Falling into Forever (Falling into You) (8 page)

I had forgotten what it meant to be with so
meone, body and soul and spirit. Lust is different from love. However I managed to convince myself that they were one and the same, I’ll never know. I won’t make that mistake again. Not after this.

Her
skin turns fiery under my mouth, and unable to wait any longer, I grab her and push her beneath me. I can’t give myself time to decide that this is an extremely bad idea.

Her mouth is working overtime, devouring my skin with kisses, but she’s not looking
at me. I need to see her face. I need to feel her eyes looking into mine. I drag my mouth to hers again and brush against her soft lips, gripping her shoulders.

“Look at me, Hallie.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

With that, I slide into her. As I do, I take her chin in my hand and force her to see me staring down at her. Her eyes are endless, down and down and down. There’s shock there and thick desire, and a wisdom that belies her childlike wonder and tousled hair. I haven’t seen her, not like this, in six years. She’s a thousand times more beautiful than she was at eighteen. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I
’m shaking and I try to cover that small display of weakness, but she sees it anyway. She’s always seen everything.

I’m trying to keep my
self from making any sound, but it’s impossible, because I had forgotten what it was like between us. I don’t even know if it was ever like this. The years have made me hungry for her in a way that I never knew existed. I’m desperately trying to keep myself in check, but she’s moving her hips against mine in a pulsing rhythm, begging me to move faster.

Her hair, still tied neatly in a knot on the back of her head, taunts me.
I run my fingers through the masses of brown and red and gold waves, and it tumbles down around her face, making smooth waves onto the pillow beneath her. She reaches her hand up to brush it away, but I clasp it and hold it down.

“It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

She tosses her head and smiles, once, a real, genuine smile that holds a hidden sea of emotion.

I love her. I will always love her. The knowledge of it, and her warm body in my arms, makes me feel alive and heartbreakingly human.

I move again, within in, and s
he lets out a little moan, and I can feel her body tensing beneath mine as the first waves of the orgasm begin to hit her. My body is on fire, and I can’t resist it for much longer. When her fingers dance across my face as she begins to contort herself, I feel myself slipping under, losing myself to this particular kind of madness. I’m so far gone and outside of myself that I barely realize it when we burst into flames.

* * *

Long minutes later, I’m still drifting in and out of consciousness. I’ve been trying to keep myself from leaving the glow of our love-making, to keep the feel of her in my arms so that it remains tangible, unlike the half-remembered dreams I usually wake up from. I reach for her to reassure myself that she’s not merely an apparition, but I find nothing but a warm spot on top of the bed.

For a momen
t, I think she’s already gone, but when I glance up, I find her huddled over the table, scribbling away furiously.

“Hallie.”

She looks back at me, but she doesn’t quite meet my eyes. Bad sign. Fuck. I want to cross the room and pull her into me, but her arms are crossed firmly against her chest and her eyes are solid steel. It’s clear that she’s built a protective barrier around herself, one that I can’t penetrate.

I attempt to
wipe my face of any trace of emotion, but apparently, I’ve been making my living in the wrong business, because it’s not working.

“Chris.”

“I…”

“Please don’t say anything.”

Unfortunately, I’ve seen that particular brand of tension in her body and that exact look on her face before. I know what they mean.
And I know that there’s nothing I can say that will make her stay.

She lets the paper
drop to the table in a flutter and gives me a sad smile.

“Thanks for not rejecting my advances, Chris. I appreciate it.”

She might as well be talking about the book deal.

“Anytime.” It’s barely audible.

Her eyes soften slightly, and her hand flutters upward as if she’s going to reach out and touch me. At the last second, she recoils and pushes her hand away, like it moved on its own. “Chris, I…”

“I know, Hals.”

I silence the voice in my head that’s telling me to drag her back into bed.

I thought I would be able to give her this thing, this moment of being able to forget about everything else. I thought I would be able to leave this room with some kind of closure, knowing that I couldn’t bring myself to harm her again.

But I want more than that. I want her. I want to make her feel whole again, because it’s obvious that even though she’s badly broken, she’s not beyond repair. And, because we’re all selfish creatures, to one degree or another, I need her to make me feel whole again, too.

“You do
n’t have to leave, Hals.” I keep saying her name, as if to prove to myself that she is actually still here. I know she’ll refuse, but I still need to say it.

“I was leaving anyway. I need to go, or otherwise, Sam will
wonder if I decided to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or something. I mean, I know we’re not in Brooklyn, but Sam always manages to come up with some crazy story. You know how he worries…”

She stops abruptly and takes another step backwards.
She certainly didn’t mean to let that piece of information slip out. I tuck Sam’s name away in the back of my head. I can’t stop her from leaving, and I won’t. I need to tread carefully, to figure out how and why and if it’s even possible to make her fall in love with me again.

“
Chris, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share the fact that we knew each other, way back when. The press hasn’t managed to make the connection between you and me, even though there are some pictures of us still out there, and I’d really like to keep it that way, especially with the movie coming out and the fact that I have to do all of the interviews, and it would probably be better for me if no one ever found out that I was linked to you. I mean, not that we were ever really linked together, since Marcus insisted that we shouldn’t be or anything, but now it would just be such a disaster…”

She moves to cover her mouth with her hand, and the gesture is accompanied by a frustrated shake of her head
.

At the tumble of words,
at the tiny echo of the old Hallie, I grin.

I can’t tell if she’s going to throw something at me or break down
into tears. To my surprise, she smiles.

“Verbal diarrhea. You can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the girl.
We all talk too much. New Yorkers have nothing on us.” She even tries a little Brooklyn accent, and I almost laugh before I realize where we are. What we did. What we are, or aren’t.

“
That’s a lame joke, Hals.”

“Yeah, it is.” She shrugs her shoulders and throws on a jacket and
a scarf.

She takes one last look at me befo
re she opens the door to leave.

“Stay as long as you want,” she adds, brushing her hand across the
air in the room. “I have the room through tomorrow. If we happen to run into each other at any of the preproduction meetings or on set, I promise, I’ll try to keep my hands to myself.”

If
we run into each other? Nice try, Hals. Make that when.

“I make no promises
about such things.”

I try to pass it off as a joke
, a visible display of my carefully cultivated public persona, but I’m deadly serious and we both know it. She doesn’t even address my words when she speaks again.

“Thank you, Chris.”

It’s more of a goodbye than a thank you, but it’s accompanied with a soft, genuine smile.

“You’re
welcome.”

And with that, she’s out the door and out of my life.

I give myself five minutes of breathing in and out and remembering the feel of her on me. I languish in the memory, letting it roll over me. It’s an old trick I learned from Hallie. She used to call them photographic moments. We had a lot of them, once.

If I have anything to say about it, we’ll have a lot of them again.

HALLIE

I should want to bury my face so deeply in the sand that I’ll never have to bring it out again. I just begged Chris Jensen to have pity sex with me, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, I am definitely going to have to look into his face again, because I just signed a bajillion dollar contract that guarantees me a specific amount of face time with the producer and star of the movie that my dead husband wrote. It’s the worst Shakespearean tragedy/screwball comedy mash-up I’ve ever heard of.

It’s my life.

For some reason, the Bon Jovi song playing a loop in my head makes me smile. “And it’s now or never.” If I wasn’t standing in a cab line, I would be singing at the top of my lungs and whipping my hair back and forth. A quick glance at the man standing in front of me, dressed in an Armani suit, assures me that it wouldn’t be a good idea.

I do a little head-banging anyway.

I don’t feel ashamed, although I’m sure that that particular emotional response is waiting somewhere around the next corner. It doesn’t matter. Right now, I feel strong, myself, in control, alive. I’m more than the shadow of a person I was this morning.

There will be consequences, because there
are always consequences. Every action causes an equal reaction. But for now, I feel relieved.

That would be i
n more ways than one. I had forgotten that mind-blowing sex has curative powers. More specifically, I had forgotten that Chris Jensen and I had been born to make love to each other. My knees are still shaking.

My foot taps out a
quick rhythm as the person behind me taps my shoulder.

“Ma’am? There’s a cab waiting for you.” The man’s voice in tinged with annoyance, which probably means th
at I’ve been allowing myself to relive that love scene for just a few moments too long.

Also,
when did I become a ma’am?

“Thanks.”

The man gives me a slightly bemused grin and I wave at him as I hop into the back of the cab.

“88
th
and Columbus,” I tell the cab driver. He gives me a curious look in the mirror before turning his head to stare.

“Hey
lady, do I know you from somewhere?”

He probably does. He’s probably seen the pictures of my ravaged face, like everyone else in the country. Thanks, 24 hour news cycle. I merely shake my head in response and
manage to give him a toothy grin, hoping that if he has recognized me, the stark difference in facial expressions between the person in the pictures and me right now might throw him off.

My phone
buzzes as we start to pull away from the hotel. I see Eva’s name, groan, and pick it up.

If there’s a dotted line somewhere that I forgot to sign, I’m just going to
tell her to screw it all. I’m planning to keep this little happy buzz, no matter how short its lifespan.

“
Hallie, is there anything you happened to conveniently forget to tell me about why you didn’t want to do this deal with FFG studios? Any little piece of
incredibly important information
that seems like maybe it slipped your mind?”

Damn it.

“Um…”

“I was curious as to why one of my most beloved friends, not to mention my favorite client, was eye-fucking the soon-to-be star and producer of
Rage
, the little multi-million dollar movie franchise that you and Ben and I have agonized over for the last four years. It was especially disconcerting given the fact that I’ve barely seen you look at anyone, let alone a man, in over a year.”

She’s g
aining momentum with every word and there’s no stopping her. She and my mother share that particular trait.

“
You know, at first, I thought maybe he was your adolescent crush. Everybody has one. I thought, maybe you were the president of a fan club. Maybe that was your deepest, darkest, little dirty secret. Maybe you made some YouTube videos professing your love for him. Maybe that’s why you were looking at him with starstruck eyes when you’re the last person in the universe with a tendency to be starstruck. So, you know what I did?”

I really do not want to know what she did.

“I dug through the dregs of tabloid archives, thinking maybe I would find a blog post or two from a young and idealistic Hallie Caldwell. ‘Oh, Chris Jensen, he’s so sexy. I want to have ten thousand of his babies.’ Did I find that?”