away. It was all he could do to try to shush those feelings, calm them, soothe them, convince them that he wasn’t going to sequester them any longer.

“Yeah?” he said gruffly, hoping that everything he’d just discovered wasn’t served up on a platter for this psychic to see.

“Wanna come over for dinner?”

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