Page 38 of Falling Into Forever
If I did this to her, I’d never forgive myself, but there’s something else she’s fighting, and I will figure it out.
“You okay over there?” I ask. She turns her head and finally focuses her attention on me.
“Oh.” She clenches her fist in front of her heart as she brings herself out of her made-up world and rejoins me here, in her home above the little bookstore she always wanted.
“Do you always lose yourself so completely in your work?” I sound tired, and I am. But it’s the kind of tired that comes from running away from problems instead of fixing them, and I’m not doing that anymore.
She glances at her keyboard, and I watch as she saves her work. It’s something she’s done repeatedly over the last few hours. She does it like she’s used to losing things. “Um.” Her focus shifts as she watches the rainbow-colored wheel spin. Once it’s saved, she turns her attention back to me. “I mean, don’t you?”
“I do, but I guess it seems different because I’m always in it with actors. The stuff I make up is entertainment, sure, but it doesn’t grab people and wrap them in a hug like your words do.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t play well with others.” She clasps her hands over her head and leans side to side, exposing a small sliver of skin at her waist. That tiny bit of her causes an ache deep in my core.
“Are you hungry?” I ask. I haven’t felt this unsure of myself since the day I walked into Tri-High. I hated that school. Well, until I met Saylor, anyway. She made everything more tolerable.
It was Sassy who helped me that day, but it was Saylor I fell in love with.
And now I’m met with a scowl.
“What?” I ask, shrugging my shoulders like an insecure teen. “You barely ate anything at dinner.”
“I can’t help it,” she snips, then takes a deep breath. “I wasn’t expecting to be sitting next to a jealous asshole who only sees what he wants to see when he wants to see it.” She says it calmly, but the words still cut.
I fight hard to relax my features as I study her. She has her guard up, surrounded by a ten-foot wall and a moat full of piranhas. But all I see are challenges to be won. “I apologized for that. I needed to know if we had an obstacle I wasn’t aware of.”
“No, Dante.” Her shoulders hang heavy, like she’s tired of holding herself together, and I would give anything to be the one to support her. When she lifts her head, all the emotions she’s trying to hold in check crash into me. “I’m not in any kind of relationship. Totally and completely alone, is that what you want to hear? Grady is the friend I found when I needed someone most.”
Her eyes glaze over, caught in a memory, maybe, but she blinks them clear, void of emotion. “We tried to hook up once. When we were both hurting so much, we just wanted to feel—something—anything but the nothingness we lived in. But we realized pretty quickly it was like kissing a sibling.” She wrinkles her nose, and it eases some of the uncertainty that had settled in my gut.
“Saylor.” I can barely hear my own words, but she does. She always did. Sometimes it felt like I didn’t even have to speak them. She had a way of understanding me that I’ve never experienced with anyone else.
“Please, Dante. Don’t. We’re six years too late.” She glances away, and her statement weighs down the silence because it is a lie, and we both know it. “My sister died. Her baby died. I nearly lost everything in that watery grave, then I lost myself, and when I came up for air, you were gone too.”
“But you told me…”
She shakes her head. “It’s fine, Dante. I can’t go back to that time in my life. Please, if you ever cared at all, let the past stay in the past. We’ll get through this mess, and then we’ll go through with our futures like we would have a month ago. On different paths. We don’t need to mix them up again.”
Her phone dings, and she lifts it to her face. It shows how deep her concentration runs, because she didn’t hear those notifications once while she was writing.
We need to talk, though. If the story she wrote is true… Fuck. If it’s true, I’ve been mourning a loss for years that never should have happened.
A light shade of pink creeps down her neck, making the buzzing in my chest more prominent. “Guess the kiss worked.”
She turns her phone to face me, and the image on her screen makes my heart fill with relief. It’s the only way to describe it. It causes a light inside me to flare brightly because you can’t fake a kiss like that.
“You did good, Sayl.” And I mean that in every way possible because that kiss still lingers on my lips, and it’s imprinted on my soul for eternity. It’s the kiss that told me we would be okay.
“Thanks. I think,” she grumbles. Then she stands from the table and slips on her shoes.
Nervous energy crackles in my gut as I watch her. “Where are you going?” It’s midnight, and she lives on a lake. She can’t seriously be considering leaving right now.
“For a walk.” She opens the door and jogs down the back stairs like we’re not in the middle of a conversation. I’m tripping over myself to slide my feet into flip-flops and follow her.
“By yourself?” I ask when I catch up to her. Saylor Greer is a one-woman show with no need for side characters, but I don’t want to be a side character. I want to be her hero. The one who earns her love. The one who holds her when she’s breaking. The one she doesn’t need but wants anyway.
Her slim shoulders lift, but she doesn’t look my way. “It’s what I do.”
“What? What is what you do?” Panic is rising in my body faster than a tidal wave.
