Chapter 8 #2
He wasn’t wrong. He was doing his job. I’d been fighting for my life. But I survived because of him. Not just the injury, but the earth-shattering way my life changed too. My first therapist was blunt with me when she told me not everyone did.
Sometimes, the pain was too much for people to bear, and there were nights I understood why she said that. But I hadn’t felt that way in months, and now that I’d found the angel who gave me the courage to keep going?
Shit, there weren’t words for the way I was feeling.
“Am I interrupting yours?” Ryan eventually asked. “I mean, if I remember right, you didn’t even know this place existed. So why are you here?” I was afraid to believe he sounded hopeful, but it was hard to deny his tone.
I used my hands to help me sit up a little higher, then crooked my knee to the side so I could turn and face him. God, he really was so thin. “If I tell you how I’m feeling, will you promise to eat a little?”
His cheeks went a little rosy again, and he cleared his throat, picking up the burger. It looked a little…sketchy. The melted fat had congealed, and the cheese had rehardened. Ryan stuffed a massive bite into his mouth and began to chew, raising his brows at me as if to say, “Happy?”
And yeah. I was.
“Just don’t choke. I technically learned the Heimlich, but I don’t know if I could actually do it.”
He snorted and swallowed. “Don’t worry. I learned how to do it on myself.”
I motioned for him to take another bite, and when he did, I leaned back against the headboard. “I’m here because I was looking for you.”
He froze, his cheeks puffed out with the size of his bite. “Me?”
“Yeah. I asked around after I woke up from surgery, but no one had your info. I mean, you were on the job, and I figured there were rules about that.”
He snagged his water bottle off the tray and swallowed half down before he spoke again. “That’s true, but shit. I had no idea. I thought about hiring a PI to track you down, but that seemed a little…unhinged.”
His eyes widened, and he laughed. “That would have been wild. But I don’t think I would have been mad about it. It might have taken them a while to find me though. I quit right after that night.”
My chest tightened. “Because of me?”
“Yeah,” he said, and when pain showed on my face, he quickly shook his head. “No, not like that. Do you—ah. Do you remember the conversation we had in the ambulance?”
Closing my eyes, I shrugged. “Bits and pieces. I couldn’t remember your name, but I remembered the glasses you wore and how you held me.” When I looked at him again, his lips were parted, and he was breathing a little quicker than before.
He cleared his throat. “Right. Well…you asked me to talk to you, so I told you about my shitty family.”
“The ones who come here.”
“Yeah.” He went quiet for a beat. “They’d been on me for years about choosing the wrong career. My mom and dad threatened to cut me off when I changed majors and went into liberal arts instead of STEM. They wanted me to take the MCAT and become an anesthesiologist.”
My brows flew up. “That is so specific.”
Rolling his eyes, he laughed. “Yeah. My mom had a whole timeline of my life in a fucking binder. It was hell when I switched programs. They said they were going to disown me if I didn’t make it right, so we compromised. I finished my history degree with the promise that I’d take the MCAT after.”
“That doesn’t sound like a compromise,” I said quietly.
His next chuckle was very bitter. “No, but it took me a while to figure that out. They didn’t want to help me financially since they said I’d wasted tuition money on a degree I’d never use, so I got EMT certified to pay for school, and I actually loved it.
But I wasn’t happy. The night of your accident, I was trying to figure out if I could keep going. ”
“And the sight of my mangled body persuaded you to get out?”
He stared, then dissolved into a fit of laughter, swaying so close he nearly knocked the tray off of his lap. “Oh my god, you weren’t mangled. You were severely hurt, but you were also the most gorgeous patient I’d ever had on my stretcher.”
My chest burned with pleasure. I didn’t know why that made me so fucking happy. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I did know. I just wasn’t sure I was ready to admit it.
“Anyway, when we were talking, I kind of told you about them. You made me promise I wouldn’t give up on myself, so I made you promise the same. A quid pro quo kind of thing.”
I rolled my lips between my teeth as I took him in. I was pretty sure he was more tired than the first night I set eyes on him, but the look on his face told me that things were different for him. Good or bad, I wasn’t sure yet, but I hoped I had enough time to find out.
“Did your parents lose their minds when you quit?”
“Yeah,” he said behind a sigh. “They officially cut me off, but I realized that didn’t matter.
They never liked me. I was always the outsider—the one left behind.
The realization that I was unwanted was profound and painful.
But it was also worth it to walk away and start living my life on my terms without fear of disappointing my mom.
She was a moving target, and I knew I would never make her happy. ”
“I can’t imagine what that’s like,” I told him softly. I wasn’t close with my parents, but I never doubted that they loved me.
He shrugged. “Honestly, nothing changed when they cut me off except that I stopped feeling the weight of my mom’s passive aggression and my dad constantly enabling her to be awful.
I felt like I could breathe for the first time when they told me they weren’t coming to the island, so I could be here on my own and actually enjoy it for the first time since I was a kid. ”
My fingers twitched. I wanted to reach for him, to hold him, to see if his touch was as comforting now as it was back then. But I didn’t know where we stood on all of that. “So they’re really not here?”
He laughed bitterly and shook his head. “Nope. They took the ski vacation I’d always wanted.
They made sure that even though I was being iced out, I got the family email update.
They didn’t mention me in it. They just said they were having the best Christmas of their lives.
But I was able to read between the lines. ”
“They sound like dicks.”
He stared, and when he laughed this time, it was sweeter. “You should write a song about it. Call it…Ryan’s Family is Full of Dicks.”
I couldn’t stop my grin. I hadn’t recorded anything new in so long, but I would absolutely make that my first if he wanted me to. I settled back, my shoulder touching his, and I saw the smile on his face flicker for a second. There was still a sadness in him that I wanted to understand.
“Why’d you come, then? If they weren’t here to make you? Why didn’t you go on your own ski vacation?”
He shrugged and twisted to set the tray on the nightstand before throwing his arms behind his head and leaning back. “I guess I wanted to reclaim this place for myself a little bit. Growing up, I didn’t know that I was unwanted. I wanted to feel that way again.”
My brow furrowed. “You want to feel…unwanted?”
A small laugh crept out of his chest, and he shook his head. “Well, I want to feel free. And being unwanted by them means I don’t have to sit under the weight of their demands. I can be myself and not lose sleep over whether or not I’m getting it all wrong.”
God, my sweet guardian angel had been through more than I ever realized. My hands felt a little shaky as I lifted them both up. And—when he didn’t go tense—I laid them on his shoulders. My thumbs caressed up and down the sides of his neck, and he shuddered once, then relaxed completely.
“Tell me if this isn’t—”
“It’s okay,” he said, cutting me off. His voice was low and a little ragged. Exhausted and something else I couldn’t quite read. “I like it. I haven’t been touched with any kind of tenderness in…a long time.”
I wanted to say I hadn’t either, because it felt like that. My brother was careful with me, but it was out of his overwhelming sense of duty, not because he wanted to be. But his tender, loving care was painful and unwelcome after all this time.
I wanted tenderness that didn’t come with a side of believing I was glass covered in spiderweb cracks and the softest blow would make me shatter. I didn’t want tenderness that came with the belief that I wasn’t strong. To have it given because the person believed it was the only way to handle me.
I took a breath and looked him in the eye.
He blinked slowly, his pupils wide, his cheeks slightly pink.
Then he leaned in a little closer, and I pressed my hands harder against the sides of his neck.
Touching him felt so fucking good. Emotions were rising in me I’d hoped to keep in check, but I couldn’t.
The universe had gifted me this, and in that moment, I had no idea what to do with it.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” I admitted. “I came here because I hoped to find you, and—god, that sounds so fucking creepy.”
He laughed and leaned into my touch. “Maybe, but I don’t know. I kind of like it. I think about you all the time, you know? I even looked you up once or twice, but I was…” He went quiet.
“What?”
Glancing to the side, he shrugged, and I squeezed down on his shoulders, almost as if I were assuring myself he was real. “I was afraid to find out that everything went the worst way it could go.”
“That I was dead?”
“Well. I figured the internet would have been losing their minds over that one, so no. But no. I was afraid you were, well…” He trailed off again, and I understood why. He didn’t want to say the words because it seemed cruel to people surviving and thriving with less mobility than I had.
But I couldn’t deny I’d felt the same way. I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in every night for just a little bit of strength back. For a little bit of feeling in my legs. A little more movement in my feet.