Falling into Forever (Falling into You) - By Lauren Abrams Page 0,13
regret in his eyes. Not pity. Just regret.
He knows, then. At least there’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.
He 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.
In 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