Falling into Forever (Falling into You) (19 page)

“Get out.”

“
Oh, I don’t think so. You don’t own the elevators, you know.”

As
the doors close and the lobby disappears, I take a look at him. He’s sticking his tongue out at me and has an absolutely ridiculous expression on my face. I want to be mad, to maintain some semblance of my ice-cold façade, but I can’t help it. I lose it, and before I even know what I’m doing, I’m laughing so hard that I have to lean against the back of the elevator for support.

He lets his eyes wander the full length of my body, and a small, hunger-filled gasp escapes his lips.

“You drive me crazy, do you know that? Especially when you talk about…things.”

Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it, Jensen.

“Hallie.”

It’s one long moan.

Shoot. I’m a goner.

It’s all instinct, the
reaching of my hands up to encircle his neck and my unconstrained movement into the crook of his arm. My mouth finds his immediately and I stroke his hair, pulling it under my fingers and letting my whole body turn into jelly under his grasp. He lifts me and pushes me against the elevator wall, his hands grabbing at my waist with greedy fingers. I gasp as he sucks my bottom lip into his mouth, releasing it only after I feel like I’m going to drown from the lack of air.

I don’t even notice when the elev
ator doors open to the top floor, but he manages to brace them with his foot just as they start to close on us.

We tumble out.

“Something about this feels extremely familiar,” he whispers, the laughter rumbling in his chest. He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out his room key. “We’re moving on up, though. The presidential suite.”

He’s trying to hide it, but there’s a prideful undertone there.

“So, that’s all you got? The presidential suite?”

His face falls slightly, and I want to tease him more, but the sight of his disheveled hair and
slightly annoyed expression are too much. He’s the one who looks like a pouty four-year-old now. I kiss his cheek and run a lone finger down his neck, which causes him to wrap his arms around my back as we make our way down the hallway, knocking into walls and falling into each other.

We’re in serious jeopardy of not making it to the room, but he manages to slide the key into the little slot in the lock
just as I’m about to make the security guy’s day by ripping my shirt off.

As we stand,
joined together, in the center of the enormous suite, he pulls back to look at me before crushing his body into mine.

“Don’t run, Hals. Please.”

I should say something in response. I should say that I need to run. I should just run. But the naked vulnerability of his plea breaks down even my last defenses. I need to be with him, not as someone who’s trying to escape from life, but as someone who wants to throw herself headfirst into it.

He’s tracing my collarbone with his fingers and pl
anting slow kisses down my neck and without warning, he spins me so that I can’t see his face. I’m twisting in his arms, and as he wraps his arms around my back and runs his hands over my chest and waist and jeans, I make a whole series of undignified noises that I forgot could even come out of my mouth. He needs an answer.

“I’ll try not to
run. I can’t promise, but I can promise to try.”

“
Good enough. For now.”

He
twirls me around to face him and his eyes widen as I lift my sweater slowly over my head before unhooking my bra and letting it fall from by body. He stares for a long time, his lips pressed into a tiny line. Afraid I’ve made a monumental mistake, I reach for the sweater. He pushes my hands away roughly.

“
Hals, you are so beautiful.”

He says it in
one long breath, in the way that tells me that there’s no argument to be made. I don’t want to. I want to feel beautiful. I want to know that I am beautiful. I smile gently at him and place my hands under his shirt and run them up and down, in the way that I know drives him craziest.

“
Thank you for saying that.”

“
There’s no need to thank me.” He grabs a piece of my hair and grins at me. “At least, there’s no need to thank me with words.”

His hands cover the small of my back
, kneading insistently, grabbing at skin. I tremble slightly and kiss him again, needing the warmth of his mouth on mine. I slide myself into the bend of his arm and let him kiss my neck, slow, slow kisses that grow more urgent as I touch more and more of him.

I reach to lift
his shirt over his head and as I do, he cups my chin in his hand and exhales a shaky breath. He is so, ridiculous, obscenely, out of control handsome. The intensity of his stare burns my skin and I try to turn my head, embarrassed, but he refuses to let me, instead looking deeply into me, so deep that I’m afraid that I’ll never be able to let go.

He lifts me
and I turn my face to his even as he carries me into the bedroom, keeping our eyes locked together. I manage to wrest myself free from his grasp to kiss the little dimple on his cheek that’s only barely visible before moving my head lower to kiss his chest. He wiggles beneath me impatiently, but I’m planning on taking my time.

“Hallie, what are you doing?”

“I’m thanking you. Isn’t that what you wanted?” I glance at him with wide eyes and flutter my lashes until he reaches for me and pulls me in for a long kiss.

“Not exactly.”

He lets out another frustrated gasp as I push him back down. I continue my slow caresses, covering every inch of his flawless, golden skin. I reach for the zipper of his jeans and he lifts his hips, ostensibly to offer his help, but I take achingly long minutes, inching the last piece of clothing from his body with deliberate slowness.

I’m starting to regret my
newly conceived plan of torture when he starts to graze my arms with his fingers. I lean over him, straddling his chest and rocking back and forth.

“You forget that I know you so well,” he says, tracing my jawbone. “You’re
the most impatient person I’ve ever met. My turn.”

With that, he reaches up and pulls me beneath him, sliding my jeans and underwear off in one smooth motion and caressing the delicate skin on my legs with his incredibly patient fingertips.

I growl at him, but he only moves his fingers more slowly, studying my face carefully with each movement. He kisses the skin behind my knee gently before covering the rest of my skin with soft, wet kisses. I lift myself from the bed and beg him with my eyes, and sighing, he moves to cover my entire body with his own.

“Make love with me, Chris.”

I watch his eyes as I say his name, knowing that it, if nothing else, might push him over the edge. I’m not disappointed.

He closes his eyes tightly, his eyelids wrinkling, and whispers, “Damn it.”

I run my fingers up and down his spine as he takes a long breath once and eases himself into me. His movements are tantalizingly slow and I start to move my hips more rapidly, but he just shakes his head and kisses the inch of skin behind my ear.

I
let a long, guttural sound escape from my chest.

“You know I hate that.”

“I know you love that.”

He’s right. I do love that.
I grip the back of his neck and pull his lips to mine, tilting my head so that he can drip his tongue into my mouth as he fills me entirely.

His breath is ragged and I let out a strangled moan as he starts to pick up the pace, rocking in and out. His eyes stay firmly focused on mine and when I try to look away, he touches my skin softly and brings me back. I cling to him, feeling the first waves of the orgasm start to tear at me. I cry out, twice
, and I feel his skin start to vibrate as he moves faster until he empties himself into me.

He doesn’t move
. We stay, skin on skin, until he rolls to the side and props his hand against his elbow, still not removing his gaze from mine.

I had forgotten the way he once looked at me, as if he wa
s memorizing the landscape of my skin. I let him do it now because it feels unspeakably good to let him.

Finally, when I’m burning from the intensity of his stare,
I lean back against the pillows and tear my gaze from his. I reach down to pick up my shirt, but he pushes my hand away.

“Not this time, Hals. Not this time.
We need to talk.”

I sigh, knowing that he’s right, that this, a real conversation between the two of us that involves more than a shadow of the truth, has been a long time coming.

I’m still afraid of what I’ll find when I look back at him.

I was right to be afraid.

Any notion that this, whatever is happening between us, was nothing but a few tumbles in the sheets is instantly removed from my brain when I see the expressions that are dancing across his features. There’s latent desire, a sad smile, a dreamy bliss that’s a direct result of our lovemaking. But there’s something else there, too. There’s love, the kind that goes on and on and on forever and doesn’t stop, despite the years between now and then. What’s worse, there’s a tiny tremor of fear that he’s not even bothering to hide.

Unless I’m mistaken, and I’m pretty sure I’m not, he still loves me. He still wants me.

I have to ask. Words can be lies and faces can be lies, but I have to hear the words spoken aloud. I have no idea what I’m going to do about it, but I need to know.

“
What do you want, Chris?”

It’s a question,
not an accusation, and it’s one that I desperately need the answer to. His answer is immediate.

“You.”

“It’s supposed to be as easy as all of that?”

“It is as easy as all of that.
You. Me. Us. For the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.”

I release a
long, shaky breath. “It’s not easy. I’m not easy.”

Wrong choice of words. He laughs, once.

“Ugh. You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Chris, there are things that I need to tell you about, there are things that you don’t know about me, there are things that I can’t even figure out how to say. I’m not eighteen years old anymore. My life story no longer consists of high school parties and dancing on rooftops.”

“I don’t think that was ever what your life consisted of, Hallie. You forget that we once had a life together. A real one.”

“And I had another life. Without you. A real one.”

A pained expression crosses his fac
e and he turns away.

“I’m well aware of that, Hallie. I had another life, too. But it wasn’t a real one.”

“Well, mine was. Don’t try to…”

I bite my lip and look away.

“I didn’t mean to say that it wasn’t.” He reaches up to touch my hair softly. “I don’t think that.”

“This isn’t easy for me. My life
hasn’t been easy, and I don’t want to talk about it right now, because I still can’t find the right words to make you even understand a tiny sliver of what it’s been like for me.”

“Try, Hallie. Please.”

I owe him that much. “When I saw you in New York, it broke my heart.” I shake my head, because it’s not the right thing to say. I try again. “Seeing you, looking the same as you always did, made me remember that I had once laughed and teased and loved something so much that it was possible to get my heart broken. I needed to do anything that might help me to be okay again. I needed to do anything that might help me feel again, period. I wasn’t trying to go back to the way we were, or back to the person I was, because that will never happen and I realize that. I know that. I was just trying to be someone who could make it through one day. The kind of person who could see a school bus without having a meltdown in the middle of the street. You have no idea how badly I was broken. Not partially broken, all the way broken. I think I wanted to forget all of that for a little while, to try out what it would feel like to be normal. I think I needed to forget, and you’ve always been able to do that for me. To make me forget that there’s a big bad world out there.”

My voice
is wavering uncontrollably and I have to bite back the tears. I’m leaning on the edge of a precipice, and if he says the perfectly wrong words or the perfectly right ones, I will shatter.

He
takes my hands and kisses them. “It won’t work, Hals. Forgetting about the big, bad world. I knew that’s what you were doing and I let you do it anyway. I was complicit in it. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about New York. It shouldn’t have happened, not like that. I never should have let it go that far.”

I turn to him with a ferocity that surprises even myself.

“I’m sorry that you wish it didn’t happen. Because I’m not sorry about it. I’m not sorry about this.”

“
I’m not sorry about this, either. But I am sorry that I took advantage of you then.”

“I don’t think you’re remembering correctly. I’m pretty sure that I took advantage of you.”