Chapter 18
Eighteen
ATLAS
Time passed in a blur with Gracie, Hasan, Tollin, and Tarik before they had to take the ferry back, and it was nicer than I expected it to be. The conversation stayed away from heavy topics, and Tollin did nothing more than pull me aside and ask me if I was going to be okay the next night.
“I am,” I told him, squeezing his shoulders. “I’m not alone.”
“No,” he said, his gaze cutting over to Ryan, who was sandwiched between Hasan and Gracie in a tight hug. “You’re not.”
Tarik apologized one last time, but I shook my head and smiled at him. “I’m glad you came. Next year will be different.”
The mood was subdued after they left, but it wasn’t the lingering quiet.
It was what tomorrow meant. Ryan took my hand and led me back toward the room, but we didn’t go up the walkway.
We headed down the beach and lay back on a shared lounger to watch as the sky began to darken.
The sun didn’t set as early this close to the equator, but the nights were still longer, which I didn’t mind.
His hand slipped into mine. “Tollin asked me to pay closer attention to you. I think he’s freaking out about tomorrow.”
I took a breath, but I couldn’t bring myself to be annoyed. “I feel fine right now,” I told him, playing with his fingers. They curled over mine, stroking lines from fingertip to palm. “But I don’t know if I’m just trying to convince myself it’s okay.”
“I get it.” He lifted my hand and kissed my wrist. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“My feelings or the accident, or…”
“Any of it,” he said with a small laugh. “I mean, I know you have therapy, but I’m a good listener if you need it.”
I didn’t know what I needed. But there was something to be said about the fact that he’d been there that night. That he’d been the one holding me. I pressed his palm over my heart and turned toward him. “I could hear you the whole time. Even when I couldn’t open my eyes.”
“You—oh.” He swallowed. “I probably said some ridiculous stuff, huh?”
I laughed. “No. No, you kept me from losing it. I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t feel my legs, and there was so much pain. I knew you knew something was wrong, and you didn’t sugarcoat it, but you didn’t let me panic.”
“I was freaking out about the fact that the man I’d just watched sing onstage was now in the back of my ambulance,” Ryan admitted. “When I snuck into the bar to get Gracie her fucking Diet Coke, I was so pissed. I walked out of there feeling different.”
“Bad different?”
He looked up at me, his face a mask of shock. “Are you serious? Have you heard yourself sing?”
“Too many times,” I said dryly.
Shaking his head, he kissed the side of my jaw. “I was struggling with so much doubt and self-hatred for giving my parents what they wanted in spite of the fact that it made me miserable. Your music sparked a courage in me that I didn’t realize I had.”
“Oh,” I breathed out. I hadn’t realized.
“Then you spoke to me in the ambulance. You made me promise not to give up on myself. I took that with me.”
I hadn’t realized that either. “There are parts I don’t remember, and I wish I had them back.”
He drew a touch over the side of my neck, then down my chest. The weight of his hand was comforting, and the heat from his body soothed my raw, frayed nerves. “I remember enough for both of us, I think.”
I couldn’t help a small laugh. “That’s probably true. I just remember feeling very safe. Like no matter what I learned after I got to the hospital, if you thought I was going to be okay, I would be.”
“And you were right,” he said. “You are.”
I pushed up on my elbow and met his gaze. “And you were right. You are brave.”
He yanked me into a kiss, letting me press him into the lounger as our tongues danced, lush and heavy. We kissed for a long, slow moment before he pulled back, knocking his forehead against mine. “So, tonight. New Year’s Eve…”
I closed my eyes. “Yes?”
“How do you want to spend it?” He eased back, though he kept my hand, holding my palm against his chest as he drew lines over the top of my arm.
“For years, I had this…superstition, I guess.” It had been a long while since I’d thought about this.
For the last decade, I’d spent my New Year’s Eve playing a show, then passing out on my hotel bed or in the tour bus while Raleigh went and got shit-faced with groupies and came back smelling of a stranger’s cologne and come.
A decade of pretending like I didn’t care.
“Tell me,” Ryan said quietly.
I took a breath. “That no matter what you did, you’d always spend the next year exactly how you ended the last one.”
“Like with your ex?”
I shrugged. “I was resigned to his bullshit at that point. I told myself I didn’t care until I couldn’t anymore.”
“So last year…”
“I was afraid,” I confessed. “I didn’t think about it right away.
New Year’s Day, I was unconscious, but sometime in…
god, maybe February?” I bit my lip, but those memories were so hazy.
“I remember being in PT and shit-scared because I wasn’t making any real progress.
My legs were still numb. I couldn’t stand, I could barely move my toes.
And I thought, fuck, that’s how I spent the night.
I was riding in the ambulance with you, unable to move my legs, so nothing’s going to change.
Then I started walking again. Feeling started coming back. So I thought maybe I was wrong.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, his brows furrowed.
“But now I’m realizing that’s not exactly how I spent the last day of the year.
” I glanced down at my toes, which were coated in sand, then at his, which matched.
“I spent it with you. I spent it with a total stranger, and we convinced each other to be brave and to live. And for all that the year was hard, I think we did just that.”
He laughed softly and leaned in, kissing my jaw. “I think so too.”
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t bring this up until after tonight—until all the weight of the anniversary had passed. But I couldn’t. “I want to spend tonight with you because that’s how I want the rest of my year to go.”
“Atlas—”
“I know that’s probably a lot. I mean, we technically just started getting to know each other, and there’s a chance that the way we feel—the way I feel,” I amended, because I didn’t want to assume, “is…altered by being here.”
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“But I feel like I have hope for the first time in a long time. And I want this to be real.”
He linked our fingers together and squeezed. “So do I.”
I rolled onto my side to face him. “I’m not exactly a catch right now. I’m jobless. I’m technically homeless—”
“Oh my god. You can’t say that. You’re on a tropical island with probably seven figures in some investment account somewhere.”
I flushed. It was true. I’d gotten an expensive apartment, but other than that, I never spent money.
I sent it to my brother and his family when they needed or wanted it.
I sent it to my parents just because. I spent it on charities and food banks—whatever helped me feel a little less like a man who didn’t deserve wealth.
But that was it. I was a simple person. I didn’t necessarily want fame. I just wanted to be heard.
So he was right. I did have more money than I knew what to do with, and fuck, that felt so empty.
“I’m just saying, I don’t know what I want the rest of my life to look like. I have offers from agents and record labels asking me to go solo. I have a thousand songs I want to write, and I want to spend time figuring out who I am outside of my past.”
Ryan cupped my cheek and met my gaze. “There’s no shame in that.”
“But I’d like to not do it alone. I’m not proposing,” I said quickly, though the truth was, I probably would if I knew he’d say yes. “I’m just asking if maybe we can try to make it work.”
“I can’t move,” he told me softly. “I don’t love my job, but I need to start somewhere, and leaving now—”
“No.”
He flinched back a bit. “No?”
“Sorry, fuck.” I was such a mess right now, Jesus. “I mean, you don’t have to leave anything. You don’t have to give anything up. I’m saying that I can be anywhere. I’m sort of free-falling right now.”
Ryan blinked, then surged in to take another kiss. It felt…desperate, almost. Frantic. “Do you want me to catch you?” he murmured against my mouth.
My kiss back was the answer.
Because yes. God yes.
Please, yes.
We left the conversation at the beach, heading inside to order dinner.
We showered, then put on the impossibly soft hotel robes before taking the room service tray out to the back deck.
Off in the distance, I could see people milling around the beach.
There was faint music playing, lights, and not too far from where we were, someone was setting up a fireworks display.
It was a very, very different mood from last year. Even before the accident, the snow had been falling in a thick blanket, the roads iced over, the people more subdued than usual. There was a heaviness to it that was starkly absent now.
“Move in with me,” Ryan said.
I jolted. Neither one of us had said a word in a long while. We’d been enjoying the comfortable silence and each other as we ate. And that was not how I expected him to start the conversation up again.
“Um. Ryan—”
“Or get a place near me. I’m pretty sure you could bribe my neighbor to break her lease if you pay enough.”
I burst into nervous laughter. “Ryan.”
He smiled at me, clearly nervous but braver than I would have been in this moment. “I want to end this year the way I want to spend the next one, and that means with you. I don’t care if we’re neighbors or roommates or…fuck. I don’t know. Lovers. Though I hate that word.”
I snorted. “It doesn’t flow off the tongue nicely, does it?”
“No, but it’s better than what we had been before you came here to find me.”
Which was nothing. A memory, at best. A stranger I’d never see again at worst.