Chapter Seven
Present - Ryder
A DREAM THAT isn’t a dream. Because she’s really here.
Evie had actually pinched herself earlier, needing to be sure.
I required no reassurance, being well acquainted with how she’d look in a dream. My mind has been doing her the disservice for as long as we’ve been apart. Coming face to face with her earlier, watching the sun set her skin aglow and her vanilla scent curling around me, there was no question she was the real thing.
And now we’re casually sitting at Starbucks, as if the dark, shadowed world I’ve been living in didn’t just crumble out from underneath my all-black chucks. Warning bells peal at the back of my mind, that painfully realistic part of me shouting, reminding me what losing her again will cost. But right now, I’m going to pretend that I’m a regular guy at Starbucks, one with a chance.
For the two orphans slammed together by cruel fate, I’ll allow us this.
For a little while.
Damn the consequences.
“Care to fill in the blanks for me?” Evie takes another sip of the vanilla cream cold brew I ordered for her, those hazel eyes gaze expectantly, waiting for my answer, the story she’s waited over a decade to hear. Unwilling to rob her of it, I begin.
“After you left—er, got adopted—I stuck around at Cyrus’s for a few weeks before it became clear that there was no future for me there. One night, I waited for him to pass out on the recliner, packed as much as I could carry, and took off. For the first couple years, I couch hopped and did whatever work fell into my lap.”
Crime. I’m talking about crime. Evie can pretend like I’m talking about mowing the neighbor’s lawn and washing cars if she wants, but we both know the kind of kid I was. What she does with that information is up to her.
“Eventually, I’d found myself in need of a place to crash for the night, having run out of couches, and wandered my way down a side street, thinking it may be a good place to crash for an hour or so. As it turns out, Connor had the same idea.”
“You were both living on the street?” Evie’s brows lift in concern, her heart no doubt squeezing for me. The way it always has.
I nod. “I found Connor sitting there on his jacket, trying to reduce the bite of the cement on his ass, cradling his guitar in his arms. He looked up at me and grinned, like I was his best friend coming down the alley. Connor said, ‘ Oi, come grab a seat. This section of cement is the softest. ’ It made me chuckle for the first time in… well, years.”
Even now, a small smile pulls at the corner of my mouth. Most people I ran into back then saw me as a threat and ran, or they tried to become the bigger threat. I never minded which way it went, spending most of my time looking for trouble if it hadn’t already found me.
“Cutthroat survival instincts told me that I should have overpowered him, taken his guitar and sold it to make a buck, but I couldn’t stomach it. Maybe because I understood that even if everything else gets taken from us, there will still be music. And I couldn’t take that from him.”
Understanding and heartbreak gleam in Evie’s eyes as she accepts my truth. For a moment, both of us become lost to the memories of sleepless nights, music being the only thing we had left, too.
Evie clears the emotion from her throat. “What happened next?”
“I threw myself for a loop and decided to sit down and test out his theory.” My mind drifts back to that night, like it was yesterday.
“You must be on something pretty damn good, because this part of the cement is as fucking awful as the rest.”
Connor laughs. “Cup half empty kind of guy, I take it.”
I don’t know why, but I don’t hate him. “Life kicking your ass, too?”
“Nah, it’s my dickhead of a father who’s doing that. You?”
“Life’s been doing its best to kick my ass since I was born.” I shrug. “But people like you make me wonder if I got lucky being orphaned. Getting beat around by a foster parent seems less depressing than getting it from your own blood.”
Connor pulls at his messy hair. “Why did you have to go and make me feel like a giant wanker, laying it out like that? Now I can’t even sit here feeling sorry for myself.”
Evie smiles sadly at my recount, despite the gravity, that caramel part of her irises warming, giving me the courage I need to keep talking.
“We spent the night quietly watching out for each other, until he began strumming his guitar and I decided to join in. If Connor was surprised by my voice, he didn’t say anything.”
“I can’t believe you sang with a near stranger, just like that.”
“That night was…dark. I think I needed the music as much as he did.” I shrug it off, but the memory clings to me. “In the morning, Connor asked about busking together in a nearby park. It was smart, a good way to make money with what we had, but I knew it would come to mean something to me, his friendship. So, we went our separate ways.”
Evie’s eyes soften at that, and I stiffen, wishing I’d left that particular part out. The years of training myself to feel nothing, to reveal nothing, chomp their jaws angrily, despite who’s sitting in front of me. “I don’t want your pity.”
“I’d never pity you.” Her face of concern morphs into a glare before she snaps. “Choosing to be a miserable bastard is your prerogative.”
I stare at her. She stares at me.
My lips pull into a grin. I love when she’s pissy.
Evie just looks at me, fighting her own smile with everything she has, until she finally has to hide it with her coffee. “Then, what happened?”
“By the next time Connor and I ran into each other, we’d moved up in life. I’d gotten a job at a bar, and he’d found a place with his best friend, Theo.” Running my hand across my jaw, I debate how much to divulge. “I’ve stepped in occasionally for his band as a favor and got roped into a few holidays. And birthdays. That’s really it.”
“Do you still work at the bar?”
“Yeah.” I focus on coming across nonchalant, trying not to clamp down too obviously. That would accomplish nothing aside from Evie butting her nose where I don’t want it.
“As a bartender?”
Nod.
Evie sips her coffee, stripping me down. “What’s that like?”
What’s it like? Watching a bit of my soul disappear every day of my life? I take a sip of my own coffee to stall. “I’d rather hear about you.”
Evie grimaces. “There’s not much to know. I’m pretty much the same.”
“A pain in the ass, bossing around anything that breathes?”
A haughty little smirk. “I’m damn good at it, too.”
I want to tell her how lonely it’s been, how dark everything has seemed, for too long. Evie was the one person I was always completely candid with. She’s my only chance to talk out my feelings about the bar and the band…but not a word will come out.
Silence falls over us, the heavy kind. All at once it feels as if we’re strangers, and yet not at all. We’ve both obviously spent ten years imagining what we’d say if we ever ran into each other again, and here we are, wasting precious seconds being speechless.
Evie takes a deep breath. “We’ve never done small talk before.”
“Then we shouldn’t now.” I’m a coward. A bona fide coward, agreeing and simultaneously forcing her to be the one to have the courage.
“I missed you. And when I couldn’t find you…it was the worst.”
Evie’s words force me to look inward, toward a once-was heart cased in thick, black granite. For her, I should take a sledgehammer to it, shatter it and let her form it anew. But it’d only be ravaged and smashed and wrecked again.
I give her all I can offer. “I looked for your face in every crowd, on every street.”
“I tried to run away, to find you, but my parents caught me. Even though I didn’t know where to go, I wasn’t going to stop until I found you.” Silver lines Evie’s eyes. “But their influence was everywhere, making sure I couldn’t grasp at a single thread that’d lead me back to the life I had before them.”
My throat feels strangled. Was my sacrifice worth nothing? “Did they give you a good life?”
Evie takes a deep breath, fiddling with her hands beneath the table. “They aren’t bad people. They were attentive, if not a little controlling. I had food on my plate and a soft bed in a beautiful house. But… it never felt….” She shakes her head. “I tried. I tried to love my soft mattress, my pretty shoes and matching bags. I worked hard in school, and equally as hard to have friends, but it never came naturally. The upper class knew I wasn’t one of them, and with my parents being who they are, I never got the chance to know anyone else. I went to birthday parties with ponies, filled with kids who would never understand what the years were like before I got adopted. So instead, I threw everything I had into creating something of my very own: my company.”
Evie’s words are raw, full of the honesty I should be offering in return. “You’ve done well by the looks of it.”
She snorts. “There’s been growing pains, that’s for sure.”
“But isn’t that how you come to love something?” The words tumble out before I can think better of them
“It is.”
Goddammit, she is so beautiful. The kind of beauty that would stump poets, too challenging to capture with merely words. I sure as hell won’t try.
Evie’s phone pings, breaking the spell as she opens the message with a frown. Guilt weighs her expression, but whatever beckons must be important if she’s warring with herself over it.
“You have to go?”
Panic fills her expression, as she nibbles on her lip. “Yes, but–”
“It’s okay.” My chest pinches. “We’re adults now.”
“And we know each other’s last names.”
Taking her phone, I add my number into her contacts before handing it back. “And now you have my number.”
“I wouldn’t go unless it was important.”
“I know.”
Evie stands, grabbing her coffee.
Following her to the door, I step ahead just in time to open it for her. We take several more steps, coming to face one another on the sidewalk. Before I know it, I’m reaching for her face, tracing her nose and brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.
I lean in, slowly pressing my lips to her forehead, basking in her scent. Evie’s hands find my chest, gripping my shirt as if she can’t stand the thought of walking away again. Eventually, I drag my lips away and cradle her closer.
Despite spending our years apart torturously reliving every one of our days together, my memory did her no justice at all. And while I’m grateful for the chance to see her again, the devastating truth is that those years transformed me into something too far away from the Ryder she knew as a child. The man I’ve become isn’t what she needs.
And I have no idea how I’ll find the strength when it’s my turn to walk away.