Chapter 20
Ryan
T he sun was warm on the back of my head, sitting in front of the tall window and anxiously stirring a glass of lemonade I didn’t even want—I hadn’t wanted to come to the café attached to the resort, the place I hadn’t been since I was still with Shane and that felt like a lifetime ago. But Aunt Helena had insisted, and between her and Grandma, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, so here I was, hyperaware of every inch of distance between me and Brooklyn when I’d told her I’d just be stopping inside.
Mom and Dad were over the moon, chatting away with a handful of other family members squeezed in at the big round table, going on like everything was normal again, as if nothing had happened this week. And it was hard to bring myself to burst anyone’s bubble by pointing out hey, I still haven’t gotten that apology, even though I was trying to talk to them about this.
“You know,” Mom said, smiling warmly at me, and I tried to push down the small, primal part of me that desperately just wanted to make her like me. “You used to love art class when you were little. I still remember your old paintings you wouldn’t let me keep.”
I strained an awkward smile. “Is this… relevant to something?”
She frowned like I’d insulted her. “It’s on the itinerary. We’re doing the group painting class later tonight.”
I prickled, picking up my drink, holding it like it was a shield. “I’m not going to the painting class.”
Aunt Helena gave me a thin smile, that kind with a hollow, dark look that told me to behave. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course you are. I’ve been looking forward to it all week,” she said, turning her gaze back to Mom, as if I hadn’t said a word. “You remember when we used to take those classes with Adrian?”
Mom laughed. “I remember that awful studio and that awful Naomi woman. Adrian was wonderful, though.”
I heard myself speak up again. “I’m not going to the painting class.”
That got a look from everyone else at the table. Mom shifted awkwardly, the first to speak, her tone defensive. “All right… we don’t need to be hostile. So, what? You’re going to stop going to family events again?”
I let out a slow breath. “I just wanted to come around and talk to you. I said that.”
“And I said this is a good place to talk. You can talk. You’re allowed to,” she said, and I figured we’d put that to the test. I set my drink down, tenting my hands on the polished wood of the table.
“It’s about when we go back,” I said, and Aunt Helena sighed.
“Why are you so obsessed with dragging down the mood on the vacation?”
I managed to catch myself with a sharp breath instead of taking the bait. “I feel like we’re just assuming all of this will go away once we’re back,” I said. “But I’m still upset about what’s happened here, and if we don’t fix this before we get back, it’s going to be a lot harder.”
Grandma gave me a sour look before she turned back to Mom, and she dropped the bomb of, “I thought you’d raised the twins to be decent.”
Mom shot her a look, and even Aunt Helena did a double take. I laughed, once, shortly, raising my eyebrows. “But not Stella, huh?” I said, and Grandma frowned like she hadn’t really thought about that. Nobody got in another riposte before a figure moved through the crowd, pushing across the café, and made my stomach turn at the sight—my lovely ex-boyfriend Shane, stepping the long way around the table and summoning the planet-sized audacity to put an arm around my back.
“Look who’s back,” he said cheerfully. “Good to see you again, babe.”
He went in for a kiss on the side of my head, and I pushed away from him, batting his arm away. The shocked look he gave me said he’d been counting on me not making a scene in public, but I was beyond caring at this point. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said. “Don’t touch me like we’re still together.”
Aunt Helena shifted, speaking in a thin, awkward voice. “Ryan, please, can we not do this right here? In public like this?”
“Oh, don’t bother,” Grandma sighed. “The poor young lady’s gone off the rails completely.”
“ Mom, ” Mom said. “That’s my daughter you’re talking about.”
Shane smiled at me, a dangerous glint in his eyes, anger pointed into a thin smile. “Easy, tiger,” he laughed. “We’re in a bad mood today, huh? Something happen to her before I got here?” he said, looking back to the others, voice playful, joking around with buddies. I couldn’t hold back the biting anger, and frankly, I didn’t want to.
Mom spoke levelly. “Shane, it’s good to see you, just—we were just having a conversation—”
Shane tried to casually slip his arm around my back again, and I pushed him away again. “Stop fucking touching me,” I said, and the whole table stopped, bone-white faces looking at me. Swearing in the family was strictly a no-no—Stella had gotten talkings-to about it a million times—and especially in front of Grandma and Grandpa, I might as well have killed someone, but I was getting close to that with Shane anyway.
Shane’s expression changed, darkening, pursing his lips into a thin, tight frown. “You really want to do this here, then, huh?” he said, and Aunt Helena put her hands up.
“ No, she doesn’t,” she said, voice sharp. “We’re all going to settle back down now and—”
“I was having a conversation,” I said. “This will stop the second you stop creeping behind me trying to feel me up.”
“ Ryan, ” Aunt Helena said. Shane snorted, leaning against the table, kicking one foot over the other, arms folded.
“I guess we can do this here, then,” he said. “So, what’s it going to be? Your little secret on the side, that’s so good you’re happy to throw everything away for it?”
I laughed. Reversal was the one and only tool of every other cheater, liar, and abuser out there. He probably thought he was safe with this in public. He hadn’t realized how little I gave a fuck anymore. “You’re hoping that by bringing this up in front of my family, I won’t say anything,” I said. “That you can try to reverse it to make it sound like I’m the one with a salacious secret to hide, and I won’t be able to set the record straight because I’m not out to my family. Is that it?”
Shane blanched, eyes flicking wildly to my family and back to me. “I don’t know what you’re going on about now—”
“You were hoping that I’d be ashamed of my sexuality and threaten to out me to get me to do what you want,” I said. At this point, even the other tables in the café were looking. Somehow, I didn’t care. Shane threw his hands up.
“What the hell are you talking about? I wasn’t doing anything like—”
“Yes, I’ve been together with a woman while I’ve been here,” I said, raising my voice a fraction. “So if that’s not the little secret on the side, what is it? Do you want to share? Please, feel free to say anything at all. Don’t count on me to stop you.”
Shane went red, huffing hard, rolling his eyes theatrically, but I knew the panic it meant when he clenched and relaxed his hands like he was doing. “I don’t know what she’s going on about,” he said, looking back at my family. “She—”
“Or do I need to get into the details?” I said lightly. “You tried to cheat on me with a woman here and she turned you down to be with me instead. Or is that too humiliating to actually own up to?”
“I don’t care what you do,” Shane started, but Aunt Helena cut in, looking like she was witnessing a murder.
“Can we not do this here? ” she hissed, and Grandma was apparently in agreement, because she stood up suddenly.
“I think David and I had best be off to our room,” she said, her voice thin. Grandpa stood up slowly with her, giving me a look somewhere between judgmental and horrified, but it was Mom who cut in with the eminently practical,
“For crying out loud, we’re already doing this here. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Sit back down, you two.”
“This is ridiculous,” Shane blustered. “Nobody here could care any less who you’re seeing, but when you abandon me and your family for some…”
I raised my eyebrows. “For some what? A woman? Or, even worse, a service worker?”
“Ryan—” Mom said, raising her voice. “Who is this you’re talking about?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing back from the table and standing up. “I’ve heard nobody here could care any less about it. I’m bisexual, though, by the way. Hopefully that doesn’t disappoint you all as much as me being a journalist. I’m changing my booking to go back separately. Let me know when you’re ready to fix things between us, if you ever want to.”
“Ryan!” Aunt Helena stood up as I pushed past her and towards the entrance, the whole table exploding into chatter. Mom stood with me, taking a step towards me as I walked past her spot at the table.
“Ryan, sweetheart—you don’t need to fly back separately, let’s just—”
“You have my number. Send a message.” I waved off her hand, marching away from them and back to the entrance, pushing out into the hot, beating sun and getting a good fifty feet around the corner before I stomped, hard, one shoe on the pavement, with a loud curse spat into the bushes, collapsing against the wall, a hand against my forehead with a heavy sigh.
I shouldn’t have stopped there, though. Left an opening for Shane to come around the corner, chasing me down with that red-faced humiliation and anger that I’d learned to recognize as a toxic cocktail in his expression that meant I needed to give him space no matter what. What a shitty relationship, where I was charting things like that.
“Ryan, are you fucking kidding me?” he spat, and I shot him a weary look.
“You were threatening to out me to get me to behave.”
“You’re putting words in my mouth, and I don’t fucking appreciate it. I wouldn’t—”
“I know what I just heard, Shane,” I said, voice low and steady. “Yell at me and pick fights with me all you like, but trying to leverage my sexuality is fucking low. You should be ashamed of yourself. Even when I learned you’d been cheating on me for at least a year, I still thought you were better than that. I thought maybe we could work through this and be cordial, but I don’t think I can ever look you in the eye again.”
Somehow, out of everything, that actually got through to him, and he wavered there between a million different things in his eyes. I sighed, turning away.
“I don’t want to see you ever again.”
“You’re going to regret pissing off your entire family over some random woman.”
I laughed, stopping in my tracks but not looking back at him. “You know?” I said lightly. “I don’t think I will.”
For all my worrying, the path back to Brooklyn was shorter than I’d expected—too short, even, because it didn’t give me time to put on a brave face, and when I found her in the far corner of the pool courtyard, she stood up with her expression protective the instant she saw me.
“Hey,” I said, and she stepped around the edge of the pool to meet me.
“Let’s get back to my place and you can rest,” she said, pulling me into an embrace, pressing my face into her shoulder. I laughed thickly.
“Not even a hello?”
“Hi, beautiful. You look pretty even when you’re clearly not doing well. Now, let’s get you somewhere I can spoil you.”
I wasn’t really cognizant of much. I drifted hazily from there to Brooklyn’s car, and then to her house, and I wasn’t conscious of anything I was saying or doing until she sat down on her couch next to me, and I murmured, “That was… not a good idea.”
She pressed a mug into my hands. Coffee. I really needed that right now. I sipped it quietly as she slipped a hand to my back. “What happened?” she said, and I swallowed.
“I tried to talk… about, you know. What happens after this vacation. I wanted to try laying out the framework for us… fixing this.”
She frowned. “They didn’t listen, I’m guessing.”
I squeezed my hands tightly on my mug. “I thought maybe when my mother said I could talk to her, she meant it,” I said thinly. “But apparently she wanted me to talk by agreeing to everything they wanted. They all just wanted to act like everything was normal, like I was going to go along with them on all of their events, and I was trying to push back when…”
“When?”
I sipped the coffee. “When Shane showed up and tried to feel me up, told me I’d better cooperate if I wanted to keep my little secret, so I told him to get the fuck away from me and shouted him down in front of my family about how I’m not ashamed to be seeing a woman.”
She blinked fast. I set the coffee down.
“He didn’t like it.”
“In front of your whole family?”
“I think I almost killed Grandma,” I said with a random laugh. “One more word and she’d probably have had a stroke.”
“Are you doing okay?” she said, her voice small, and it stirred me out of the haze in my head, looking at her.
“I’m… I’ll be okay,” I said. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry about me,” she laughed, but it was forced. “I’m good. I’m just worried about you.”
I didn’t like her not telling me what she was feeling. I knew I was overreacting because I was already in such an emotional place, but it felt like a thin hairline crack in the finest piece of porcelain, the tiniest fault in Brooklyn’s openness that I was so attached to.
But I was just overreacting. I put it away, looking down at the floor. “I’m good, honestly,” I said, voice hollow. “Just… I really did go and step in it. Not sure if my family’s even going to talk to me anymore.”
“That’s not true.” She squeezed my arm. “I don’t know about the rest of them, but you don’t really think Stella and Oscar would leave it at this, do you?”
I laughed thinly, hugging myself. “No. Yeah. I guess that’s a good point. Just…”
“I’m sorry you had to do it like that,” she said softly. “Coming out is a sensitive thing, and it should always be able to be on your terms.”
I laughed. “I don’t care,” I said, surprising myself with how true it was. “I’m tired of turning myself into some nice… polite… palatable version for them. I’m bisexual. I’m happy for everyone to know so they can hate me for it if they’re going to. It's just…” I raked my fingers back through my hair. “I really don’t have anything.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“No family, no boyfriend, and my good, reliable career in ruins behind me—” I shrugged. “Everything solid I’ve had has been tied up in my family. I feel like I’m nothing now.”
“Ryan—” She shifted to face me directly, look me in the eye, her hand on my upper arm. “That’s not true,” she said, her voice low, firm. Grounding. “You’re an incredibly confident, brave, outspoken woman with a strong voice. You’re a journalist because you know there’s people out there—mostly other brave and outspoken women—who need to have their voices heard, and you make it happen. A whole hell of a lot of things have happened because of your voice, and that’s not something your family, your partner, anybody around, can ever take away from you.”
I swallowed, a knot forming in my throat, and I spoke thinly around it, a smile wavering on my lips. “You looked up some of my work, huh?”
“Ah, well… yes.”
I laughed. “It feels like it’s all castles built on sand. Like everything could collapse in a day and then I’m nothing.”
“You’re a lot more than you give yourself credit for,” she laughed. “Your family might not be able to see it, and that sucks, but a lot of people out there see you. And are damn glad for what you do. Myself included.”
I didn’t really know what I was doing—I put a hand on her cheek, and I kissed her, not thinking about it and just letting my body move. It felt dangerous, a different kiss than usual, not something my body was seeking out looking for contact with her body, but that my heart reached out to hers. Like I had a hole in my chest that she slotted perfectly into, and it was terrifying how much I needed her right now. She kissed me back, and when I pulled her into me, she shifted to meet me, our bodies intertwining on the couch as our lips moved slowly together, and when her fingers caressed through my hair, I flashed with this desperate feeling like I never wanted to let her go.
“Brooklyn…” I whispered her name softly as I pulled away, holding her against me. “I’m glad it’s you,” I said. “That you’re here. That I’m here.” I paused. “Not to get sentimental.”
She laughed, but when she cracked her eyes, she didn’t quite look at me. “I’m glad I’m here, too,” she said softly.
“You know, it’s…” I swallowed. “It’s going to be hard on Sunday.”
Brooklyn stiffened in my arms. I shouldn’t have said it—we hadn’t directly mentioned it, not really, since we’d started this… whatever this was, but I couldn’t help it. I should have taken it back, but I didn’t. Hung in the silence waiting for what she would say, and she finally said, in an airy tone, looking just past me, “It is. But I’m just focusing on the here and now.”
I sighed, pulling myself away, just enough to sit next to her, picking up my coffee and cradling it close to my face. “Brooklyn?”
“Mm?”
“Don’t you get lonely?”
She let out a quiet snort, looking away, pulling one knee up into her chest. “You’d be surprised the kinds of things people can get used to.”
“ Are you used to it?”
She smiled thinly my way. “Journalists with the hard-hitting questions.”
I raised my eyebrows, letting the silence press her. She looked away with a sigh.
“Yeah, it still hurts to say goodbye to someone I like. But every life has its moments that hurt. A happy life doesn’t mean being happy all the time. You know that, don’t you? You’ve seen people with all kinds of lives.”
“I have. But… most of them want something different. Most of them want better.”
She shrugged. “I’ve lucked out. Gotten what I want, and now I’m happy.”
I studied her through an achingly long quiet before I said, softly, “So you wouldn’t change it, if you could.”
She shrugged, not saying anything. I sighed, standing up.
“I think I could use a little fresh air. A bit of a walk behind the house.”
She kept her gaze on the floor as I stood up, and the bitter feeling bit in my chest as I walked to the door, but she spoke, quietly, once I pushed the door open.
“I’ll go with you,” she said. “If that’s okay.”
I paused, not looking back at her. “You don’t have to, if you want a little alone time.”
I heard her stand up, and her footsteps came closer until—my breath caught at the feeling of her pressing up against my back, wrapping her arms around me, and she kissed my neck softly, burying her face against me. “Ryan, you know I feel the same way about you.”
A knot formed in my throat, and I gripped the door tighter. I tried to stay firm, but my body melted back into Brooklyn’s soft touch. “I mean… we’ve been pretty clear with how we’ve felt.”
“There’s no need to be coy right now,” she laughed softly, breath tickling my neck. “You don’t want this to end. I don’t either. But you’re not moving here, and I’m not moving away either. It’s not that I don’t feel the same way, it’s just… I know how this ends. And I don’t want to think about it.”
I swallowed hard, closing my eyes, and I heard my voice wobble when I spoke. “How do you do it to yourself?” I breathed. “I couldn’t imagine doing this over and over…”
She clutched tighter against me, fingers slipping up under my shirt, her touch soft and tender against my skin. “Not to sound corny,” she murmured, “but… it doesn’t normally feel like this.”
I snorted, letting my eyes flutter shut as she held me against her. “You probably say that to everyone,” I laughed softly, and she gripped me tighter.
“You’re a difficult one. I was trying not to even kiss you, but you’ve been hard to resist…” She kissed my neck again, lingering longer, softer this time. “Sunday is going to be miserable. So I’d really rather not think about it.”
“I could… come back,” I said, my voice thin, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be saying any of this. “Like that person who came back to visit you regularly, and you…”
She squeezed me. “If you do,” she murmured, “then you can come back here. See me. Do this again. But until then… don’t make promises.”
I laughed thinly, weakly. “You really do like me, huh?”
“Try not to sound that surprised.”
Jesus, she was right. I knew she was. This was just a natural response—ostracized by my family with nowhere to turn but her, it was natural she’d become my whole universe. Even if I was going to shout it from the rooftops that I was bisexual and that loving a woman was as natural as breathing, I wasn’t going to pull this woman out of her life and carry her around with me.
Feeling this way about her was just the heat of the moment. But the moment was so heated that it was hard to see that bigger picture.
I shut the door, pulling out of Brooklyn’s arms to turn around and face her. “Show me,” I said, and she raised her eyebrows.
“Show you what? That I like you?”
I put my hands on her hips. “Yes,” I said. “We can go for a walk another time. Make me forget everything else… please?”
She softened, eyes flicking down over my body. She didn’t miss the implication—asking her less for sex and more to make love . I felt my heart pounding, waiting for her response, a hundred things in my head that I managed not to say, until she finally slipped her hands up my shirt, holding my waist. “For as long as you like,” she whispered. “Until sunset, until sunrise…”
Ugh—Sunday was going to hurt like hell. I stepped forward, and I caught her lips with mine, throwing myself into her arms as we kissed deep enough I couldn’t think of anything but me and her.