Chapter 14
Fourteen
ATLAS
Breakfast was quieter than I expected after Ryan and I put our joint feet down, and both Tarik and Hasan managed to corral our more enthusiastic family members and pull them away before anyone could ask any more invasive questions about what we were doing for the afternoon.
If it was just sex, I probably wouldn’t have cared so much. But it wasn’t. This thing with Ryan was so much more.
We’d only been here a short while, so it wasn’t like I could ask Ryan to make me deeper, bigger, more important promises. That wasn’t fair to either of us. But I wanted to talk to him about how I felt before everyone else cornered us and coerced us into revealing how we felt.
“So. Dinner,” Tollin said as the six of us started toward the hotel lobby. When I didn’t say anything, he grabbed my arm and urged me to hang back. Ryan glanced over his shoulder, but I nodded for him to go on without me.
“What do you want?” I asked my brother once everyone was out of earshot.
“Do you really think this is healthy?”
I stared at him.
“I’m not trying to be a dick or imply that you don’t know what you’re doing—”
“Yes, you are. I mean, maybe you’re not trying to be a dick, but just because I was hurt…”
“No,” he interrupted quickly. “This isn’t about your accident.
This is about the fact that right before you got hurt, you had a massive public breakup with the world’s biggest dickhead, who you’d been living with for years.
” His voice started to rise, and when I glared at him, he cleared his throat and lowered it.
“I just want to make sure that you’re being careful.
The bar Raleigh set is six feet beneath the crust of the earth. Anyone is better than him.”
“Ryan’s different,” I said.
“You’ve known him for two days. This could be some kind of…I forget what it’s called. Where you idolize the dude who saved you? Hero worship?”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I took a calming breath. He wasn’t wrong to be worried, but nothing I could say would make him understand what it felt like to be with Ryan. It wasn’t just what he’d done for me. It was who he was as a person.
“You knew you were going to marry Lyria the moment you saw her,” I told him. “Even though she hated your guts for the first two months you knew her.”
He bit his lip. “That was different.”
“How?”
“Because we’re the exception to the rule, dude. Everyone I know who dove headfirst into some relationship with a person they didn’t know had it end in tears.”
I stared for a beat. “Do you think you’re the only exception to that rule?”
“I—no. I’m just saying—”
“That you don’t trust my judgment because I was a young man with his head up his ass when I was charmed by Raleigh? You think I didn’t learn from that mistake?”
“You were with him for years,” he repeated.
I squeezed the handles on my crutches to give myself something to do that wasn’t punching him. “I was in a band. I was under a contract. I put up with his bullshit and stayed miserable because I thought it would be worth the money.”
Tollin was silent, and then he took a step back. “I get it.”
“I know you don’t get it, but I’d like for you to trust me. I’m not about to propose marriage here, Toll. I’m just trying to enjoy some time on a nice, tropical beach where I’m not being followed around with someone holding a net in case I fall.”
“I—oh. Right. You mean me.”
“I mean you.”
He flushed. “I didn’t think you’d resent me for the help I gave you.”
“I resent you for thinking that’s all I am now. And for believing that I couldn’t make any life work, no matter what it looked like.”
“Tarik already bitched me out about it,” he said with a soft sigh. “I get where I was a dick, okay? I just…I don’t know. I freaked out. You disappeared in the middle of the night, and Tarik refused to tell me where you were.”
“I did tell you!”
“After you were gone,” he snarled back. “And I’m obviously not in the minority for how I feel, here,” Tollin went on. “Your friend’s family did the same fucking thing.”
“Obviously, people have boundary issues. Maybe you can bond over it.”
He glanced away. “I just needed to see with my own two eyes that you’re okay. My ferry back is tomorrow so I can be with Lyria and Sadie for the new year. And Tarik is going home then too.”
Well, at least I wasn’t going to have two angry wives going after me for taking their husbands away from family. Not that I thought either of them would blame me, but still. The thought was vaguely terrifying.
“I hope it works out between you two,” Tollin said after a moment. “If you really want to make this work, anyway.”
“I don’t know. I feel like my life would be too much for him. I’m not ready to give up music just because I gave up on the band. I don’t want to overwhelm him.”
“You need to let him decide.” That was not advice I was expecting him to give me after he’d just implied I was making a huge mistake being here with Ryan, but I appreciated it because he wasn’t wrong. Ryan deserved a say.
The only thing that scared me was that Ryan had no idea what this life could be like.
Paparazzi was different now. The world had shifted to being stalked by people on cell phones, taking random shots of me shoveling food into my face or coming out of a festival porta-potty and making them viral on social media channels.
And the parasocial relationships people formed with me without my knowledge or consent would extend to Ryan. People would find out who he was, where he worked, what he dressed up as for Halloween in ’96.
There would be so little peace unless he went dark online and we pretended the rest of the world didn’t exist. And that would be a lot to ask of him. With Raleigh, we were in it together. We cut our teeth on the edge of fame hand in hand. He was a monster, but he got it in ways no one else could.
How could I ask Ryan to do that?
“Give him a chance,” Tollin said, like he was reading all of that off my face.
I raised a brow. “Now you’re defending him?”
“I’m asking you to be careful, but that doesn’t just mean protecting yourself from him. It also means not sabotaging something that could be very good because you’re afraid. You do that too, you know.”
I hated that he was right.
“Whatever.”
He laughed, then reached for me, careful of my crutches but less careful with the hug than he normally was. It made me feel a little better when he lifted me slightly off the ground and then let me fall back on my feet.
“Let me make it up to you.”
I lifted a brow. “Paying for my hotel bill?”
“Dude, you will have more money than me even if you never write another song again. Fuck off with that.”
I laughed and made a go-ahead gesture.
“Let me call a Realtor and get some places lined up for you to look at. Somewhere with enough miles between us I can’t just walk around the corner and let myself in.”
I burst into laughter. “Not a continent. Not even a state, but yeah. That could be helpful.”
He softened. “I do believe in you. I always have. But our parents…you know. They weren’t the most attentive. How many times did they see you while you were in rehab after the accident?”
“Mom twice,” I said. “Dad once.”
It was more than I’d expected. They didn’t want to deal with the reality of my condition. They were better now, of course, that I was back on my feet. But if I brought out the crutches, my mom swore she got hives, so she didn’t visit much.
“Sometimes it felt a little like we were all we had. Like if shit went sideways,” he said quietly, “I’d only have you. You know that the first time they met Sadie, she was ten months old.”
“What?” Tollin had always been the golden child.
“You were on tour, and you saw her three times before they bothered to book a flight to meet their only granddaughter.” He rubbed the back of his neck and shrugged. “So sue me if I get a little weird when it comes to what feels like my only real family.”
I reached for him this time, and he sagged into the second hug. “I’m not going anywhere, you know. I just want to figure out what my life is meant to look like after all this.”
“I get it. And I’m sorry. I’ll be better,” Tollin swore.
“Just have fun, okay? Go make best friends with Gracie and Hasan so if Ryan and I do figure this out, it won’t be weird at family gatherings.”
He laughed. “I think I can manage that.”
That’s a little bit of what I was afraid of, but there were worse things. I stepped back and watched Tollin speed-walk toward where Tarik was waiting for him, and it was then that I caught Ryan hovering near the back doors that led out toward the beach.
My feet were still sluggish, but leaning heavily on my crutches, I made it to him quickly and let out a sigh when he curled fingers around the back of my neck and stole a quick kiss.
“Don’t want to get too public in case anyone recognizes you,” he murmured.
“Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?” I asked.
His eyes widened. “Embarra—Atlas, why would you think that?”
“You don’t seem to like kissing me in public.
” I hated that it bothered me, but Raleigh had been the same way.
If we were onstage, it was fair game, but the moment we weren’t performing, all affection fizzled into quiet resentment bordering on hatred.
And if people caught us having PDA on camera, I always paid for it later.
Ryan gripped me by the back of the neck again, this time laying a deep, possessive kiss on me. “Nothing about you is embarrassing,” he murmured against my lips. “I just didn’t want someone to take a photo of you and make up a bunch of rumors.”
“Like what?” I asked, slightly breathless. “That I’m on a tropical island with a hot-as-fuck teacher, making out like we’re horny teens?”
He blinked, then burst into laughter. “I guess that’s fair.” The moment sobered quickly. “But I know you’ve been kind of…guarding your privacy since the accident.”
He wasn’t wrong. When the truth was told about me and how I was living my life, I wanted it to come from me.
But I also wasn’t afraid for someone to get a sneaky pic of me and Ryan. Let the world see that I was happy.
That Raleigh hadn’t ruined me.
That the accident hadn’t broken me.
That I was better than I ever had been before.
“Come on. Let’s get back to the room.”
Ryan’s brows went up. “You don’t want to go do resort things?”
“That can wait,” I said, my voice dropping. His pupils widened as he caught my meaning. “I have better things to do with you.”
“Race you there,” he said. “First one to the room gets to suck a dick!”
I burst into laughter when, instead of hanging back to let me win, he took off faster than I could ever be.