Chapter Fifteen #3
Wyatt was either ignoring him or he wasn’t home. Normally, Ryan would have been fine giving him the space he wanted, but after last night’s relationship debut had not gone as planned, Eric was chomping at the bit to get things back on track.
He’d given Ryan stern orders that they would go to dinner tonight and they would at least pretend to be the most loved-up couple in LA.
That meant that knocking again wasn’t an option, it was a requirement.
He did it, a little louder this time. More authoritarian.
Still nothing.
The third set of knocks were more door thumps, and they must have done the trick because the door swung open, revealing a sleepy-looking Wyatt, shoving a hand through his hair.
His expression went from confused to angry to hurt. And it was the last that made Ryan’s heart ache. It hadn’t been very hard to figure out that was what was hurting so much in the vicinity of his chest. Even Tabitha hadn’t had to tell him.
“What are you doing here?” Wyatt demanded.
Ryan discarded the immediate and obvious explanation that this was his property and attached to his house. “I wanted to apologize,” he said.
“Not interested,” Wyatt said, and tried to slam the door shut, but Ryan got his foot and calf in before he could. Usually Wyatt had incredible reflexes, even more deft than Ryan’s, but he’d clearly just woken up.
“I was an asshole last night. Rude and thoughtless and cruel. I genuinely am very sorry,” Ryan said.
Wyatt had taken a step back away from Ryan’s entry into the house and took another. And then another. Ryan shut the door behind him. His neighbors didn’t need to hear this and send the scoop to TMZ.
Wyatt didn’t look convinced, so Ryan tried again.
“You’re right, I was playing games. And I’m done.”
“Done how?” Wyatt asked.
“You were right about so much,” Ryan said, desperately latching onto the tiny opening that Wyatt had just given him. “About how the boredom thing was about me, and not about you. I should have told you I wasn’t going to get bored, and should have listened when you said you wouldn’t either.”
Wyatt sighed. “Listen, I don’t really give a shit that you’re not going to get bored in a fake relationship. Or by hooking up with me, or whatever. I don’t care.”
“What if it wasn’t just a fake relationship? What if we weren’t just hooking up?” The Ryan of six months ago would have been aghast at the direction this conversation had taken, but frankly the Ryan of six months ago had been a tool.
Wyatt hadn’t just made him a better person; Wyatt made him want to be a better person.
“You want to be together? For real?” Wyatt sounded very skeptical, and Ryan honestly could not blame him.
He sat down on the couch, leaving Wyatt hovering around the TV.
He’d read once that if you wanted someone to believe you, you needed to be absolutely sure of your own actions.
Sitting down on the couch like he belonged there seemed the most affirmative action that Ryan could take at the moment.
“I do,” Ryan said.
There was a flash of hope in Wyatt’s eyes as he sat down on the chair opposite and leaned over, his elbows resting on his knees. “I want to believe that,” Wyatt said. But then his face hardened. “I’m just not sure I can.”
Ryan figured this was the best time to lay all his cards on the table.
Tabitha had warned him as she was leaving that going to dinner tonight in an attempt to fulfill the original agreement was going to fuck with Wyatt’s ability to forgive.
Ryan’s apology would just look like he was manipulating Wyatt to get what he needed from him.
“You need to nip that right in the bud,” Tabitha had cautioned. “Tell him right away and be as honest as you can. Tell him your hands are tied with this. Otherwise he’ll have every reason to believe you’re lying.”
“There’s something else,” Ryan added. “Last night . . . I don’t even need to tell you that last night I monumentally fucked up.
Not just with you, though that’s the part that possibly has the worst and most lasting consequences.
I also fucked up our agreement. I fucked up the impression I was trying to give people.
I was trying to look like someone responsible and trustworthy, someone who cared about you, and instead I made it look like the opposite. ”
“Believe me, I was there. We don’t have to rehash it,” Wyatt said dryly.
“What I’m trying to say is that Eric has set up a redo. For tonight.”
Wyatt stared at him incredulously, then jumped up and started pacing between the living room and the kitchen. “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s why you’re here? That’s why you’re apologizing? Because you need me to go play nice with you in front of some fucking photographer?”
“No. I’m here because I’m sorry. But yes, we do need to do that.”
Wyatt looked straight at him, a challenging look in his eyes. “How can I ever believe you if you make me go do this tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said and it was the most wretched truth he’d ever told. “I really wish I could figure it out, because this is killing me.”
“It didn’t seem to be killing you last night,” Wyatt said, and there was a cruel edge to his tone that Ryan told himself that he absolutely deserved.
“I know. I was . . . I guess I should tell you why I acted that way. I probably should have started with that. When I first got drafted by the Dodgers, I had a boyfriend. And he was a little older, and exciting, and I loved that. I thought I loved him. And then one day, I came home early, and he was fucking some guy in our bed. I kicked him out, of course, but not before he told me that he’d had to do it because we’d gotten too boring.
We’d stayed in and ordered pizza and watched Netflix and he’d gotten bored.
I realized then that I’d been bored too.
After that, I swore that I’d only do hookups.
Because that would never happen in a hookup. ”
“Because you’d never stay long enough for anyone to get bored,” Wyatt said slowly. “I want to say that’s really stupid of you, to believe something a cheating asshole tells you, but you thought you loved him. And he echoed something you were feeling too.”
Ryan nodded miserably. “Tabitha said we were both wrong for each other, and that if it’s right, it doesn’t matter if you’re boring together, because you never get bored.”
“I don’t know, I could go for boring sometimes,” Wyatt said ruefully.
“I just want you to know why I would do something like last night,” Ryan said. “I was confused, things between us had gotten so complicated and you’d gone sort of quiet, and I thought, completely stupidly, that you were bored.”
“I wasn’t bored,” Wyatt admitted. His eyes looked so blue from across the room, boring into Ryan. “I was falling in love with you and afraid that you didn’t feel that way about me.”
“Oh.” Ryan had said plenty of times how stupid he’d been, but this really drove the point home. If he’d only asked, instead of assuming that Wyatt pulling away was a bad thing. “You said, was.”
Wyatt shrugged. “That’s not something that changes. I’m just not sure I trust you. Those are two separate things.”
“Because of the dinner tonight.”
“Because of the dinner tonight,” Wyatt repeated.
“Because of a hundred other things that I shouldn’t question but I am anyway.
” He sounded upset and conflicted, and Ryan probably should have felt more sympathy for him, but he was also doing a little happy dance internally that he sounded conflicted at all.
Wyatt could have just kicked him out, but he’d listened, and they were trying to figure things out.
Of all the ways this could have gone, it certainly hadn’t gone the worst.
“I really am sorry, but I can’t get us out of the dinner.
Believe me, if I could, I would. I would do it, if it helped you trust me again,” Ryan said.
He knew he was begging; he’d always assumed it would feel worse.
More demeaning, maybe. But it felt right.
Like putting everything on the line for someone he loved.
“That’s okay,” Wyatt said, and for the first time, there was a hint of a smile on the corner of his mouth. “I could think of worse ways to spend an evening than being wined and dined by a cute guy.”
“You’ll go?”
“I didn’t think I had much of a choice,” Wyatt said wryly. “Not if I don’t want to get sued by Eric.”
“Threats and blackmail are really more his style,” Ryan said. “But yes.”
“You need to get a new agent,” Wyatt said.
“Sadly, you are not the first person to tell me that.” Ryan took a deep breath, and asked the question that really worried him. “What are we going to do about going forward? After tonight?”
Wyatt sighed. “I care about you. I care about what I started building here. I don’t want to leave, even if I’m mad at you, even if you’ve embarrassed me. So I won’t. But I don’t think we can go back to where we were right away. I need time. I need to figure out if I can trust you again.”
“Okay.” Ryan was feeling cautiously optimistic. Wyatt had agreed to go to dinner. Wyatt wasn’t leaving. Wyatt was willing to wait and see if he could give Ryan another chance.
Best-case scenario, considering how catastrophically he’d torpedoed things the night before.
He’d considered more than once if he should tell Wyatt he loved him too—because now the other man had told him twice he felt the same.
Once in anger and now again, while they were trying to resolve things.
But Ryan hadn’t wanted to tell him as an apology.
He wanted it to be a moment of celebration and happiness.
Something bigger and brighter. Special. Just like Wyatt was to him.
So the three little words would have to wait but he had another ace up his sleeve.
Tabitha had suggested presents, and though people usually gave apology roses or apology chocolates, Ryan was betting on his apology gift being a hell of a lot more successful than that.
He’d wanted something concrete that could say so much better than he could two important things: one, that he knew he’d messed up and two, that he was willing to put the work in to fix it.
But the present wasn’t going to be delivered until late tonight, or early tomorrow, no matter how much he’d pleaded, so Ryan would have to wait.
And waiting was really not his strong suit.