Page 12 of Falling Into Forever
She did it. I knew she had. Social media makes it too easy to keep hold of your past. But seeing it in person is something else entirely.
To the left is a storefront with boarded-up windows, and to my right is the old tackle shop. It’s like this little town built itself around her grandparents’ home on the lake.
Almost nothing else has changed in all these years.
Heart Lake sparkles between the buildings like strikes of lightning warning me away.
“Want me to have Poppy call you when she’s done with dance class?” Lena asks. Jesus. I’d forgotten she was on the phone.Get your shit together, man.
“Yeah. I want to hear how she—”
The snap of an old screen door, followed by shattering glass, has me turning in place and my heart trying to drop-kick my lungs. The world tunnels, time stops, and everything goes blurry except the woman standing before me like she’s seen a ghost.
And in her story, she has.
CHAPTER4
DANTE
“Hell no. No, she wouldn’t do this to me.” Her words bring everything speeding into motion. It’s the first time I’ve heard Saylor’s voice in person in over six years, and it’s enough to shock my heart into beating again.
I incline my head toward the voice my soul will always recognize.
“You have got to be kidding me.” Her hands are frozen in midair, where she’d obviously been carrying something.
“Lena? Let me call you back. I found my Sa…my client.”
I hang up before she can reply and smile at my mouthy little she-devil.
“Client? Your client?” Her voice gets shriller with each passing syllable.
The sun is so bright behind the house that it casts the porch in shadows, and it takes a few moments for me to adjust to the light.
Not a day has passed that I haven’t felt her presence in my heart.
Guilt caused by shared trauma and mistakes sits heavily on my shoulders.
“No. No way,” she whispers, but it carries across the distance like an arrow to my heart. Her right foot taps against the old wooden planks that have probably not been replaced since her grandparents owned the place, and when she catches me staring, she crosses her arms over her chest.
“You are not my image doctor. No way. Kate said—but—it can’t be you.” The column of her throat ripples when she swallows, and she makes a face like it pained her. “This new Dante,” she says, pointing at my chest, “is an asshole.”
Her lashes fly high when it slips from her lips, but she’s wrong about me. Dante Greer is who I became to mask my pain, and I’m assuming she uses my last name professionally for the same reason. What better way to shield yourself from the world than to wrap yourself in what’s already hurt you?
Her chest heaves like she’s struggling for breath, but I’m entranced by her face. The wide, bottomless eyes I spent years lost in. Her thick brown hair, still too wild to be tamed, spills out of the messy bun she’s made on the top of her head.
She’s wearing short denim shorts and a T-shirt with a blue grumpy-looking teddy bear on it. It makes the organ in my chest skip several beats. Saylor’s the same and so different that it’s disorienting.
How much of a role did I play in putting those shadows beneath her eyes?
She mutters something that sounds like asshole again, and I finally find my voice.
“You know that’s my public persona, and I know SassyThompsonis yours,” I say mildly. But it does nothing to calm her. Instead, she seems to get angrier.
How many times did I watch her doodle Sassy Thompson in her notebooks? Hundreds? Thousands? In another world, she would have been Saylor “Sassy” Thompson for real.
“Oh, I do,” she mutters, tightening her features. Her face morphs into a full-on glare, but all I see is the pain she’s masking as anger. “I can’t go to the grocery store without seeing your face everywhere.” She stomps her foot like Poppy does when she’s angry, and if I weren’t so disconcerted, I’d smile.
When she doesn’t continue, I close the distance between us to stand at the bottom of her steps and fight the urge to scratch at the pain in my chest.
