Falling into Forever (Falling into You) - By Lauren Abrams Page 0,22

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 before 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.

Chapter 7

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 in 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 that 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 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,