Falling into Forever (Falling into You) (5 page)

I pass over t
hose last ones quickly.

The last image I
see, on the twentieth page of results, seems vaguely familiar, and when I click on it, I realize it’s a video clip.

I know
instantly that I absolutely do not want to see this, and that it holds its own kind of pain. My finger hovers over the little red x, but every impulse towards self-destruction takes over instead.

Free from the constraints of time, a much-younger Hallie moves towards the camera, shaking her fist and grinning.

“Tell me, oh mysterious lady, what are your plans, now that you’ve captured the hearts of millions of lovers of art who’ve looked upon your beautiful face?”

She pulls her
little black mask onto her forehead, revealing wide blue eyes under exaggerated black eyebrows. Of course. It was Sam’s annual masquerade, the summer after Hallie and I had met. She had insisted on da Vinci and Mona Lisa.

She gestures wildly at Sam, and he lets out a low chuckle.

“Tell me, Sam. What are your plans, other than becoming a New York bum who occasionally goes to clubs to show off your dancing talents? Cheater. You didn’t even wear a costume to your own party.”

“
Baby, who needs a costume when you’ve got a face like this?”

Hallie leans back her head and releases long peals of laughter. The camera shakes a
s Sam takes another step towards her. Her eyes are full of mischief as she opens her mouth, but Sam shushes her.

“Mona Lisa, r
ight now, my plan is to take our little show on the road. You know, we’ll find some sort of dance contest in each city and we’ll just make our way from coast to coast. No responsibilities, no obligations. Whenever you realize that Jensen is a total clown, I’ll be here.”

B
efore she can offer a quick retort, another voice cuts in. It’s a younger, happier version of my own.

“In your dreams, asshat.”

I breathe a sigh of relief when I see myself step into the frame. At least I’m wearing a black mask that obscures my face. Thank god for small mercies. Otherwise, the press would have found this one a long time ago. But even though my face isn’t visible, there’s no disguising the fact that we belong to each other.

I watch as
the other version of myself moves quickly to her side and lifts her off her feet after casually throwing a middle finger in Sam’s direction. Despite the bulk of our costumes, Hallie and I are entwined together, dancing and staring into each other’s eyes. Sam mutters something about the shot being ruined by my presence, but he keeps the camera zoomed in on us anyways as we begin to spin amongst the sea of elaborate costumes.

We are dazzlingly happy.

Correction. We were dazzlingly happy.

HALLIE

After Chris left my hotel room, I was immobilized for long minutes that stretched into hours and maybe days. Time has seemingly lost all meaning for me. I check the clock and realize that an hour has passed, but the air is still filled with his presence, his scent, the faint whisk of something woodsy and masculine.

“One breath at a time.
Find your strength.”
Thanks, Dr. Feelgood. That little mantra might have been fine a month ago, but it sure isn’t working very well at this exact minute.

Finally, I manage to perch myself on the edge of the bed.
As the annoyingly flowery comforter moves slightly with each breath I take in and out, inspiration strikes. I grab my phone from my bag and murmur a silent prayer that he’ll pick up immediately.

“
Hey, Hals. Just thinking about you, actually…”

I cut him off.
“Sam, I need a place to stay. Now. Tonight.”

I start
shoving my stuff into the bag like a madwoman.

“
You need a place to stay? Do you mean a place to stay in New York? Are you in New York? What’s wrong?”

He’s going to be angry, but it can’t be avoided.

“Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this, but I’m in the city. I really needed to get in and out as fast as possible, and I just couldn’t face the thought of spending more than 48 hours here. You and Marie would have insisted…”

“The fuck? You’re
actually in New York? I thought you were joking.”

Yep. He’s t
otally pissed. Of course. Great. Just what I need right now. I reach for my hairbrush and shove it into the front pocket of the black leather bag.

“
Yes, Samuel. I am in New York. And I need a place to stay for the night.”

“Oh,
so you didn’t see the need to tell one of your oldest and dearest friends, who adores you, that you were making your first trip to his hometown in more than five years. Now, you need a place to stay? No, no, no. Where’s the quid pro quo? Do you know how many times I’ve dragged myself out into the wilderness to see you? Into a variety of states which all look and smell the same, like pine trees and small-town lives….”

I manage to swallow the urge to berate him
for the condescending comment.

“Sam,
I saw Chris.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other line. “What? When? Where?”

“The movie deal.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

He hisses in frustration. “You really should have told me.”

“I know, I really
should have, and I’m sorry about it.”

“Do you want me to send a car for you? Where are you?”

“The Marriott in Times Square.”

“They put you up in a dump like that?”

“The quality of the hotel is absolutely not important right now. I need to get out of here before he comes back.”

“What do you mean,
when he comes back? When was he in your hotel room? Why you would agree to see him if…”

“Sam, I promise that I will explain everything to you as soon as I get out of here, but time really is of the essence. I’m just going to take a cab, okay? Give me thirty minutes.”

“You do know that Marie is going to kill you for not telling her that you were in town? She’s in Africa right now, so you’ll miss her. If you think I’m keeping something like this from her, you are absolutely, totally crazy.”

“
I’ll just have to deal with the consequences.”

Sam mutters
something about sending a car, but I manage to brush him off before I hang up. After blindly throwing everything else I brought into my bag, I rush out into the hall. I don’t even check under the bed and in the closet and behind the shower curtain, like I always do.

I’m looking back at the door to make sure it closed
behind me when I feel a bit of solid flesh collide into my own.

Before I can look up, t
he pulse of his invisible force field envelopes me; there’s always been and there always will be something in the air around Chris that announces his presence. It’s unmistakable, even in my current state of disarray.

I grit my teeth and
force myself to look into his face for the third time today. It’s a miracle that I’ve found the strength to do it twice. This time almost breaks me entirely.

There’s
an ocean of regret in his eyes. Not pity. Just regret.

He knows, then. At least t
here’s some relief in that. I’ve never had much affection for secrets.

He takes a step towards me
, still not breaking eye contact. For a second, I’m afraid he’s going to try to wrap me in a hug, or even worse, that he plans to offer some words of comfort. I must be made of clay, because I don’t even attempt to move.

H
e neither lifts his arms nor opens his mouth to speak. Instead, his eyes still intently focused on mine, he reaches up to brush away the loose strands of my hair. It’s an intimate gesture. What’s worse, it’s one that carries a thousand memories with it, most of them perfect and loving and wonderful and warm.

“
You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

I wish I could say that I hadn’t thought about
our first day together a million times, replaying it over and over and over again until memory began to play tricks on me and I couldn’t figure out what was real and what was a shadow of the truth. But I had thought about it, memorialized it. The look on his face tells me that he remembers it too.

He
removes his hand from my skin, but his palm is still raised, hovering around my face. His eyes are wide and questioning, and he looks like the old Chris, the one who taught me how to ice-skate and wasn’t sure if he even wanted to be James Ross and made up funny stories about art and laughed at all of my bad jokes.

I turn my eyes down to the ground and
move away, backing up against the wall. Physically, I’m as far away from him as I can get. He takes one hesitant step towards me and then another, and then he’s so close that I can feel the warmth of his breath on my face.

Out of habit, of madness, or the need to shatter even the last piece of myself, I
raise my arms slightly. I need…I need so much to touch him, to feel his arms around me, to throw myself headfirst into what I had always told myself I would never do again. I need the weight of his skin on my own. I need to forget. I need to remember.

I need Chris Jensen.
To hell with it. With all of it.

As I hurl myself into his arms,
I feel him shake slightly under the force of my embrace, but his skin closes around mine and I lose myself in the minefield of memory.

I
n that moment, we’re no longer grown-up Chris and Hallie. We’re eighteen and madly in love and lust and everywhere in between.

* * *

7
Years Earlier

Los Angeles

“Good morning, beautiful.”

He hands me a cup of coffee as I glance down at the tangle of sheets around my feet. I stretch myself like a contented cat and grin at him.

“What are we doing today? Steak dinner? Sightseeing? Disneyland?”

He snorts. “Hallie, you really don’t want to go to Disneyland, do you?”

I turn my face to his hopefully
. I do, actually, kind of, sort of, want to go to Disneyland, but his incredulous face stops me from saying it aloud.

“No?”

“If you really want to go to Disneyland, we can go to Disneyland. Since today is our last day here and all.”

“It’s silly. Never mind. That’s for kids.”

He laughs. “Nope. That’s it. To Disneyland we go. I won’t hear any more arguments about it. You want to go, so we shall go.”

“My hero!”
I place my hands firmly on his face and give him a long kiss.

“One promise—we have to get the mouse ears with our names on them.”

“That’s a deal.”

I laugh, and as he touches my cheek gently, I realize that he looks exhausted. I can’t blame him, because the
last two weeks had been a blur of costume fittings and read-throughs and meetings with Marcus and Alan. For me, the last two weeks had been a blur of long days hanging around the pool and working on my tan while reading romance novels and pointedly ignoring the pile of books I had ordered for my classes in Prague, which were still sitting neatly in their plastic wrap.

Despite the long days,
there had been time for us too, to find the small things, the little quirks and the upward flights of eyebrows and little noises that made up the big things. I’ve tried to memorize every single one—the looseness in his body as he drifts off to sleep, his complete inability to remember that bottles of toothpaste have caps, the way he taps his spoon against a bowl of cereal.

People say that love is hard, a
nd I guess that’s true. The Sophia disaster had been hard. Delving into the wreck of long-forgotten memories of a fourteen-year-old girl who was changed, perceptibly and imperceptibly, had been hard.

Honestly, though, this felt easy. And more importantly, it felt right. Like I had found my perfect place in the world.

“Mama…ooooo ooooo.”

Queen’s
“Bohemian Rhapsody” blares from my phone. Chris bursts into laugher as I cover my face in abject horror.

So
, everything had been easy, except for one little thing—convincing my mother of the fact that I had found my perfect place in the world.

When I had called her from the Atlanta airport
on the way to LA, she had screamed and cajoled and begged and pleaded for me to stay at Greenview. While I hadn’t expected any less, her words still stung.
“Throw your life away, Hallie, throw away everyone who cares about you and loves you and only wants the best for you, and you’ll regret it. This won’t end well.”

Three weeks ago, I
might have agreed with her. Now, I was all about the happy ending and totally converted into a true believer.

Chris
grabs the phone and taunts me, holding it just out of my reach. “You’re going to have to talk to her again sometime, you know.”