Chapter 15
Fifteen
RYAN
For a short while, I thought the presence of Gracie and Hasan, added to Atlas’s brother and friend, was going to ruin everything.
But we spent half the morning with Atlas sucking me off in the room without a care in the world, and the second half at the pool with drinks and an endless flow of whatever snack looked good on the appetizer menu.
We agreed to go without our phones, which meant if the other four needed something, they’d have to track us down.
It felt oddly indulgent, almost like we were on another planet. I’d never in my life wanted to be cut off from the few people I cared about, but now I was reluctant to go back to the room and check to see if anything had gone wrong.
“I’m going to shower,” Atlas said as I slung the beach bag over one of the chairs. “I’m going to get properly clean, so you have to stay out.”
I might have been insulted if every shower we’d taken together so far hadn’t led to us getting so distracted we neglected behind our ears and in between our ass cheeks. I kissed Atlas as he dropped his crutches against the wall, and he kissed me back.
“Enough,” he said when I started to get a little hard. “This is getting kind of ridiculous, and I’m going to run out of Viagra if we keep this up.”
I wouldn’t apologize. We had so little time together. Each minute that passed felt heavy. Each hour that went by was a vicious reminder that this would all, eventually, be over.
I wanted to fill every single moment with Atlas.
But a shower was necessary, and I would need one after him before we did dinner with everyone else. The ocean was a good way to wash off all the evidence of what we’d been doing, but I was pretty sure we smelled faintly of come and sweat at this point.
And I’d left those days behind in my teenage years.
Flopping on the couch, I pulled my phone off the charger as I heard the shower go on, and I jumped on Instagram.
Gracie and Hasan had uploaded a bunch of photos of their tour.
They’d gone snorkeling, had seen starfish, and had gotten a video of a dolphin pod.
I could see the resort in the distant background, and I felt a little bad for skipping out on it.
If this had been any other time—any other vacation—I might have had serious FOMO. But not now. Not when I had such little time with Atlas.
I needed to talk to him about it. I needed to figure out if this was going to end the moment we walked out of the hotel doors for the last time. My flight was sooner than his, so my countdown was shorter.
Swallowing past a lump in my throat, I tapped my email icon and began to scroll. I had several from the school, which I refused to acknowledge until I was back on duty, and more spam than I cared to see.
And just when I was about to exit, I saw an email with my brother’s name as the sender.
Callum.
Subject: You should be here…
My heart began to hammer in my chest. It was obviously sent to just me. There was no one else cc’d on the form. This was a pointed email for my eyes.
I couldn’t bring myself to believe any of them regretted not having me along for the trip. They had never wanted me. Not once in my life. How could it possibly be different now? What I really needed to do was delete the damn thing.
What I did instead was open it because I was still a fucking glutton for punishment when it came to my family.
Ryan,
Please enjoy the photos of the winter vacation.
You could have been in them if you hadn’t been so stubborn.
I don’t know how you sleep at night with the way you broke mom’s heart.
You have no idea how much you hurt her. There was no reason for you to do what you did, and I hope you can find it in you to ask for forgiveness someday.
You know what you have to do, and you’d be welcomed back.
Hope to hear from you soon,
-Callum
My vision was hazy, and my hearing was overwhelmed by the sound of my heart beating in my ears. But I clicked on the photos and looked through them until my eyes were too blurry to see anything properly.
They all looked happy, though I wasn’t sure that was ever the right word for it. They looked smug, that was for goddamn sure. Each of them was grinning at the camera with looks on their faces like they knew I was going to see it.
Like it was for me.
To hurt me.
But while I waited for the feeling of pain to hit me in the chest the way it always did, it didn’t come. There was a sting—resentment, anger for the fact that they could be so casually cruel for no reason other than they enjoyed it—but I wasn’t brought to my knees.
“Ryan?”
I glanced up. My vision was still a little foggy. “Hey.”
“You’re crying.”
I swiped my hands over my cheeks. I was. I hadn’t realized it, but it was more cathartic than anything. I said nothing as Atlas walked over and dropped beside me, gently taking the phone out of my hands. He kept the screen pointed down.
“Is it Gracie and Hasan?”
I laughed, then sniffed. “No. No. It’s…” My throat felt thick for a second. God, why did it have to hurt at all? Why did it have to bother me so fucking much.
His hand cupped my cheek and drew my gaze up. “Talk to me.”
I didn’t want to say it aloud, so I took the phone back from him, opened the message, and gestured for him to read it. I watched his face as he did—the journey of confusion, which melted into a small frown, which turned into a fire in his eyes.
Dropping the phone on his lap, he took a deep breath. “Hateful.”
I’d never thought of it with that word before, but yeah. That’s what it felt like. Hateful. Swiping my hands down my face, I took a deep, cleansing breath. “They don’t matter.”
“No, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. And believe me, I get it. I stopped loving my ex years ago, but he was still able to hold a knife and sink it deeper because he knew me. He knew where my tender spots were.”
“I just hope it eventually stops bothering me at all,” I confessed.
The smile he offered was soft and careful. “Want me to help you forget?”
“Oh.” Yes, I wanted that. I just didn’t think I could perform the way he was suggesting. “I, ah…I mean. I want to, but I’m not sure I can—you know—when I’m feeling like this? God, I’m so sorry. I—”
“Ryan.” His voice was soft but firm. He took my chin between his fingers and met my gaze. “That is not what I meant.”
I blinked at him.
“Stand up and come with me.”
With the way his voice was pitched and the way his order felt a bit like affection, it was impossible not to obey.
Twenty honey-slow minutes later, we were standing at the edge of a cave with several tide pools around it. Atlas was behind me, using my waist and one crutch to keep himself properly balanced, but he was steady on his legs as we carefully made our way across the bumpy rock bed.
“A guy at the desk gave me this brochure when I came downstairs my first night to get a couple towels,” Atlas said quietly, his voice just audible over the waves lapping at the pools. “He said these rocks are actually just really hard-packed sand.”
I nodded. I knew exactly where we were, and it was saying something that Atlas had picked this place to help me forget my family. It was the place I had used myself to forget them when they were being terrible.
“I used to spend all my time here as a kid. I could literally sit here and watch all the little creatures all day and not get bored.”
He hummed and leaned in, kissing the side of my neck. “I could picture that.”
“Can you picture me getting stuck there,” I said, pointing to a very tall rock with carvings all over the side, “when the tide came in? Because that happened twice. The first time, my mom made my brother use a pool noodle to wade out and get me. The second time, she left me there.”
He stiffened, then sighed. “Were you scared?”
“Not really. I kind of hoped that they’d get tired and leave me, and I’d get to live out here and survive on the fish I caught.”
He snorted and shook his head. “There’s a book like that.”
“I know.” I knew the book. I was obsessed with it growing up. “I always read it on the way here and hoped that it would become me. I’m not sure how many kids fantasized about their parents abandoning them on an island.”
He said nothing. But really, there was nothing to say to that. It was fucked-up. I was fucked-up. He tightened his arm around me and hooked his chin over my shoulder.
“Sorry,” I said after a beat. “We’re supposed to be forgetting.”
Atlas hummed, then reached out a hand and pointed. “Crab.”
It was a pretty decent-sized one climbing out of one of the pools. It meandered along like it didn’t have a care in the world. It was weird to be envious of it, but I was, though I wouldn’t trade the feeling of Atlas pressed against me for the fucking world.
“Can you make it up to that rock?” I asked when the crab dipped back into the water.
He hummed and tilted his head to the side. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Good.” I took his hand, stopping only a few feet away to lean down and pick up an empty, broken piece of a clamshell before leading him the rest of the way.
The rocks were bumpy but relatively flat, and the larger rock had something like steps formed from people climbing up to the top for years and years. I went first, then offered him a hand, which he took to make his way toward the top, leaving his crutch at the bottom.
There was a flat space that overlooked the side of the cave and the ocean. It wasn’t high up, but it felt like it from that perch.
“Gorgeous,” he said softly.
I nodded, then looked down. There were names carved over names carved over names. There wasn’t enough space for all the new people, but it didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.
Childish scrawl at the very edge, the R a little shaky, the YAN attempting to be something like cursive because I’d been practicing it in school. Scooting over, I traced the letters with the tip of my finger.
Back then, I hadn’t realized how awful my home life was. At least, not externally. Something deep inside me might have known that I was in a bad place because I had been so fucking sad as a child. But I hadn’t realized it until it was almost too late.
“That’s you, isn’t it?”
I glanced over my shoulder and, for a moment, got lost in Atlas’s eyes. They were so pretty. Light brown with a black ring around the irises. He shifted closer and hooked his chin on my shoulder as I turned my gaze out back toward the ocean.
“I was eight when I put my name here. I was learning cursive in school.”
Atlas huffed a soft laugh against my ear. “Your handwriting was a lot better than mine back then.” He traced a touch down my arm, then plucked the broken shell out of my hand.
Clearly, he understood why I’d brought it. Shifting to the side, he moved around until he found a blank space at the top of the stone. It likely had names on it before, but the weather wasn’t very kind to people leaving their marks in packed sand.
Stretching his legs out, he sat sideways, then began to carve. I watched as his arm moved, an almost hypnotic pattern, up and down, up and down, as he drew the line for the A. Then the T. Eventually, the LAS.
He didn’t stop there.
He drew the smallest heart, and beneath that, my name. A curvy R, a looping Y, and the A N almost like a punctuation.
Atlas-heart-Ryan.
I couldn’t hope that was true. It would be too much. Too wild. Too…wrong, wouldn’t it? After all, we hardly knew each other. The feeling in my chest was impossible to ignore, but it had to be something other than love.
Everything told me it didn’t happen this way. That it couldn’t.
That love like this wasn’t lasting.
But when I wrapped my arms around his middle and took a deep breath of the scent that was so uniquely him, I thought that maybe it could be. Not the love a couple shared after being together and growing together for years, but the first tiny, flickering flames of what could be.
“I want to stay here,” Atlas murmured, setting the shell aside and pressing his hand on top of mine.
“I think you’d regret that after the first big storm.”
“Don’t be logical. Let me have my fantasy.”
I laughed and leaned harder against him.
“Fine. Have your fantasy. But…” I hesitated.
We’d both been pretty careful not to talk about the future—or what was going to come after all this.
Only, I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish the week without some kind of idea whether or not he wanted to see me again.
I could guess, and I’d probably be right.
But I was also afraid.
“But what?” he pressed when I didn’t speak again.
I opened my mouth, then closed it and took a deep breath. “It’s not important.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a lie.”
I bowed my head against him and closed my eyes. “You have your fantasy. For now, let me have this little lie.”
“Only if you promise we will talk about it later.”
“Deal.”
He shifted away from me, but only to turn so he could take my face between his hands and kiss the breath straight out of my lungs. This moment, this space between us, felt like everything.
It felt like family. And home. And a future.
It had hope and promise, speaking for me in the silence while I was too afraid to speak for myself. But I couldn’t get the words out—not to ask if he felt the same, and not to ask if he would be willing to try.