Page 45 of Falling Into Forever
“You ask, Saylor. You say you made a mistake.” He’s angry. I don’t blame him, but he doesn’t shout, even though the vein in his neck tells me it’s taking great effort not to lose his shit. “You should have told me,” he says more calmly. “You’re you. I would always have come back for you, sweetheart. How could you not know that? But I thought, I truly thought I would hurt you more by forcing you to see me.”
“Our lives didn’t connect anymore,” I say. It’s a wet, raspy whisper. Ainsley places her head on my shoulder, and I don’t shrug her off. Her tears soak my arm, and somehow it strengthens our connection, the one I thought I’d severed irreparably.
“I tried to get her to reach out,” she says. “But the more I pushed, the more she retreated. I was in med school, and even I couldn’t help. I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, so I stayed silent too.”
Dante sighs and smiles kindly at my sister—the only family I have left.
“Shannon was always our safe space, especially after Grumpy died,” Ainsley says quietly. “We were technically adults when the accident happened, but twenty-two-year-olds still need their security blankets. We still needed her so desperately, and we were drowning in our loss.”
I nod and choke out more explanations that mean nothing now. “We were so young and freefalling through emotions we had no idea how to handle. And then for her to die so suddenly and violently in that car was…none of us handled it well.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t do more to help you both through this,” Ainsley whispers.
This isn’t another burden for her to carry. She was grieving in her own way. Neither of us was there for each other like we should have been. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I tilt my cheek to press it against my sister’s head. She shudders beneath me and cries silently. She always has.
Time passes, but the three of us stay immobile and connected like a strange little triangle until Dante clears his throat.
“You—You’re still not doing well, are you?” There’s no accusation in his tone, only sadness and something too close to love for me to acknowledge.
I tilt one of my shoulders up in a shrug. I’ve only told my therapist everything, but maybe hearing how messed up I feel will show him why he can’t stay with me. “I have nightmares sometimes. My anxieties are more nuanced and fickler than most. My fears, irrational as they are, control my day-to-day life. My weirdness is more intense.”
“You’re not weird, Sassy.” Ainsley uses a tone I imagine her using with her stubborn patients. She stares at me for a long moment, scanning back and forth like she’s decoding a secret message, and for the first time since we lost Shannon, I hear her voice in my head.Take this chance and let him in. You are lovable and worthy of good things. Let him love you.
“Thank you for asking me to be here for this,” she says to Dante without releasing my gaze from hers. “Thank you for remembering how easily I feel her pain, but I’m going to head home and let you two take it from here.”
She stands, and I grasp for her hand. It surprises me as much as it does her. “Are you going to be okay?”
Ainsley doesn’t hide her emotions from me. Watery eyes sparkle through pain and happiness, reaching me like raindrops on a cloudless summer night, warming my chilled body.
Maybe, just maybe, I’m not as broken as I believed.
“I am now,” she says. With a nod to Dante, she scurries from the room, and moments later, I hear her close and lock the front door of my bookstore.
Dante stands and slides into her spot next to me. “Tell me.” It’s not a demand. It’s a plea to let him in, and I’m too tired to find any snark.
“I—I don’t handle being close to people very well. According to my therapist, knowing I could lose them hurts too much, so I keep everyone at arm’s length. Not everyone allows it, though.” Arching my right brow, I point out the nonexistent space between us, and he chuckles.
“I’m not moving unless you tell me you need physical space. Emotional space is no longer an option for us.”
My brain says,hell no. Step back. No touching.But my heart bleeds for him, and I’m too stubborn to tell him so. Instead, I shrug and let my body sag back into his. “My therapist said I’ve been trying to shut off my emoters.” I laugh, but nothing about this is funny. “I lock things away and keep them inside to shelter others from my pain—and so I can’t be hurt by theirs either. I haven’t had an attack like this in years because I work hard to exist in the emptiness. It’s easier to avoid emotions because they shred me to pieces when I let them in.”
“Saylor.” He drags out my name as if it pains him. “But you do. You feel things in the stories you create. If you didn’t, your readers wouldn’t connect to them like they do. You’re still experiencing the painful things, the happy things, the things that let you know you’re alive. But you’re living them through the safety of your mind.”
Silence fills the room, but my thoughts are playing over a loudspeaker in my head.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” My biggest fear is spoken in the darkening room, and there’s no taking it back, because the truth is, most days, I’m not sure myself.
“No, Sayls. I think you’re hurting. I think you’re unmoored and lost your last safe place to land—you lost me.”
Until tonight, he’s mostly followed my social cues and rarely pushed past the walls I wear like a last line of defense. Now, squished together into a double chair, he takes control. He wraps an arm around me and hauls me up while he leans back so my body is draped over his, my head on his chest, and that’s when the dam breaks.
His comfort doesn’t send me spiraling down. It lifts me gently into the emotions I’ve kept embargoed in my mind.
Years and years of unshed tears find their way into the button-down shirt of the one man I thought would never hold me again.
“Fall, baby. I’ve got you,” he says against the top of my head. And I do. I free fall into the pain I’ve spent a lifetime hiding from, secure in the knowledge that he’ll catch me when I’m done.
It is a trust fall, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to land.
