Chapter 5
Five
RYAN
One Year Later
Throwing my satchel onto the couch, I dragged my fingers through my hair.
I didn’t regret my life—so to speak. Not…
not entirely. There were pieces I missed since walking away from the medical field.
I missed Gracie, though she and Hasan came over at least twice a month since Gracie was an only child, and I was the single person in her life willing to help her with wedding planning.
I also missed the thrill of the chase when we were speeding down the road with the sirens blaring. I missed the feeling I got deep in my gut when we helped someone and I knew they were going to be okay.
But I didn’t miss the way my heart felt like it was being ripped out of my chest when the calls were bad. When the violence was overwhelming.
When I had to watch someone being rushed through automatic double doors, knowing I would never see him again, not knowing if he would ever be back up on his feet.
Not knowing if his life being changed would ruin him.
Not knowing if he would stick to the promises I’d forced him to make while trying to keep him stable.
I shook my head, trying to get the vision of Atlas out from behind my eyelids.
It was a damn near impossible task, of course.
I thought of him almost every single day.
Sometimes one of his old songs would come on the radio, or someone would post an article about him on social media, and it would be like tearing open fresh wounds.
Sometimes I would see a guy with shaggy, dark hair and tattoos and think, Oh! There he is!
But it was never him.
The echo of his voice was with me the day I went to my parents’ house and told them I wouldn’t be taking the MCAT.
That I was accepting a job at the college prep academy that paid well and gave me a moving stipend.
The ghost of his hand was in mine, squeezing my fingers gently when they looked me in the eye and said that if I was going to spit in the face of all the love and financial support they’d given me over the years, I was dead to them.
That I was nothing.
I was no longer their son.
The memory of his faith in me—a total stranger—comforted me at night when I realized that in choosing myself, I was entirely alone. I’d never had time to create my own little family. My own little circle. I had Gracie and, by extension, now Hasan.
And that was it.
I was making some friends at the school, but they weren’t my people. Most of the professors had decades on me and didn’t appreciate that I had tattoos under my sleeves and a foul mouth that couldn’t be controlled the moment students weren’t in earshot.
But there were a few who asked me how my day was going.
So that was something.
It wasn’t the life I’d envisioned though, which was the hardest and most bitter pill to swallow. I wanted to be someone, be something in my field. I wanted to write books and make discoveries and instill a passion in students for history that I had growing up.
But the best I got was apathy. Bored children fighting the urge to dig into their backpack and pull out their phones because they saw me and what I was trying to teach them as pointless. I didn’t blame them. It wasn’t for everyone.
This wasn’t my forever path. I could deal with it until something else opened up and made way for me. It would take a while, and in the meantime, the best thing I could do was work on not being so solitary. And so fucking lonely.
But that was even harder.
I tried to date. Both Gracie and Hasan set me up with people they knew, but each date was worse than the last. Most of them didn’t call for a second, and the ones who did didn’t call for a third.
I didn’t know if there was something fundamentally wrong with me or if the universe was saving me for someone else.
Someone with dark hair and a mole under his left eye and calluses on his fingers from his guitar.
I knew better than to believe that. Wishful thinking only ever wasted time, and I didn’t believe in fate or serendipity or kismet. We’d had a moment—two ships passing on a really fucked-up night—and that was that.
Atlas had moved on, and I needed to do the same.
Dropping to my couch, I glanced over at my fish. He wasn’t much of a companion. A fantail betta in orange and white that looked a bit like a koi. I didn’t know who he was trying to impress with the way he spun around every time I walked by, because if he knew what a catch I wasn’t, well…
“Hi, Fish.” It also didn’t help that I hadn’t named him, and somehow, he’d just become Fish.
I thought about getting a cat, but I wasn’t sure I could look a fur baby in the eyes and just call it Cat. I would be eaten alive in my sleep.
Kicking my feet up on the coffee table, I tried to shrug off the heaviness of the upcoming holidays.
The prep school didn’t get out until three days before Christmas, and we had to spend Christmas Eve sitting in our offices, readying our lesson plans so we’d be ready to hit the ground running when the semester started.
I had asked for this, of course. Literally.
I had given up my job as an EMT, gone through three rounds of interviews, background checks, shadowing several other professors, schmoozing members of the board, and finally signed a contract selling my soul for what was better than a public school salary, but not by much.
I could afford my rent and my car payment and minimums on all my credit cards, and that was it.
Not that I had anyone to spend money on, so that was a blessing.
But all I had going for me was a savings account, my fish, and some nice dishes I’d managed to snag during a Pottery Barn Outlet clearance sale.
My phone buzzed, and I groaned softly. This was meant to be the start of my vacation, before the new year, where I could do literally nothing and not feel guilty about it. I’d finished all my lesson plans early and was ahead of the game.
So if the school was telling me I had to come in tomorrow…
Dear Everyone, it read…
Shit. This was not from the school. My mother’s email address sat in the sender line.
This was the first time I’d seen an email from her in a year, but I could already see that I was being cc’d in with everyone else in the family.
She probably didn’t know I was in this gigantic list of recipients who were mostly people I never spoke to.
I breathed, tried to ignore it, and then—because I was a masochist—I kept reading.
Dear Everyone, I’m writing to let you all know that the Rasch family will not be on Pierce Island this New Year’s Eve. My amazing son and daughter-in-law will be hosting us this year in the Poconos. We will be enjoying skiing, cider by a warm fire…
And that was when I stopped reading. My stomach twisted, like it was practicing for the goddamn summer Olympics gymnastics floor routine.
They weren’t going to Pierce Island. They were going to the mountains.
To see the snow. To do something I had begged to do once—just once—and was made to feel two inches tall for having the balls to go against my mother’s status quo.
I’d been laughed at. Called an idiot. Told I didn’t understand the point of why we went to the island in the first place. I’d felt so ashamed for it. And now this?
This felt like it was on purpose. It was like they knew how much it would hurt to twist that knife. But fuck it. And fuck them. I didn’t need them.
They were no longer my dictators, and while they could hurt me, I would never let them see it. I would never let them know.
Taking a breath, I deleted the email, then sat back and pressed my hands to my face hard enough that I saw sparks behind my closed eyelids. I wanted to do something to ease this pain. To take back the power my mother thought she could steal from me with a single, pointed email.
I didn’t know what. I could show up at the Poconos and pretend like I was having fun all on my own, but that felt like the move of a defeated man. I could stay home in my original plan to rot on the couch and pretend like the world outside didn’t exist for a week.
Or…
An idea started burning in my brain. An old childhood pain I could soothe. A moment I could reclaim for myself and maybe start to heal some of the wounds that were still refusing to close.
Pierce Island was still there, sitting in cool Caribbean waters, waiting for someone. And maybe that someone was me. I had the funds for it, especially by myself. I could sit by the beach with a fire nearby, a room to myself, and prove that I didn’t need them.
That I could have something that was just mine, that didn’t belong to my family.
It would be lonely. I was still wallowing in what I’d lost when Atlas was wheeled past the OR doors and I never saw him again, but maybe this was a chance to heal from that too.
We were star-crossed lovers in almost the most literal way because the man’s name was Atlas, and that was a single star in the Taurus constellation. The glowing light in the distance who held a promise I made to him and to myself that I would never give up on me.
And maybe—in my own fucked-up way—I hadn’t given up on the idea of seeing him again, even if I doubted he’d remember who the hell I even was.
I knew so little about him. He’d gone dark after I left him in the hands of the doctors. I knew he’d survived. That the doctors were able to stop his internal bleeding and he was going to make it, but that was it.
The most detailed information released to the public was that he suffered a spinal injury and would be taking a long leave of absence from performing.
I had half a mind to message one of his social media accounts just to check, but that probably counted as stalking, and considering I was fresh into my new job, I couldn’t take the risk.