14. Fourteen
Fourteen
C laire had threatened to drag him out of his condo if he didn’t join their friend group at the blood bar tonight. Ryker had made a counteroffer: he would enjoy a night out as his reward for cracking the toughest case he’d had this year. Of course, she’d refused.
“Tonight, Maddox. If you don’t show up, we’ll come for you.”
He hated admitting it even to himself, but maybe a break would help him think better when he returned to the documents he’d been scouring for three days and three nights. Leslie’s words about resting for his own sake, seeing that the world didn’t end that day weeks ago after he let himself sleep before his work was done… It had all sprouted roots deep inside him, made him rethink his need to push himself beyond his limits. Maybe…maybe he was more than the sum of his accomplishments. Maybe he was a person who was allowed to take a break and see friends.
He got in his car and started driving, and he was almost to the bar when his phone buzzed from his car’s center console. He swiped to accept the call and set it back in its place. He was already smiling. Regardless of mental fatigue and mathematical annoyance, he couldn’t take a call from Leslie without smiling.
“Have a good time with Hannah?”
“Ryker.” Unshed tears strained her voice.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“We have to talk.”
“Are you okay? Are you safe?”
“I’m safe. I’m not hurt or anything like that. But I’m not okay.”
He turned into a bank parking lot, long since closed for the evening, and shut off his car. He would sit here as long as she needed him. But Leslie had gone quiet.
“What do we need to talk about?”
“Us. We have to talk about us.”
Frozen panic gripped his chest. He didn’t breathe. At all. He kept his voice calm and open, but it took every ounce of will he had. “I’m listening, Leslie.”
“Long distance isn’t going to work. Not long-term.”
He’d worked this puzzle as best he could, but pitching his solution to Leslie after dating barely two months had seemed potentially off-putting, so he’d kept it to himself and continued ironing out the details. But now wasn’t the time to pitch either, not while she was so upset. So instead he only said, “I agree.”
“I knew you would.”
“We can work on a plan.”
“No. We can’t.”
The cold fist squeezing his chest seemed to grow claws. He rested his forehead on the steering wheel. His hands curled tightly at his sides.
“I’m sorry,” Leslie said. “I thought I’d do anything for you, Ryker. I thought I’d even move to Virginia. But I wouldn’t be myself. I wouldn’t be the same artist or the same person, and—and I’ve tried to talk myself into doing it anyway, but I can’t.” She heaved a hard, dry sob. “I can’t.”
Ryker fought to regain his own calm. She hadn’t said she didn’t love him. His fists opened a little. He drew in a ragged breath that sounded weak as a human’s.
She said, “I know I’m hurting you, and I’m so, so sorry. But the only way for me to let go of Harmony Ridge is to become someone else. It’s like I’m being torn in half just thinking about moving away.”
The tears were rising in her voice, threatening to break free. Ryker picked up his phone from the console and cradled it in his hands as if he could comfort her this way.
“We’re going to figure this out, Leslie.”
“There’s nothing to figure out. I won’t ask you to do something I’m not able to do. It would be wrong, and—and over time we’d resent each other. Because that’s what always happens when you give up too many pieces of yourself to make the other person happy.”
“When did I ask you to give up pieces of yourself?”
Shoot, he didn’t mean to snap. He nearly crushed the phone by accident, a mistake he hadn’t made since he was sixteen years old. He dropped it into his lap and rested his forehead on the wheel again.
“You haven’t yet,” she said.
“Yet? I’m never going to do that. Not ever.”
“I know you believe that now, but if someone’s going to move, it has to be me.”
“I’ve never said or implied that, because I’ve never thought it.”
“We both know you can’t move here. You’d shrivel up. You love your city the way I love Harmony Ridge.”
He did love it here. He loved his condo, loved his family and friends, loved his work and all the contacts he’d established locally that ensured he was never between contracts. He loved the walkable areas downtown, the vibrant vampire community’s many gathering spaces. But there was no reason he couldn’t have everything he loved. No reason at all, unless—unless he’d fooled himself this whole time.
“Don’t do this,” he said, and in his own ears his voice sounded…dead.
“We have to be realistic, Ryker. There’s no way around the problem.”
“So you’re breaking up with me.” She had to say it. If she wanted this, she had to say it. “Leslie?”
“I…I’m…”
She didn’t surrender to the tears; but instead of them, a high, musical keening sounded from the phone. Ryker threw open the car door and got out. He had to make distance from the sound. It throbbed in his ears and in his heart, which felt as though someone had torn it from his chest and stomped on it. He stood half-bent, one hand braced on the roof of the car. He curled his fingers around the edge of the roof and almost left dents in the shape of his fingers.
Over the next few minutes, Leslie’s soft cry faded. At last she whispered, “I…I think I should hang up now.”
“No.” He wasn’t doing this right. He had to fight harder to keep her, to tell her, to show her. He had to. “Don’t leave me, Leslie, please don’t. Please don’t.”
“I have to. I’m so, so sorry.”
The call ended.
Ryker fell to his knees on the blacktop and rocked back and forth. He lost track of time as he huddled there. He’d been wrong. Falling for Leslie had softened him, warped the steel. He should have known better; no, he did know better. No excuse. Jacqueline had shown him, and now Leslie was showing him.
He wasn’t worth fighting for, wasn’t worth keeping.
This fall hurt so much more than any other kind. He’d rather plunge over the edge of a mountain and break all his bones than fall like this—in love but not worth it, not really wanted.
Wow. He was pathetic.
He got up from his shrunken posture on the ground. He got into his car and turned back toward home.
He dove into his work with a strangely numb aggression. His headache grew. An hour passed. His phone buzzed and buzzed with calls from his friends. But none of it mattered. He was working. He was accomplishing. He was doing the thing that made him matter.
He smelled the vehicle chock-full of vampires when it turned onto his street. Freaking vampires, what were they thinking?
He’d left the door unlocked. It opened to admit every last one of them. Mackey, Philippa, Nova, Logan, and even Claire. She’d made someone cover for her at the bar. Well, as the owner she could do that.
“Ryker!” Logan hollered at a volume to make all of them wince.
They stampeded into his study one after the other and stood around his desk in a half-circle. The eyes of his friends were flashing jewel tones. They stared at him with varying combinations of relief, worry, and anger—all except Mackey, who as usual appeared merely intrigued. The anger was mostly Claire.
“You said you were coming,” Claire snapped.
“I’m working,” he said.
“So you lied to get me temporarily off your back? I warned you we’d come for you, dude.”
“I need to work.”
“That’s the opposite of what you need. You look sick, actually sick.”
“Go away,” Ryker said.
The twins moved to either side of him and crouched to get good looks at his face. “Ryker,” Nova said, and Logan said as if finishing her sentence, “Talk to us, man.”
Ryker gave them a glare that held nothing back to protect friends. He couldn’t knock them unconscious as he could humans, but a vampire’s gaze was potent against his own kind when he wanted it to be. The siblings flinched and backed away.
Claire brought her fist down on his desk with a force shy of cracking the wood. “What in the world is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. Get out. All of you.”
“Nah.” Mackey leaned in and met Ryker’s glare without a blink. “Claire’s right. Something’s wrong. So spill it, because we’re going nowhere.”
“Then sit here and watch me work. I don’t care.”
He didn’t care about anything. Only about his work. He was good at that. He wouldn’t fail at that. No more failing. No more falling.
“You’re so pathetic, Ryker.” The memory of Jacqueline’s voice was so visceral, it seemed her specter had joined them in the room. Ryker shuddered hard.
“Hey,” Philippa said. She stepped around Nova to stand beside Ryker and rest a hand on his shoulder, and her light touch tried to break him, but he wouldn’t let it. Steel. Toughen up. “Come on, tell us.”
No. He stared at his computer screen. He scrolled the document in front of him, but he couldn’t see the formulas he’d plugged in, couldn’t add two plus two as his head pounded.
“Leslie,” he whispered.
He shouldn’t have spoken her name. The moment he did, all the energy drained from his body, from his limbs. He folded forward in his chair, pressed his palms to his burning eyes.
“What about Leslie?” Claire said.
“We broke up.”
The words physically hurt. He couldn’t think, could only feel no matter how hard he tried to stop feeling.
“Oh,” Philippa said with a gentle texture behind her voice that nearly brought him to tears. “Ryker, honey. Tell us what happened.”
He did. They listened.
“And then what?” Logan blurted, crossing his arms over his chest. “You called her back, right?”
“No,” Ryker said. “I…I came home to work.”
“For crying out loud, man. Call her.”
Ryker lifted his head. “You weren’t listening. I can’t fix it.”
“It’s not like you to give up. Ever. So why aren’t you fighting for her?” Mackey was watching him with his usual focus, midnight-blue eyes that shone almost black, obsidian when he was engrossed in probing the whys of the universe. He looked like that now, in fact. As though Ryker’s devastation were something to be dissected.
“She hung up on me,” Ryker said. “It’s not worth it. I’m not worth it.”
Crap. He’d said that last part out loud.
Instead of calling him on it, Philippa said, “She thinks she’s stuck in a long-distance relationship forever. That’s why she hung up, Ryker. But you have a solution, honey. You’ve been mulling the long-distance problem since you met her, right? You were just waiting for the right time to share your thoughts on it.”
He nodded. His chest still felt empty and all twisted up. Had his heart given a single beat since Leslie said she was sorry, gave a final sob, and hung up?
“Ryker, come on,” Logan said. “Call her.”
“I don’t think she wants me to,” Ryker whispered.
A low murmuring hiss came from every last one of them. It was enough to pull him up from the quagmire he couldn’t seem to shake. He opened his eyes and met theirs—Mackey’s flashing blue-black, Logan and Nova’s bright teal that gave away their status as siblings, Philippa’s pale purple washed to mother-of- pearl in her distress for a friend, and Claire’s deep purple-blue glittering with challenge.
“What?” Ryker managed.
“Leslie is not your ex,” Nova said slowly and clearly.
Ryker hadn’t gotten a vote when the five of them unanimously banned Jacqueline’s name from friend get-togethers. All five had expressed various degrees of concern or alarm toward Jacqueline when he’d first brought her along to a gathering.
“She just seems like a mean girl. I don’t know how else to say it, but I’m afraid she’s too mean for you, honey.”
“I don’t trust her, man. Something’s wrong with y’all, between y’all.”
“It doesn’t feel right when she’s around. I think you should be careful.”
“Are you sure you’re happy with her? Does she make you feel safe and happy?”
Claire had been the strongest Jacqueline denouncer of them all. “That woman is a shark, Ryker. She’s going to hurt you.”
“I know Leslie isn’t Jacqueline,” he said, breaking their rule and earning hisses around the room. “But…”
“But your brain and your body forgot,” Mackey said with all the confidence of a professional psychologist. “So we’re reminding you.” He gestured to Ryker’s phone sitting face-down on the desk. “Call your girlfriend. Now.”
“I can’t.”
Philippa slipped from the room and came back in seconds with a blood bag. She tore the seal and held it out. “Ryker, sip on this. I think you need it.”
He knew the theory, of course: after a physical injury or emotional shock, a small amount of blood could fortify a vampire in pain. He wasn’t in pain; he was tough. Yet his hand reached out and took the bag, and he took a small sip. His headache receded almost to nothing. His mind cleared, and he saw the absurdity of ignoring his friends, standing them up, telling them to leave when his distress must be obvious. He’d never leave one of them alone in his condition.
He sipped again, and his twisting chest loosened, just a little.
“Sorry,” he said. “I…I can’t believe y’all piled into Mackey’s SUV for this.”
“Of course we did, you idiot,” Claire said.
“Sorry for the glare,” he said to the twins, and they nodded. Apology accepted, no grudges among friends. Not these friends anyway.
“Now,” Mackey said flatly, “for the love of logic, will you please call your girlfriend.”
Ryker pushed to his feet and scooped up his phone. Five pairs of jewel-tone eyes watched his every move.
“Okay, listen,” Ryker said. “I’m going to call her. Thanks to all y’all. But I need privacy for this. Go back to your drinks and wait for me. I’ll come after I talk to her.”
“Will you, though?” Claire said.
“It’s a promise. However this goes, I’ll meet you there.”
He waited until Mackey’s vehicle was no longer in scent or sound range, and then he tapped his phone screen to send a video call. But…wait. Stop for a minute. Think through everything Leslie had actually said, not what he had heard through his panic.
She couldn’t give up her mountains for him. Of course not. No one who loved her would ask her to.
She couldn’t become someone else for him. Of course not. No one who loved her…
And there it was. He finally saw what had happened between him and Jacqueline. Unlike Leslie, Jacqueline had wanted to be his everything, insisted on it, and claimed he should be hers too. For a while he had done his best to oblige her. He had tried to empty himself for her, tried to become who she said she wanted at any cost to his health, his sense of self. When his hollow insides ached and when the whole of him wasn’t enough to fill the bottomless hole inside her, he had blamed himself. When she’d told him he wasn’t enough, he had believed her.
And when Leslie had told him she couldn’t be the emptying one, he had heard Jacqueline’s voice instead of Leslie’s. No matter what was actually said, he heard that he wasn’t enough, wasn’t worth keeping around.
Everything between him and Jacqueline had been wrong. Leslie was right: becoming someone else to make anyone happy was wrong. Sure, he would fail in the long run, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that he’d be throwing himself away. He would never want Leslie to throw herself away for him, so he must never do it for her.
“Okay,” he said to his quiet study, his file folders and his big mahogany desk and his bookcase. “Okay.”
He sent a video call to his girlfriend. Not ex. Girlfriend. Fixing this wouldn’t cost his entire self, wouldn’t cost him a thing. Time to fix it.