Can't Help Falling Read online

  “But we’re not a match. Not even for a date.”

  She opened her mouth to answer him but he cut her off.

  “What’s the issue here?” he asked. “I didn’t propose. I’m not a bad guy. It would be fun.”

  Of course he hadn’t proposed. That was the whole point. Not that she wanted him to propose. But the venomous disdain that dripped from his voice at the very idea of commitment...

  “I’m not looking for fun, Tyler—”

  “Well, what are you looking for, Fin? Because I can’t figure you out.”

  Temper crackled inside her like static electricity. She set down her food and turned to him, dusting salt off her hands.

  “First off, I was about to tell you what I’m looking for when you cut me off twice. And trust me, if you were any other man on the street, I would have already walked away from this conversation. So take it as a compliment that I’m even explaining this to you. Tyler, I barely date people at all. And I certainly don’t date men with your priorities. I’m not looking to eat fancy food at an overpriced restaurant and make small talk while I watch you attempt to figure out how best to get my clothes off. I only like seeing movies by myself, and I’m not interested in ice-skating or binge-drinking or whatever the hell else it is that people do on dates.” She sucked in a breath for more air, and watched as the color leached out of his face. “And, most important, you are never going to have kids ‘if you can help it.’” She threw two quotes around those words, letting him know that she’d definitely overheard his conversation with Matty just now. “And I am looking to start a family. ASAP.”

  “I didn’t—” he started, but she held up a hand to stop him.

  She’d lost her patience. Maybe if she hadn’t dealt with the man on the train that morning, or maybe if she didn’t feel the eyes of other men on her right that very second, taking her confrontation with Tyler as an opportunity to let their eyes linger on her breasts and ass and face, maybe if the world was a little more decent to women, she’d have let him say his piece. But here they were, on Planet Brooklyn, where her temper still hadn’t burned itself out.

  “You’re in your forties,” she continued, “which doesn’t bother me, but even at this stage of your life, you show no interest in anything beyond seeking your own comfort and having fun while you do it, which does bother me.”

  “Serafine,” he started again, looking like he thought there was still a chance for him to argue himself into a date.

  Nope. Sorry not sorry. She went in for the kill stroke, deciding to, mercifully, grant him a swift and final death.

  “You cling to Matty and Seb instead of living a life of your own. You’re charming, sure. Good looking in a Zack Morris sort of way. But from where I’m sitting, you’re also a childish, too-smooth commitmentphobe. Besides, if I wanted a fling with someone—which I don’t—I’d know better than to fling with my best friend’s boyfriend’s best friend. Is that a good enough answer for you, or shall I go on?”

  * * *

  TYLER HAD BEEN sucker-punched once, in the eighth grade, by a kid named Simon Sigrid. Out of nowhere, the kid had marched down the hall and socked Tyler in the face. They’d found out later that it had been on a dare from another kid and had nothing to do with Tyler in the least. It wasn’t the pain that had hurt Tyler the most, but the shock of it. The realization that one could just be carrying on in one’s life and then BAM, knuckle sloppy Joe right to the nose.

  That hadn’t been any more shocking than this had been. Tyler gaped at her for a moment before he realized that he wasn’t breathing. He felt like she’d just waxed all the hair off his body in one fell swoop. He felt completely naked, and every inch of his ego was smarting.

  “Damn,” he said. Because it was the only thing to say. He took a step back from her. And then another. And then turned and walked back to his seat, mechanically passing out the food and drinks. He stared down at his pretzel, which he’d forgotten to get mustard for, and just passed the whole thing over to Matty, who’d enjoy it no matter what.

  She was looking for more of a commitment than he could offer her. He’d always sort of known that. He didn’t begrudge her that. But to tear him to shreds over it? As if it was a mortal character flaw and not a choice he’d made a long time ago. Tyler would not be repeating his father’s mistakes. Even if it meant that Matty was as close to a kid as he’d ever get. He might not be able to commit to anyone, but he wasn’t abandoning them either.

  A few minutes later, he sensed the moment that Serafine came back and sat down behind him. This time, the hairs on the back of his neck didn’t stand up. There was no electricity or tripping heart. He felt entirely heavy, weighed down and slow, as if her words had been one lead blanket after another that she’d tossed on top of him.

  When Simon Sigrid had punched Tyler in the hallway of his school, knocking him to the ground, it had been Sebastian who’d pushed Simon away, who’d helped Tyler to his feet, led him to the nurse’s office while Tyler pinched his own nose against the blood running down his face. It had been Sebastian who’d sat there for hours with Tyler while they waited for Tyler’s parents, who hadn’t come.

  And it had been Sebastian who’d ridden the subway home to Tyler’s empty house so he wouldn’t be alone after school.

  But right now, at that moment, Sebastian was snuggled up with the woman he loved, his first priority no longer Tyler. Tyler was a distant third after Matty and Via. And that was the way it should be, he reminded himself. Yet he couldn’t help but acknowledge that that hurt almost as much as Serafine’s words had.

  That once again, Tyler was the one who nobody wanted. The one who waited in the office with a bloody nose, knowing that no one was coming to get him. If he wanted to get home, he was going to have to do it himself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Three months later

  “SO, UH, WHERE’S the crystal ball then, huh?”

  Fin restrained her eye roll and merely gave the man a polite smile. These were the sorts of questions that all nervous, quasi-skeptical first-time clients asked her. It was people’s natural reaction to try to figure out exactly how real her abilities really were. Fin had found it was best to just let people tire out their nervous energy and take the opportunity to observe them.

  The man in front of her, Enzo, was an odd duck. Handsome in a rough way, a bit of a beer gut, a tough-guy swagger but nervous as a cat. She knew, at a glance, that he was the kind of person who made fun of other people’s superstitions but had spent more than a night or two listening for ghosts in his own house.

  “And I thought there’d be more tarot cards and stuff. Or, like, black candles. Skulls. Velvet tablecloths.”

  They were in a small office that Fin rented for first-time clients, until she got to know them well enough to decide whether or not she was willing to do house calls for them. The office was unadorned; nothing about the decor suggesting anything out of the ordinary.

  She cleared her throat and Enzo stopped pacing and turned to give her a glancing perusal, as if looking directly at her could be dangerous.

  “I’m wearing velvet pants,” Fin said in her Louisiana accent, intentionally making her voice drawlier and deeper and calmer than normal. “If that helps ease your mind at all.”

  Enzo’s eyes dropped to her legs, and Fin detected a flash of suspicion that gave way to humor. His first reaction to her upon entry to the office had been intense attraction. But it had faded almost as quickly as it had bloomed. He was more nervous than he was turned on, completely unsure what to make of this supposed psychic.

  “Wanna talk about why you’re here?” she prompted.

  “You can’t guess? Thought you were a psychic.”

  It infinitely irritated her when skeptics tested her as if they and they alone were the end-all judgment of what she was or wasn’t capable of. Especially when those skeptics, like the man in front of her, weren�
�t actually skeptical at all. But rather they were scared about what they might actually end up believing.

  “Enzo, you’re not paying me so that I can convince you I am what I say I am. I’m here to help you. If you don’t want help, this is a waste of your money and my time.”

  Enzo stood stiffly for another few seconds before he sagged backward against the wall. He let out a deep breath, and Fin saw that his beer gut was actually a bit bigger than she’d originally assessed. Apparently he’d been sucking in.

  “I’m here ’cuz of Rachel. She thought it would be a good idea.”

  Rachel Giulietta was one of her best and favorite clients. Fin, who rarely, if ever, took on male clients, was seeing Enzo as a personal favor to Rachel.

  “She, uh, thought it would be a good idea if I talked to you.”

  Enzo shrugged and started pacing again, but it wasn’t the agitated pacing of before. Fin recognized it as a thoughtful pacing, still a bit nervous, but also the tick of a man searching for the right way to explain something.

  For the first time since he’d walked in the door, Fin relaxed a bit.

  An hour later, Enzo left the office, and Fin stared thoughtfully at nothing. They hadn’t made much progress, except for the fact that Enzo had ceased his skeptical posturing. She’d only promised Rachel that she’d see Enzo the once. It was up to her to decide if it would be worth anyone’s time or money for her to see him again.

  Already leaning toward a no, Fin paused. She had few male clients. Generally, it was her inclination to boot them out the door. As fast and as far as her boots could boot.

  For just a second, Tyler’s face flashed across her mind’s eye. His flayed expression at the ball game. It bothered her that it was still sticking.

  “Damn” was all Tyler had said as he’d stepped back from her. Emotionally, she’d stripped him down like corn off a cob and his navy blue eyes had asked her why even as he’d taken two more steps away, disappearing into the crowd. Damn was the last word he’d spoken to her, and she’d had to convince herself that it didn’t sit heavy on her shoulders like a curse.

  Sure, he’d been pushy. Unappealing in his quest to get what he wanted. But she’d been cruel. It bothered her.

  She heard a conversation start up on the other side of the wall and it jolted her out of her reverie. She packed up her things and decided to walk home, the air finally crisply chilly in a very satisfying early-autumn sort of way.

  As she turned the corner onto Ocean Avenue a man called out to her from the corner, jogging to catch up.

  “Where you headed, beautiful?” he asked, as if it were any of his business.

  Mars. A funeral home. To my freaking living room where I can get some peace.

  Fin wondered, for the countless time, if her answer, were she to give him one, would even matter. All he wanted was a way to ask if he could come with her. Didn’t strange men on the street have anything more pressing to tend to than chasing pretty women down the block? Who had the time for that?

  She knew better than to indulge him with a reply and instead shook her head at him, frowning. She picked up the pace, left him in her dust, and was practically panting with exertion by the time she made it to up to her apartment ten blocks later.

  Fin didn’t even have to step inside to feel the vibes peacefully spiraling out toward her. Her foster sister had an extremely recognizable energy. Calm, a little worried, openhearted, homebody energy. There wasn’t a more comforting flavor that Fin had ever encountered. Via often used her key to drop in on Fin.

  Fin pushed through her front door and into the welcome embrace of her private space. She closed New York out and flipped the lock.

  “I love you, Fin,” Via said, not even bothering with a hello as she came to stand in the doorway between Fin’s kitchen and living room. “But your kitchen makes me cringe.”

  Fin laughed, hung up her coat and came to stand shoulder to shoulder with Via, surveying the mess.

  Even she could admit that things were a little more tornadoish than usual today. Herb trimmings were on the floor beneath where Fin had hung them up to dry the night before. A rather pungent new poultice recipe was simmering in her slow cooker, the steam from the pot humidifying the air and making her eyes sting. On the far countertop sat the remnants of yesterday’s geode excavation. A gorgeous amethyst geode sat broken into three pieces, its craggy, dinosaur-like exterior belying the sparkling purple crystal on the inside. The hammer that Serafine had used to crack it open still laid haphazardly on the counter and a fine coating of rock dust stubbornly covered everything within a two-foot radius.

  Two years ago, the two women had shared this kitchen and this apartment. Two years ago, this kitchen would have been startlingly spick-and-span and there would have been chili percolating in the slow cooker, not a fresh batch of burn poultice. When Via had lived here, she’d firmly limited the amount of non-food-related interests Fin was allowed to pursue in the kitchen.

  But now, Fin lived alone and she was living her life in pursuit of mindfulness and magic.

  “If it makes you feel better, sister, don’t think of this as my kitchen. Think of it as my laboratory.”

  “There’s a fridge,” Via pointed out stubbornly. “Ergo, a kitchen.” Via picked her way around the fallen herbs and poked her head into said fridge. “Have you used this kitchen to, I don’t know, prepare any food today?”

  Fin restrained a smile. If Fin spoke the language of magic, then Violetta DeRosa spoke the language of food. Food was the way in which Via measured her days, her weeks. Food was her way of telling someone she loved them. The woman was a true artist when it came to the kitchen. Nothing extremely fancy or gourmet, but everything was fresh and made with love and care. There was simply no other magic like a Via meal.

  “I had lunch at that very kitchen table not three hours ago, I’ll have you know.”

  Via closed the fridge and raised an eyebrow. It was like staring down a cross little cat. “Microwave popcorn and turkey roll-ups does not a lunch make.” She raised a stern finger. “Even if you took a multivitamin with it.”

  Serafine laughed and marveled how it could feel equally gratifying and annoying to be so well-known by another.

  “You’re gonna need to take some serious cooking classes before you become a foster parent,” Via said, settling herself at the kitchen table.

  Fin felt her smile freeze in place. How to tell Via that her unflagging optimism sometimes hurt more than negativity might have?

  “I’ve...decided to take a break from that. For now.”

  It was a miracle Via didn’t strain an eyelid with how round her deep brown eyes became all at once. “What? You’re—Wow. What do you mean ‘a break’?”

  She understood why this news was hard for Via to reconcile. It was no secret between them that practically since the day she was born, Fin had longed to belong to a unit. She had Via, of course. The two women had known and loved one another since they were preteens. Via had been shuffled into Fin’s aunt’s house as a foster kid. Fin had been shuffled into her aunt’s house as a lost kid whose mother no longer was able to take care of her.

  They’d become sisters before they’d become friends. Even as they aged and changed, they seemed to do so as halves of one organism, developing and altering in relation to one another.

  And now Seb and Matty were becoming part of that relationship little by little. But Fin wanted a unit in her daily life.

  The thing you want the most in the world...

  Fin sighed. She felt prickly and vulnerable and sad but there was no way she would have folded herself into a kitchen chair and plopped her chin on one hand if it were any other person on the entire earth. But this was Via. So, she did just that.

  “I’ve been trying and trying for a few years now, and always the answer from the state is the same. I’ve changed my house to suit them, revamped my busi
ness, prepped for weeks for the interviews, had countless people look over my applications and still, it’s nothing but no, no, no.” Fin dropped her eyes and fiddled with her rings for a moment. “I don’t understand why there’s this wall up between me and the foster system. But maybe it’s time that I listened.”

  For better or worse, the universe had bricked off access to the foster system for Fin. She figured it might be time for her to stop beating her head against the bricks, trying to get to the other side. Brute force had never been her style, and she worried that the rejection and disappointment was warping her.

  For the second time that day, she got a flash of Tyler’s face from the baseball game.

  “A break means that you’ll try again, though, right?” Via asked, her eyes still round. “You’re not giving up?”

  Fin sighed. “No. I just need...to try something else. Whatever energy I’ve been bringing hasn’t been working. I can’t walk the same road a hundred times and expect it to bring me someplace new, you know?”

  “That makes sense,” Via agreed slowly.

  Via was going to continue, Fin could tell. Optimistic, unbridled love and support were about to spew all over the conversation. Fin didn’t think her heart could take it right now. She straightened up in her chair and interrupted.

  “You wanna tell me why you’re here?”

  Via’s lips quirked. “You mean to tell me that you don’t already know?”

  “You’re here to drag me over for dinner, of course.”

  “Glad to see you’re not slipping in your clairvoyance.”

  Is Tyler going to be there? Fin didn’t ask it aloud.

  In the past, it had been a fifty-fifty chance as to whether he’d be there or not. But this would make it five Fridays in a row that Serafine had attended dinner at Seb and Via’s and five Fridays in a row that Tyler wasn’t there. “Sounds like a smash.”

  Tyler had been MIA recently. Fin could feel Via’s worry over him. It had Fin leaning forward, searching for a trace of him in Via’s energy.