Other People’s Weddings

Chapter 18

C HAPTER 18

I felt my chest cave in just slightly.

I hadn’t realized until the words came out of my mouth. Very few people took care of me. Not since my grandmother had died.

Josh never had. I took care of us. Some of that was being afraid to need anybody too much. Some of it was my own fault. I didn’t tell people how to take care of me. But Ryan had never seemed to need to be told.

He had taken care of me when the bear had eaten my cake. He had taken care of me that day of the breakup. And I was the one who had been terrible to him. Even after I had run out on him after sleeping together, he had made sure I was taken care of.

He did it like it was breathing.

“Why don’t we get dressed and you can come with me. I was wanting to hike the Queenstown trail and take some pictures. Then we can go to the grocery store for . . . food.”

Condoms also, I hoped.

“Sure.”

I took the suitcases into the bedroom. The bedroom we were going to share. I felt a little shiver of excitement go down my spine.

It was so weird, though. To be with this man that I did know, but not in this way. To suddenly be launched into the intimacy of not only sleeping together, but living together.

I put on my very warm snow pants, and a sweatshirt. Then I drifted into the bathroom and fussed with my hair for a while, ultimately doing braids and putting a beanie on. When I came back out, he had gotten dressed as well, and then he took his bag and deposited it in the bedroom. I swallowed hard.

“Okay,” I said, trying not to marinate on why I felt gravity because our bags were cohabitating. “Let’s go.”

We went outside, and I had to brace myself against the intensity of the wind. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets, and I followed him, trusting in his sense of direction to get us where we needed to go.

His camera bag was slung over his shoulder, his hair pushed back off of his forehead. He always looked so rugged. Like photographer Indiana Jones or something.

“You’re staring,” he said.

“Well. Because I think you’re hot. And I’m not worried about you knowing that now,” I said.

He looked at me. “I think you’re hot too. If that hadn’t been made clear.”

That made me blush. My whole face was hot. And suddenly the beanie felt too warm.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I should’ve told you that back in high school.”

“I would have run away from you,” I said. “I wasn’t . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut for a second. “I was not in the space to hear that from anybody then.”

“Especially not me, probably though,” he said.

I grimaced. “I didn’t know what to do with you. I think . . . I could never have put this into words until just now. I kind of realized it earlier today. I was always afraid that you would look at me and see what I was lacking. Because you were like me.”

“Ah. Right. The outsiders club. Where you don’t even reach out to each other because you’re feral and you don’t know how.”

I laughed. “Yeah. That’s exactly it. But I had done such a good job of not being part of that club. I had Quinn. And I had my grandma, and I was hiding it.”

“I didn’t hide it. Not at first.”

“No. But then you began your descent into golden boy territory. It was intimidating.”

“There was a point,” he said, the only sound other than our voices our feet on the sidewalk. “There was a point where something flipped inside of me. Where I realized they weren’t just going to send me away. But even more so, I realized I didn’t want them to. And once I didn’t want to be sent away. That was when I started trying. To do better. Be better. Be worth it.”

“How did you even meet them? How did they find out about you?”

“They were looking for an older child. One that had been stuck in foster care. They took me in because they felt sorry for me. It’s tough, because when you’re a foster kid like I was, you kind of need the pity of the well-intentioned. But I never wanted it.”

I could feel it then, another sharp difference in our experiences. My grandmother had taken me in because I was her granddaughter.

Mary and Michael had been doing a good deed. And it didn’t mean they didn’t love Ryan. They absolutely, obviously did. They were his parents. But I knew how much those shitty experiences from childhood could affect you. And when you were in Ryan’s position, a teenage boy who had been in foster care all of his life, and the people who adopted you did so as an act of charity, a good deed, because of your need, not necessarily their burning need to have a child, it must linger inside of you.

You must wonder at what point the good deed was no longer worth it.

When the balance of the scales would be thrown off altogether.

“I feel ungrateful sometimes,” he said. “Feeling the way that I do about those years. About my childhood. Because they really did give me something spectacular. Something that I had never had before. I think I have every right to be a little bit messed up from foster care. I don’t really have the right to be messed up over them taking me in.”

“Well, funny thing, you don’t get to choose what emotionally scars you. Believe me. I tried to sort through all that. Because what I would really love is to just be grateful that I had a grandmother who took me in and took care of me. What I would really love is if I could just be okay, because I was okay. Eventually, I was okay. That isn’t how it works, though.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. We continued on up the trail, the view around us stunning. The town itself on one side, the vast wilderness on the other. The lake, the mountains. We were surrounded by beauty, just like everybody else who ever came up here. We still carried all that same pain around with us.

“Good things don’t make the bad things go away,” I said. That realization suddenly crystallizing within me. “We had both. Standing here, looking at the view doesn’t make us not abandoned children.”

He huffed a laugh. “All right. That’s a good point.”

When we reached the top of the mountain, the end of the trail, he got out his equipment, his camera, his tripod, and began to take pictures. I sat down, grateful for my waterproof pants, picking a spot in a snow drift as I watched him work.

I was fascinated by this part of him. By the way he used photography.

His exhibition about the town; the way that he had captured and held the people that were around us all the time. Froze them, so that we could pause and make sense of them. For better or for worse.

When you were a kid that was thrust into unfamiliar, strange situations all the time, that must be a gift.

The opportunity to pause and breathe and make sense of your surroundings. To capture it and hold on.

To make the memories you didn’t have from before.

There was so much to it.

There was so much to him.

He turned around and faced me. He lifted the camera up and covered his face. I smiled. He took my picture.

“Come over here,” I said.

“Why?”

“Ryan,” I said, “come here.”

He did, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and took my phone out of my pocket.

“I don’t do selfies,” he said.

“Now you do,” I said, taking the phone out and turning it to face us. And right as I was about to take the photo, he kissed me. Deep and hard, and I was dizzy.

I clung to him, and kissed him back, there at the top of the mountain, where anybody could walk up and see us. Of course, we weren’t home, and everyone we knew had left, so it wasn’t like happening upon the two of us making out would mean anything to a stranger.

It still felt like something to me.

He pulled away from me, and I looked at the picture. Us kissing. His eyes closed. It felt bizarrely intimate to look at it, even though we were the people in the photo.

I let out a long, slow breath. “I like it.”

Even though like didn’t quite cover it. Even though like was too simple.

“Everybody thinks they’re a damn photographer with their iPhones,” he said.

“Well, at least you’re in the picture.”

We walked back down the mountain together and went to the grocery store.

I chose a couple boxes of frozen meat pies. Bread for toast, which we had decided was superior in New Zealand for some reason. He bought a jar of Marmite and insisted that I try it on my toast.

Then we went down the aisle that also contained shampoo and paracetamol and grabbed a box of condoms. I grabbed a second.

“We don’t know when we’re getting a flight out,” I said seriously.

We went to the checkout line, and I felt like a teenager, caught doing something a little bit naughty, but I didn’t hate it.

I did my best not to look at the checker as she moved the two boxes of condoms across the scanner.

When we were back out in the parking lot with our scant bags, I burst into a fit of giggles.

Ryan took the bag I was holding and proceeded to carry everything back to the rental house.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to,” he said.

And that brought me back to my earlier thought process. About the way that he took care of me.

I felt a little bit wind-chapped by the time we got back into the rental. Ryan took the groceries into the kitchen, and I flexed my fingers, which were frozen, in spite of being encased by my new gloves. Maybe possum wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

I was back to believing in the possum lobby.

Ryan moved to me, and brushed his thumb across my cheek. “You’re freezing,” he said.

“Only a little bit.”

He reached down and tugged at my gloves, pulling them loose one finger at a time. Then he curved his fingers around mine, rubbed my hands between his palms, before moving his lips to my freezing fingers and kissing them.

I wanted to lean against him. My full weight. Into all of his strength.

I had never wanted something that scared me so much so desperately.

Because I had never once leaned against someone with everything I had. I knew better than that. He made me want to.

I felt so desperate to know him. To really know him . But I wasn’t sure I even knew myself on the level I wanted to puzzle him out. I wanted to burrow inside him. To get down beneath all the layers of rock and stone and see him.

We were here together after so many years of . . . whatever we’d been.

After how I’d . . . hurt him.

Had I hurt him?

It seemed important to know. And important for me to tell him the truth of that night.

Suddenly, he lifted me up off the ground, and carried me like I weighed nothing, right into that single bathroom we had to share. There was a large, deep white tub in it. He turned the water on and set me down.

“You’re freezing. And I think you could probably use a bath.”

“I think you probably have lascivious intent,” I said.

“I absolutely have lascivious intent,” he said.

He stripped his shirt off, and I discovered that my intent was pretty lascivious too.

“Wow,” I said, when his bare chest was revealed. “You are really . . . you are really hot.”

He growled and moved toward me, and took my shirt off, began to make quick work of my clothes. Something was nagging at me. Chewing at the back of my mind.

I wanted to say something, but I was in a lust fog, who could blame me, and I was having trouble making sense of what was quite so pressing, since really, the only thing I wanted to be pressing was his cock against me.

The fifth wedding.

“I just need to—”

But he kissed me.

And I ended up arching against him, rubbing my breasts against his chest like an absolute hello, and I wasn’t even ashamed.

I took his jeans off of him, making quick work of the belt, button, zipper.

And then, I wrapped my hand around that hard length, velvet-covered steel. Which I had read in romance novels before, and laughed at, but found it so apt now.

I had never given that much thought to the textures of sex. To all the different aspects of it. And now I found myself obsessed.

Yes. Maybe I was different.

But then, he lifted me up and deposited me in the warm water, coming to sit behind me, planting me firmly between his thighs, my ass pressed up against his insistent arousal.

“You’re so sexy,” he said, kissing my neck.

No one had ever said that to me before.

He said it with intensity. A guttural sound. Like it was an imperative truth.

I had never been so enamored of anyone as I was of him in that moment.

Maybe because no one had ever seemed so enamored of me.

And that was when the fog cleared. “Ryan, I need to say something about Leavenworth.”

His hold on me went tight, his body went still. “When I said that I wanted to get back at him, I did mean it, but that wasn’t . . . that wasn’t the only reason. And I was too stunned by the whole thing to articulate myself. I was angry. And yes, part of me wanted to hurt him for that. But it wasn’t . . . it wasn’t what it sounded like.”

“That you only wanted me because I was the person that would hurt him the most?”

He did believe that. It was my fault. I’d been so in my own head, in my own feelings, that I’d let him believe I only wanted him to hurt Josh.

It seemed like such a stupid, stupid thing. Especially now, when I could see how pale what I felt for Josh really was.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t. Because you made me feel exciting and beautiful and desired. In a way that he never did. And he made it really clear that he wanted to go out and have sex with other people in part because he was bored with me. So having you . . . you, who didn’t even like me . . . want me like that, that made me feel good. And it did feel poetic. I can’t separate your relationship with him, and my relationship with him, and my feelings for you. Not entirely. Because we’re human beings who don’t exist in vacuums, however much we might want to. But it wasn’t the only reason that I wanted you. It never was.”

He didn’t say anything. He moved his hands up to cup my breasts, and I figured that was . . . well, him not hating me.

I leaned my head back against his chest, desire making my words slow. Making it hard for me to think. Hard for me to speak.

“I wanted you. And I knew that. In New Orleans when I saw you with the bridesmaid, I was sick to my stomach. But I couldn’t figure out why. But I know you felt it. Under the awning.”

“Is that when you were first attracted to me?” he asked.

“I’m sure it wasn’t. I don’t know when that happened. It was the first time it felt like something I couldn’t just dismiss. I’ve told myself for years that you make me feel uncomfortable because you don’t like me. And every little bit of discomfort I’ve felt around you has been easy because I could blame it on you. But not that moment in New Orleans. Not that evening in the rain. I didn’t want to label it. I didn’t want to say what it was, not even inside my own head. I protect myself from it. Because I was determined to . . . I just wanted for everything to stay the same. So badly. And in that moment, I felt precariously close to letting go of something. To losing it completely, and that terrified me. But I couldn’t handle seeing you with her. And I also had a very hard time rationalizing that response away.”

“But you tried,” he said.

“Yes. I did. And then I had a hard time looking at you. I had a hard time being nice to you. In Tahoe I saw you through the window. Without a shirt on. And it was like I got slapped in the face. I couldn’t deny it anymore. No matter how much I wanted to. So, when we kissed in Leavenworth, I was free to do something with wanting you. And it felt good. It was never only about him. It never could be. Because we’ve never been only about him. We had our own thing first . Even if it was dysfunctional and filled with dead science fair projects.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “It was just one.” He paused for a moment. “Do you know why I hooked up with the bridesmaid?”

“No,” I said.

“Because I wanted you. Because I wanted you, and that moment outside, in the rain, it tested me. And I knew I would be the biggest asshole on the planet if I showed up to your hotel room and told you how much I wanted you.”

That hurt my feelings, actually. That he’d been with somebody else while wanting me. It made me feel small and hurt. I was kind of glad. Because I had hurt him. It was kind of nice to know that he had also responded to this thing between us badly.

That I wasn’t alone in my ineptitude.

“That’s sort of terrible,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is. But I told you, I’ve . . . I felt things for you that I shouldn’t and I had to come up with ways to handle that.”

“I genuinely thought you just didn’t like me.”

“In a way it’s true. I didn’t. Because I didn’t want the complication. Josh was my first friend and it was the same as it was for you and Quinn, in the beginning. Not in the same way always, but at first. And I felt a hell of a lot of loyalty to him for a long time. I didn’t want to want the woman that he was dating.” He moved his hands over my skin, I shivered. “Anyway, I didn’t think you liked me .”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Because you were so unimpressed with me. And I really need people to be impressed with me.”

He tightened his hold on me. “God, that was a lie though. I was.”

“You were just like a feral cat.”

“Still am,” he said.

“Me too, I think,” I said. “I don’t really want to be. But . . . old habits die hard, I guess. And protective measures can die really hard.”

“I’m familiar.”

“I really didn’t mean to drop the bowling ball on your science project.”

“I really was mad about that,” he said.

“I know.”

“That was the first thing at school I ever really tried on, you know?” He was quiet for a second. “And my . . . my mom helped me with it.”

“Oh,” I said.

He kissed my neck, moved his hands over my skin, began to tease my nipples. He was obviously done talking. Sharing feelings was over. And I was a swirl of revelation and contradiction.

He had wanted me. He had disliked me.

He had resented me. But of course he had.

Right now, he was holding me, and the feeling of his rough hands moving over my sensitized flesh was good enough that I didn’t really want to think about complications, or the future. Not about the inevitable goodbye that I had tried to outrun this morning.

Who knew when we would leave here?

We were together now.

That was what mattered.

I didn’t know what to think about it. I didn’t know how it was going to end neatly. What lesson we were supposed to learn from each other, or what this meant as the end result of our issues with each other. I just didn’t know.

Maybe I didn’t need to. I was always trying to make everything chronically okay, and I had never really been able to do that with Ryan.

That was the beauty of him. And the pain.

I maneuvered so that I was facing him, straddling him in the water, rubbing against him right where I was desperate for his touch as he kissed me deep, his hand fisted in my hair. I didn’t need to rationalize. I didn’t need to reason. I just needed him.

He fisted his hand in my hair and pulled my head back. I arched forward and he leaned in, taking my nipple into his mouth and sucking hard.

There was something feral about him now, and I loved it. Craved it.

Suddenly, I was being lifted out of the water, his arms strong around me, as he carried us both safely out of the tub. I clung to his neck as he took us into the bedroom and flung me down onto the bed.

“I would have killed us both trying to get us out of the tub like that,” I said breathlessly.

“I had you,” he said.

He had. He’d had me. And I trusted it. I trusted him, which was the most amazing thing of all. Because the list of what and who I trusted was short. Very, very short.

“Wait here,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere!” I called, as he disappeared from the bedroom and returned a moment later with a condom box.

Then he laid down on the bed, his naked body pressed against mine, our skin still slick from the water. This was frantic. Frenzied. Perfect.

He pinned me down, kissed me hard. Kissed his way down my body and forced my thighs apart so he could lick me right where I needed him most.

He lapped at my clit, his fingers buried deep inside me, as he called an effortless climax from my body. As he made me cry out his name.

Ryan.

It blew my mind less that it was Ryan now. Because somehow now it just made sense. Of course, he was the man who made me feel like this. Of course, he was the best kisser, the one who touched me exactly how I wanted him to. How I needed him to.

How long had it been him?

When he was inside me again, I clung to him. Locked my legs around his hips, and took him. I felt like I understood things I hadn’t before. About songs, and poetry. About books and about myself. If it hadn’t felt so good, I might’ve been terrified. But I was lost in the moment. Lost in him.

He said my name against my mouth when he came, and I followed him over the edge, clinging to him until the storm passed.

I lay against him afterward, my hand resting on his chest.

“When was the first time you saw your mom on TV?”

I turned to face him. “That’s a weird question.”

“I’ve always wondered. But we’ve never really done the getting to know you stuff.”

“This isn’t really a small-talk kind of question.”

“Yeah, and what we just did isn’t really an introduction either. So, I figure I’m allowed to skip the weather and go straight to parental issues.”

“Fourth grade. She was in a movie about a talking pig. You probably remember it. He played basketball.”

“Oh. Yes. I do remember that.”

“Everybody was seeing it. But, of course, my grandma didn’t want to go. And I wasn’t sure if I did either. But the trailer would come on all the time on TV. I ended up seeing it at a friend’s house. At a sleepover. But I couldn’t say anything to anybody. I didn’t want them to know. That my mom was famous. She wasn’t, not really. I mean you don’t get famous after one movie part, but ten-year-olds don’t really know that.” I huffed, and looked at the texture of the ceiling. One shape looked a little bit like a sheep. I let that distract me for a second. “Of course, after that, she was in that erotic thriller, and that actually made her famous. And I never saw that. I would actually rather die.”

“I know she’s on a sitcom.”

“She wanted to do something different. And that presented itself. At least that’s what she said. I suspect that maybe she was just having trouble getting roles because Hollywood is ageist. And it isn’t like she was Meryl Streep. She had a couple of movies that did well.”

“What was it like, seeing your mom on TV like that? At a party?”

“I went in the bathroom and cried. And threw up some of the birthday cake.”

He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. “I’m sorry, Poppy.”

“You get used to it. But you might see your mom in a newspaper or a magazine. On a billboard. On a poster by the movies. Eventually, that image of her kind of became . . . not my mom. It’s weird, though, because I know her more as a Hollywood version of herself than I do her.”

“And you never wanted to go join her? I mean, surely when you were older . . .”

I shook my head.

“No. She didn’t want a mom image.” I laughed. “And, of course, she ended up on the sitcom playing a mom. That’s actually been the hardest one for me. Because she’s so many things on that show that she’s never actually been for me. And I have watched it. Because . . . I was so curious. What it would look like. If she had kids that she loved. She’s good at pretending.”

“What a mindfuck.”

I snorted out a laugh. “Tell me about it. It’s ridiculous. And it’s not like anyone around me relates. It’s just such a weird thing. I’ve always felt alone that way. I thought you probably would understand the most. Or at least, it’s dawning on me that out of everybody I know, you probably understand it the most.”

“It’s different. I don’t even know what my birth mom looks like. Maybe she is famous. Maybe she grew up and got clean and got away from everything. But I have a feeling that’s a fantasy. It’s what I kind of like to believe though. I’d like to believe it was worth it. Not having the kids. I mean. Like maybe not having us let her get sober? I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s kind of my thing too. Sometimes I need to believe that it was worth it. That what she puts out to the world is helpful for other people, and I am an acceptable casualty. She has her dreams. In my life is . . .” To my horror, my chest hitched, and my throat closed. And suddenly I was crying. Which I really hadn’t expected. To go crying about my mother, who was an old, old wound. It wasn’t the grief over losing my grandma, it wasn’t even the disorientation and the sadness over losing my relationship with Josh, which I knew now wasn’t heartbreak, per se, but had still been something difficult to contend with. I hadn’t thought that it could still hurt me like this.

But I hadn’t had anyone ask me these questions before. I hadn’t talked about it.

“You know, sometimes I feel like . . . fuck her,” I said. “Because I am her daughter. And I really wanted to matter. The way that daughters do. The way that they’re supposed to. But I don’t even have kids, and I don’t know if I’ll ever have them. I probably won’t. I probably won’t, and I feel like I don’t have a right—”

“You were hurt by her. It still hurts you. You have a right.”

“I just . . . it’s pathetic to want somebody who didn’t want you. I hate it. I hate it so much. I don’t want to feel it anymore. Most of the time I think I don’t. And then something like this comes up and . . . I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked about this with somebody. No. Not even Josh.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s well-trodden lore. Everybody knows my mom is famous now. They didn’t when I was ten, but everybody does now. They all know that I don’t live with her. What is there to ask?”

“How it makes you feel .”

People had gawked at it before, but I’d never gotten the sense anyone had wanted to dig into how I felt. Not out of a lack of care just . . . no one else I knew connected quite as deeply to being separated from the mom who’d given birth to you like Ryan did.

We both remembered what it was like to live in a time before we’d landed with the people who’d raised us.

We both knew what it was like to feel the abandonment. He might not remember his mom, but he remembered the consequences of her losing custody of him. The years being bounced from home to home.

“It makes me feel like shit. How else should it make me feel?” I scrubbed my forearm over my eyes. “I got raised by the grumpiest old lady in the entire world. And I loved that woman to death. I still do. She hated you, Ryan.”

He laughed. “Yeah. I know.”

“That was probably my fault. Because I complained about you a lot. She didn’t like Josh either. She didn’t like men. Her husband left her, and it hurt her. I think she blamed him for what ultimately happened with my mom. Like his abandonment twisted her up and made her into the kind of mother that would abandon her own kids.”

I hadn’t fully realized the way we were all sitting in abandonment issues. My grandmother. My mother. Me.

All hurt people lashing out in weird ways. Except I had tried really hard not to lash out. And now I kind of wanted to. I kind of wanted to call my mom and tell her that she sucked. I wasn’t sure I even still had her number.

“Who was the last family you were with?” I looked at him. “Before you came to Pineville.”

I wanted to know his story too. And I wondered if anyone had ever asked him these questions. If the bridesmaid that he had sex with in New Orleans had cared. If she had known. If anyone ever had.

“They were one of those foster families with like fifteen kids. A bunch of them were theirs, but a bunch of them were wards of the state, like me. Huge house. Lots of bulk food and label bins. They were nice. But you really had the sense that everybody was just passing through. All the kids were kind of interchangeable. Because we would be switched out in a few weeks. It was a short-term placement. I had a lot of anger issues. That got me kicked out of those houses.”

“You did?”

Ryan was grumpy. And he could definitely be an ass. But I couldn’t imagine him having anger issues. Even the boy that I had met at twelve had been a very particular sort of difficult.

“I was just mad all the time. One of my foster parents told me it was because people like my mom were broken, and they had broken kids. I couldn’t believe it when someone actually wanted to adopt me. Because I already knew that I was . . . I knew I was broken.”

I didn’t even know what to say. I was wounded. Bleeding for that little boy. There had always been somebody that loved me. I had never been on my own completely. I had never had to look out for myself entirely. He had.

I rolled over and pressed my face against his chest, tried to hold my tears back. “I wish I would have been nicer to you.”

“You were,” he said.

“I smashed your science project with a bowling ball.”

“You didn’t mean to.”

“I held it against you that you weren’t nice to me,” I said. “I made it about me. I wasn’t understanding. I never asked you why.”

“I was mean to you for smiling at me. Because I didn’t know how to be cared about anymore. But even . . . with everything, it wasn’t all bad. I swear to God. And my parents did a pretty good job rebuilding me. And most people wouldn’t have tried. Do you have any idea how much more common a story it is to become a kid that just ages out of the system and finds themselves on their own? Hell. People who had families just turned out when they’re eighteen with no support. I have more than most.”

“Good. Because you need it. Because you had all that other stuff besides.”

“Do you know something,” he said, his voice rough. “Hope is the most painful thing on the planet.” It was. He was right. The hope that something would work out when you didn’t have a guarantee, and God knew we never had guarantees. Nobody did, it was true. But, of course, we wanted guarantees more than most.

“Have you ever had a real girlfriend?”

He laughed, and I realized he did that when I surprised him. And when he didn’t really want to answer. “No. Because what the fuck’s the point?”

I had arrived at that place. The whole what was the point place. Because I had tried to have a relationship that I could control. One that wouldn’t hurt.

“Right,” I said.

“It’s not that I don’t . . .” He looked at me, his expression suddenly serious. “It isn’t that I don’t want those things. Who doesn’t? But to me, it’s like being a foster kid and wishing that you could have a family. You can. I do. But I’m still not the same as a kid that was born into a family with parents who wanted them. And loved them. I lived twelve years of being passed around, unwanted, and that leaves scars on you. I’m lucky to have the parents that I have. I’m lucky to have my family. But sometimes I wonder if they wish they had a son who wasn’t so messed up.”

“I think your parents love you,” I said, my heart squeezing. “Because you’re . . .”

I wasn’t sure that I had words for it. To me, he had always been magnetic. Yes, historically, when things had happened between us, they had gone wrong. But the truth was, no matter what, we were always drawn to each other.

I had been drawn to him from day one. How could I not be?

He had always been a fascination, an obstacle. I had been as drawn to him as I was afraid of him.

“You were always meant to be something. And nothing was ever going to hold you back. That much is clear. Because if it could have, it would have. But you . . . you’re amazing, Ryan Clark. The photo exhibition that you made for the town, the way that you brought Quinn and Noah together . . .”

“Entirely unintentional. Noah and Quinn.”

“Quinn thinks that you’re the very hand of God.”

He squinted. “Does she?”

“Now, I can personally attest to the fact that your hands have made me see God.”

“Don’t get me hit by lightning, Poppy.”

“I’m not trying to.” I sobered. “You’re not broken forever.”

“I wish I could believe that. But it’s like you said earlier. We can have the views, but it doesn’t take away the hard things. Especially after I got adopted, I thought maybe I could just be normal. But a lot of other experiences showed me differently. And I’ve found a life that makes me happy. It really does. Traveling around. Taking pictures. I get to meet all kinds of different people, move around to a lot of different places.” He let out a long breath. “There are things that happen to you, Poppy. Moments that change who you are. There are some things you just can’t fight. I’m just realistic about who I am.”

I wanted to fight with him about that, because I really wanted to believe that there was hope. That all the damage could be healed. Maybe because I wanted mine healed so bad.

But hadn’t I written off love and relationships too? Was I any different?

I had tried, with Josh. At least, I had told myself that.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Meat pies?”

“Sounds good.”