Chapter 8 #3
And bit by bit, those prayers were answered.
“I couldn’t walk for a couple of months, and my doctors weren’t sure that I ever would again.
At least not without major assistance. There was a lot of physical therapy and several surgeries to put pins in my spine to help stabilize it.
Some days, I feel like I’m more metal than I am bone, but…
it worked. About two weeks after the six-month anniversary of the accident, I took my first unassisted steps. ”
A smile flittered across his mouth. “I wish I’d been there to see it. Fuck, I…I should have checked up on you. I feel like an asshole for just leaving you there.”
My fingertips trailed down his arms, almost as if they were moving on their own.
Propriety told me I should stop myself. Ryan had saved me, yeah, but he was still a stranger.
And yet, I watched as my fingers moved lower—lower—until they were twining with his own.
His palms were warm, his fingers strong and unmarred, where mine were permanently calloused from years of cutting them on metal strings.
I heard him suck in a breath the moment we were holding hands, and his eyes searched my face. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but after a short forever, he smiled.
Fuck, how could a total stranger make me feel this way? I was a poet—a songwriter—but there were no words for the emotion burning in my chest.
“I wish I’d been able to remember your name, but…” I paused for a beat, trying to figure out what exactly I was trying to say. “I think I’m glad I didn’t see you again until now. I was a mess before all this. I was angry and taking it out on the people I loved.”
“That’s normal,” he said fiercely. “And I hope they understand that.”
“They do. I think.” I bowed my head. “Right after it happened, my ex showed up and tried to fire me from the band and the label. It…it took everything out of me. I wouldn’t have wanted you to see me that way.”
He was too quiet. Then, “Did you shove a crutch up his asshole? I don’t advocate for anything up there besides sex toys, but I’d make an exception for him.”
I stared, then laughed, leaning into him. “It was tempting. If I ever see him again, I’ll have my cane ready.”
He grinned, then lifted our joined hands and pressed his thumb against the tops of my fingers. “I like your laugh.”
My heart settled. “I like yours.”
He lifted my hand to his lips, grazing something like a kiss over my knuckles, and for a moment, I swore time stopped. I held as still as I could, terrified to shatter the moment. Everything he did was so…unthinking, like he was moving on instinct alone, and I didn’t ever want him to change.
“So,” he said after a heavy silence. “You came here to find me.”
I held in a sigh. “Yes, but I also came here to get away from my suffocating family. My brother’s been…
a lot since the accident. I’m mostly walking on my own, but he thinks a stiff breeze is going to shatter my spine.
And fuck, even if it did, I could learn to live with it.
But the last time I made noise about moving out, he had a full breakdown, and I had to calm him down before he had a damn cardiac event. ”
Ryan squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry.”
Turning just a little more toward him, I pulled our hands into my chest, then let him go, pressing his palm to my heart.
He stroked fingertips over my T-shirt. “I snuck away. I didn’t tell him I left because I knew he’d try to stop me or—god forbid—follow me.
I needed to get some fresh air and prove to myself that I could do this.
My sister-in-law is pregnant, and I want him to stop focusing on me and start focusing on his family.
I want to be able to move on without having to center his fear around my health. ”
I felt a little selfish for saying that because my brother did love me, and I was admitting this all to a man who had just lost his family. But Ryan didn’t look upset. He met my gaze with empathy, pressing his hand harder against my heart.
“I didn’t expect to find you. Not really,” I admitted. “And I thought if I did, maybe we’d say hi. That I’d get a chance to thank you. I didn’t expect to be here in your bed.”
He looked up at me, his eyes holding an earthy kind of glow from the light in the room. “I’m not going to pretend like I think you’re disappointed it got a bit more intimate than a quick hello.”
I snorted and fought the urge to hold his chin, lean in, and kiss him. Though I wasn’t sure that was off the table with the way he was looking back at me. “Not in the slightest. But I do wish the circumstances were better.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “You’ve been alone all this time. I’m glad you’re not here with anyone, but I wish you hadn’t been on your own to deal with everything your family put you through.”
“I wasn’t totally alone,” he said. His free hand rose, and he traced a touch around the ink I had decorating my arm.
He was such an intense contrast to me—tan where I was pale, blank where I was decorated, bony where I was thick.
I loved it. “My best friend and her fiancé are there every time I need someone to talk to. And I dated a little.”
An unwelcome rage flared in my chest, but I quickly swallowed it down. I had no right to give even one solitary fuck about who he’d spent his time with over the last year. But there was a possessive monster in my head when it came to him, and I didn’t even know it existed until this moment.
“Atlas,” he said quietly.
I realized I was grimacing, and I quickly schooled my face into something closer to neutral. “I don’t know what to say to that. I hope whoever it was made you feel less lonely.”
“Yeah, no. They weren’t thrilled about my teenage boy–style obsession with a rock singer.”
I frowned, then realized he was talking about me. “Oh my god.”
“I’m joking. Sort of. One of them did point out how many photos of you I had saved on my phone.
” He reached out and tugged on a lock of hair that had escaped the elastic band.
“This was a lot shorter in those photos. And your face was shaved.” He scratched his fingers over my seven-day-old scruff, making me shiver.
I felt my cheeks heat as I let him go to twist my hair up into a tighter bun.
His eyes widened a bit, and his pupils got larger.
Oh god, he was turned on? By the way I looked like a total disaster?
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I wanted to do something different. Something that didn’t remind me of the person I was before him. ”
“Raleigh,” Ryan said, like he was testing out the weight of the name.
I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “That’s not his real name, you know. He was jealous of mine. He wanted something that sounded unique.”
“Why’d he choose Raleigh?”
My lips twitched. “In third grade, that was the word he failed during the spelling bee.”
“You’re shitting me.”
My grin turned into a barely-restrained laugh. “Nope.”
“What a fucking tool. I mean, in third grade, I probably would have failed with that word too, but my god, let it go.”
Grinning, I leaned into him when suddenly the laughter between us fizzled out, and something heavier took its place. Something intense. Something wanting. We shared each other’s breath, and in that moment, a heartbeat.
Then he reached up and palmed my cheek. His touch was so careful. So soft. He blinked, lashes feathering downward, long and lush without a ton of product to make himself fit for the stage. Fuck, it was so different, and so, so much better than what I’d had with my ex.
“Am I reading this wrong?” he asked.
“No.”
“Can I—”
“Yes.”
He huffed, and his eyes lifted, searching mine. “You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“No, but I was hoping you were asking for a kiss. Or more. But whatever it is, Ryan, I’m yours.”
He swallowed thickly. I heard his throat catch, and then he cleared his throat. “I feel like I’ve been half in love with a ghost for a year. Which is ridiculous, you know? I mean, you probably had a thousand people thinking they were in love with the part of you that you shared onstage.”
He was wrong—but he also wasn’t. “It wasn’t thousands, but yeah. I did get some people who were…ah…a little lost with their feelings. I was like that too though. In middle school, I was absolutely convinced that Gavin Rossdale just needed to meet me, and he’d fall head over heels in love.”
“Wait, that guy from the ’90s alt-rock band?”
I snorted and shrugged. “Yep. And trust me, it’s embarrassing as fuck to admit that to you, but I’m saying it because I need you to know this feels different.
” I shifted away from him just so I could see his face properly.
His fingers grazed my jawline before they fell, landing in the open space between us, and I took his wrist, pressing my thumb into his palm.
“I don’t know what the fuck any of this means.
I don’t know why we met like this. I don’t have a clue why the universe put you next door to me.
But I felt something the night you saved me. ”
He let out a trembling breath. “Yeah?”
“It doesn’t make any sense, but right now, we have this, and I want to see where it goes without the world butting in.”
“Our own bubble,” he said, and I laughed.
“Yeah. A gorgeous, tropical bubble with blue water and seven days—”
“Five,” Ryan said quietly, then bit his lip. “I have five days.”
I felt a little crushed, robbed of more time with him.
But it was what it was. “Five days, then, where the real world has ceased to exist.” I closed my eyes, leaning forward until my forehead bumped his.
“I was going to spend the anniversary of a very terrible night on my own, hoping I’d get through it without completely breaking down.
And then the door to my room opened, and of all fucking people, you were there.
I don’t know if it means something. I don’t really believe in that kind of shit.
But I’m also not foolish enough to pretend like this isn’t important. ”
He was quiet for a long time, and then he touched my chin and lifted me away from him, his gaze locking onto mine. “Five days isn’t enough.”
“It is what it is. And what happens after is what happens after. But if my legs would cooperate right now, I’d get down on my knees and kiss the fucking ground at your feet.”
“You could kiss me instead,” he murmured.
Suddenly, I was profoundly aware of gravity because my body tried to lift off the bed and float above it. But I was pinned by the turn of the earth, by the universe, and by his gorgeous eyes. “I think that’s a fair compromise,” I told him.
His smile lit up his entire face, and he leaned in, touching my jaw again. “Yes?”
“Yes.”
I curled both hands around his jaw, held him tight, then leaned in and took the kiss I’d been desperate to have.