Chapter Forty-Nine
Scarlett
One Month Later
I spent the last thirty days bleeding onto the pages of my old notebook.
Not literally, of course. But it felt that way.
Nothing could tear me away from the feeling of pouring my heart and soul into song.
I wasn’t a singer, no –
I was a composer.
Tav gave up the idea of Ryden working with Paisley, especially after my refusal to answer any of Kyle Binx’s emails. Not worth my time, I’d said. Or Ryden’s.
Then it’s not a duet, Tav fought back. Ryden merely smiled. It’s more of a duet than you’ll ever know.
Did it serve as an issue for the higher ups? Maybe. But Ryden’s spring opener was booked at Madison Square Garden and there was no way the label would drop him – he was too valuable of a client, too important – no matter what the tabloids thought.
No one could paint Ryden red.
Only me.
I pulled my notebook from the bath table, leaned into the steaming water and bit on the pen cap.
So many words from little me, flashes of memories and moments running across these pages in bold lettering – all incoherent, illegible.
What did it feel like to be cared for?
I wasn’t so cold anymore.
The cold was back.
It made someone smile.
Glimpses of supressed memories and emotion stamped these old pages. Ryden told me that’s how he wrote his songs – through brackets of feeling, pockets of pain that he noted down for future use. What is the use of pain if it’s not meant to be shared?
I thought I knew him.
I did know him.
But the last two months felt like a fever dream in comparison to the almost two decades of our life.
We met as children, hung on through adolescence, adulthood, made new by stardom, now intimately, vulnerably, but not… calm. I saw that now. The wave of peace that blanketed him like a coveted dream as he wrote, sang, played.
You think you know every piece of a person until they do the little things that amaze you.
It’s a blessing, to discover someone you love all over again.
A soft knock came from my door. “Dove?”
I looked down at myself, soapy bubbles covering my breasts. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck ME for giving him a key all those years ago.
“Little busy!” I called back, trying to froth the remnants of crushed bath bomb at the bottom of my tub. “What do you want?”
He strolled in anyway and I threw water at his face. “You don’t listen to anyone, do you?”
He bent down and placed a gentle kiss on my forehead. My insides warmed at the touch. Suddenly, I felt a little too exposed – naked and stripped bare in front of my best friend and… um –
“You were mine forever,” he said, kneeling down to my height. “Just because we slapped a label on it doesn’t mean you weren’t always.”
“Hm,” I smirked. “Poetic.”
“I can be,” he chuckled. “Especially when it comes to a pretty bird with red hair.”
I blushed, returning my eyes to my notebook. “I don’t like you sitting so close to me.”
“I’m not sitting, I’m kneeling.”
“Semantics.”
Before I could react, he stripped down to his boxers, shirt discarded exposing ropey muscles and a chiselled torso. Then a splash of water carried a current, wetting my pages.
“Oh for the love of –”
He swiped the notebook from out of my hands, sealing it behind him on the towel rack. “Talk to me,” he said, pulling my legs to fit on his lap. “Tell me what you’ve been working on.”
“No,” I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s a secret.”
He smirked, tongue jutting from his cheek. “A duet is a partnership, Dove. You’re supposed to share the lyrics so I can sing them.”
I stared at him.
My… God, I couldn’t even say it without fighting my own instincts.
After the blow up with Paisley and everyone witnessing Ryden and I… well, being Ryden and I – there was no use in pretending what we were.
What we’ve always been.
I realized the fear I felt believing everyone would judge us, ruin us, the potential loss of my job would be inescapable. Prioritizing other people’s opinions ended up serving as my downfall.
Battling my own urges was almost impossible to conquer.
I tried. I fucking tried. For weeks, we’d sneak around, tangled in each other’s sheets forgetting the fame and the cameras and the outlets.
It was easier for me that way, to play around as if Ryden wasn’t my one great love (though he was) and act as if we were just ex-lovers who couldn’t fight the bite.
It felt like a dirty little secret, something sacred between him and I if no one knew.
It felt like I could split myself down the middle and be the manager I knew how to be, the protector, the planner – but I began to crave the…
warmth, Ryden provided. The companionship in a way I never thought possible.
Imagine going through what we went through, being intertwined all our lives through love and loss, to being something more – a spark lit on fire, a volcano ready to erupt.
That was us.
How could you navigate the flood? The overflow of emotions?
Ryden tugged me closer to him. “I can’t get enough of you.”
I wanted to say it back. When he told me he loved me at dinner last week, when he asked me to be his. Paparazzi swarmed the outskirts of Le Pavillon. It felt unnatural…
It felt right.
I said yes, of course I said yes, and of course the cameras caught the moment before I could even process his lips on mine.
He pulled me behind a back alley then, fingers tangled in my hair and said, “This is our life, Dove. We chose to escape, and we accept the wins and the losses. But right here,” he kissed me softly, “this is where we won.”
You could say this is what I loved about our story.
So many of our moments remained private.
Our first date was never announced, never publicised.
Our first moments of intimacy were sacred and special.
No one knew anything about us, but us.
We fell into each other’s love, adjusting to the best of our abilities to a new tide. But truthfully, nothing groundbreaking had changed, at least not like I feared it would.
Nobody viewed us differently. In fact, many people thought we’d been an item since the beginning.
We have, he’d said. We just didn’t know it until now.
I smiled at that. He was right. God, he was so right.
There was never a monumental love declaration, not when you’ve been in love since the dawn of time.
You can’t pinpoint love like that. You just feel it. Every day.
In the way you remember the splatter of freckles across their back.
In the way you remember how they eat their bagels, what they like in their tea.
The way they shut their eyes when they hum a tune you’ve never heard before, familiarizing yourself with the lullaby in which you fall asleep to every night.
It’s their voice in your head, in your heart, every moment…
And you don’t remember when it got there, only that it did.
That was our love.
Slow, steady, patient, fierce.
An eagle and a dove.
A gentle bird, and a protective beast.
We were both at the same time, and that’s what made us strong. Special.
Infinite.
Ryden leaned back in the tub, grabbing hold of my notebook and reading through the pages in silence. His hand rubbed my foot underwater as he thumbed through frayed lyrics and wet pages, eyebrows knit together in concentration.
And yet, his hand never left my skin.
That’s who Ryden was.
The Eagle who never stopped flying.
The boy who didn’t allow the pains of his past to destroy the rest of his life.
Something changed that day when his mother walked back into his life. Something better.
Whether we knew it at the time or not, the course of our lives redirected itself to this –
The moment of us, sitting knee to knee in my bathtub in New York City.
Naked. Vulnerable. Together.
But we won.
How does this happen, you’re probably thinking. How does one turn longing into love?
Well, it starts with a story of two birds – one eagle and one dove – and the ballad in which they learned how to fly.