Page 181 of The Fall

I can’t watch him pace a rut through his own head any longer.

I come over without thinking. My feet carry me to him before my brain catches up. I lean into his back, wrapping my arms around his stomach. He stiffens for a second, then melts into my touch. His scent fills my lungs—coconut shampoo, the clean sweat from practice, and that hint of ocean that seems to live in every corner of this house.

His knife stalls halfway through the tomato.

“Talk to me.”

“I’m thinking.”

“I figured. Tell me the scary part.” I slide my hands up his sides and rest them flat on his chest. His heart is hammering way too fast for slicing tomatoes. “What’s got you so stressed about a vacation?”

A slow inhale lifts his back against my chest. His hands cover mine. “It’s not the vacation.” His voice is low. He turns slowly within the circle of my arms, facing me. “It’s us.” His eyes flicker, tidal blue, full of risk, and tangled with fear. “I need to be honest with you.”

A thousand worst-case scenarios flash through my mind: he’s sick, he’s leaving the team, he’s breaking up with me before we’ve even really started. The kitchen hangs on his words.

He looks down at our joined hands for a long moment before he speaks. “If we do this,” he says softly, so unlike himself. “I’m going to fall in love with you, Torey. All the way in love.”

My heart stumbles, caught off guard, as if the ground beneath me has shifted.

“I’m already halfway there,” he continues. “But if we do this, that’s it for me. I’ll be hopelessly in love with you.”

His eyes search mine, as if confessing this is more terrifying than any fight or overtime loss. “If that’s not what you want, or if you don’t feel the same, I?—”

He falters, a fissure opening for me to see all the hurts he’s hiding inside himself. His voice runs out, hanging there. Finally, he says, “If that’s not what you want, then...”

Don’t break me, Torey.The unspoken plea vibrates between us.

Is he afraid I could possibly turn away from him? That I could ever tell him no, you’re not the pair to every part and piece of me, you’re not everything I’ve ever dreamed of?

I have loved him forever. I’ve loved him when he didn’t know me, when he barely tolerated me. I’ve loved him through every brutal drill and tentative smile and shoulder brush on cross-country flights. I’ve loved him with my sweat and my muscle tears, with the burn in my bones, with my sunrise skates and my midnight workouts. I’ve loved him for so long and so deeply, the embers of that love sparked and caught and remade my whole world.

I breathe him in, slide my hands up and cup his face. His heartbeat races to match mine. I count the twitches in his jaw, the quarter-inch flares of his nostrils. Was he born this intense or did he learn it?

He’s showing me all his cracks and fault lines, and he’s letting me slip through them and into him, into his heart and his fragile hopes.

He’s waiting for me to destroy him or save him.

I trace the curve of his cheekbone, memorizing the texture of his skin, the slight stubble beginning to roughen his jaw. How doI tell him that he’s been the center of my universe for longer than he knows? That every milestone has been measured against the light in his eyes when he looks at me?

“That,” I say, “isexactlywhat I want.” My thumb strokes over his jaw. “You’re not the only one falling in love.”

He cups the base of my skull and holds on, forehead resting against mine. “Don’t say it unless it’s real.”

“It’s real.”It’s you, Blair. Everything in me starts and ends with you.

All his edges soften. His arms wrap around my waist and he buries his face in my neck. Relief, pure relief, pours off him in waves, soaking into me. He holds me like he’ll never let go, like I’m the only solid ground in his world.

This isn’t a hallucination, or dream, or fantasy. This is real; this ishappening. This isnow,and this is us.

I say, softer than a secret, “Fall in love with me the way I’ve fallen in love with you.”

His breath catches, and his eyes close, and he leans into me like I’m holding him up. When his eyes open again, they’re clearer than I’ve ever seen them, his storms finally breaking into something bright and endless. He pulls back and searches me. I let him look; I let every soft and hungry part of me surface where he can read it in plain sight.

The sigh he releases could drain an ocean. “Okay. Let’s do it,” he breathes. “You want to plan it with me?” He pulls out his phone, crowding us together as he scrolls through pages of turquoise seas and sand so white it burns the screen. “I already started looking at places. I was hoping you’d say yes.”

As if there were any other answer I could have given him. “Show me everything.”

He flips through a half dozen websites. There are private islands with thatched villas, white sands, and neon shores. “I kept coming back to this one,” he says, tapping on an aerialshot of a white-sand crescent beach thickened with dense jungle along the interior. The seas around the postage-stamp island are every shade of turquoise.