One Kiss
RILEY
Ifinish the book on the couch.
It's mid-morning and quiet. Easton left for practice a couple of hours ago, and the house has settled into a peaceful silence.
I like it. There’s just something about the silence that mirrors peace, and reminds me that for once, I’m simply enjoying my company, not performing.
The sun has moved across the living room floor twice since I sat down.
I close the book, a James Hadley Chase paperback I picked off the coffee table the night before. I sit with it on my chest and try to remember the last time I finished a book.
I can't.
That is the second realization in twenty-four hours that has done this to me.
I don't know what I like. I don't remember the last time I finished a book.
Each one a window into how thoroughly I had stopped being a person who lived inside her own life.
I stretch. I notice, with mild surprise, that my phone isn't on the coffee table.
Then I remember. It died last night. I borrowed Easton’s charger and plugged it in by the lamp. I have not looked at it in almost two days.
I lean over and pull the cable out.
The screen powers on, and the notifications start.
The phone vibrates in my hand in one long, relentless wave. The number keeps climbing.
Forty.
Sixty.
Eighty.
A hundred and fourteen.
A hundred and twenty-six.
The notifications keep pouring in, the device buzzing so continuously it barely pauses for breath. For a second, I'm tempted to set down the phone and walk away.
But anxiety roots me to the spot.
I expected a lot of messages and calls. But not this much, and the reality dawns on me that while hiding in this house in the hills, I’ve somehow forgotten the real world, and the chaos unfolding from Preston’s press release.
The notifications settle at one hundred and forty-eight.
I sit very still. I drag in a deep breath, and my thumb slides across the screen, unlocking the device.
I scroll past the missed calls first.
Dad. Mom. Preston. Mason. Dad. Preston. Preston. Preston. Mom. Preston. Mason. Dad.
I count Preston’s name nineteen times before I stop counting.
I read Mom’s text first, because she's the easiest.
Mom:
Riley, dear, please call your father. He's beside himself. Honey, the family is here at the house and we are all just trying to understand. Preston has been with us all afternoon. Please come home. Honey, you have to give us something. I love you. I love you so much. Please.
The last one comes through at four in the morning.
She's up at four in the morning typing texts to my locked phone, and somewhere underneath the engineered language about the family is here I can hear her, my actual mother. The Preston-and-the-family scaffolding is what she has built around the fear to make it manageable. I know her, and I can tell she’s worried sick.
I scroll to Dad.
Dad:
Riley, your mother is in pieces. Call her.
Then, another one follows an hour later.
Dad:
Riley, who is the sports man we are seeing in these photos? You can't do this to our family. You had everything with Preston. Whoever this is, you have settled. Tell me where you are. Tell me you have not made a permanent decision about your life on a bad day.
The photo. The man at the parking lot. My heart sinks. The phone almost drops from my hands but I hold on with shaky hands.
I press the heel of my hand into my eye. They took photos of Easton and I. Easton is being pulled into my mess…
The reality hits me squared in the face, and the regret follows a second later.
I shouldn’t have stepped out. Not yesterday, not the way we did. Now Preston has more stories to tell.
My shaky hands click on Preston’s text.
The first message is from twenty-two minutes after I ran. I must have missed this when Mason’s text came in that night.
Preston:
My love, I don't know where you went, but I'm terrified for you. The wedding is on hold. Everyone here loves you and just wants you home safely.
I read it in the exact tone I’ve heard for the past six years. The sweetness of a man who portrays affection as a show for the world, not out of care or empathy for this partner.
My eyes skip to the third one, dated yesterday evening.
Preston:
Riley. I have been very patient. I think you owe me a conversation. Whoever the man is, he's using you. The photos are out and the family is humiliated. End this and come home, or I will have to make decisions for both of us that we'll both regret.
There it is. The bottom of the velvet.
I sit on Easton’s couch, still in Easton’s t-shirt that I’d mindlessly pulled on last night after a bath, with my phone in my hand and I think, very clearly, that is the man my family wants me to come home to.
One more notification chimes. Mason.
His thread sits at the bottom because he has not flooded it. Three texts in two days.
Mason:
Hey. Whatever you're doing, I'm glad you did it. Call me when you can. I'm not telling Mom or Dad anything until I hear from you. You owe me nothing. Just stay safe. I love you. I'm here. Whenever. However. No questions.
My heart warms. It's the same sentence Easton used in my guest room the first night.
I am crying before I notice I am. It's the bad kind, the kind that comes out of you when something you have been holding has shifted. I curl my knees up and press the phone to my forehead.
I have to leave.
It's the only clean thought. I can't stay here. I dragged a stranger into this.
A stranger with a career, a reputation, and already three photos circulating online of us leaving a boutique together. Three photos linking him to me, the runaway bride currently fueling half the internet.
Easton has no idea what kind of man Preston Sinclair becomes when he decides he's been patient long enough.
I'm still on the couch, phone clutched in my hand, when I hear the door.
I freeze.
His keys hit the tray in the entryway. Footsteps into the kitchen, a pause, then toward the living room. There is no version of this where he doesn't read everything on my face the second he sees me.
He stops in the doorway.
“Hey.”
I don't answer. Instead, I furiously wipe at my eyes, willing the evidence to disappear, while I keep my head down. I can’t stand his sympathy.
He drops his bag. Crosses to the couch in three steps and crouches in front of me. His fingers find my chin and he tilts it before I can object. Our eyes meet. He looks at the phone in my hand, then at me.
“Riley.”
“I have to leave.”
At first, he doesn’t answer, but I see it. The words caught somewhere in his throat. His Adam's apple bobs. His eyes tighten at the corners. A muscle jumps in his jaw.
For a moment, he looks like he's fighting with himself.
I release a shaky breath.
Because whether either of us likes it or not, this decision still has to be made.
“I have to go. I can't do this to you.”
“Okay,”
His response shatters me more than I expected. It’s simple and gives me the freedom I’ve always wanted, but then a part of me freezes.
Maybe it’s the part that has believed after two days with this man, that he’s the one person who sees me and is willing to slowly anchor me into my new path. But he doesn’t have to. As it is, he’s done more than enough.
I nod, and look down.
“Where? What’s the plan?”
My eyes shoot to his. The question throws me off. I try to speak, to say something meaningful, give him a run down of a plan I don’t have. Nothing comes out.
That is the entire problem. I could walk away from here right now, and end up back in Preston’s home because there’s nowhere to escape his presence. Not with my entire life tied to him.
Mason could have been the obvious answer but he's also the second place Preston will look. A hotel needs a card I can't use without a flare.
“I don't know,” I say honestly, losing the fight.
The tears I’d willed away, trickle down my cheeks, now coming in torrents.
Without a word, strong arms wrap around me, and my head nuzzles into his neck. He smells like the rink and clean cotton and the cedar underneath that I noticed on his hoodie the first night.
His palm moves in slow, soothing circles across my back.
A few minutes later, I finally manage to pull myself together enough to step back.
When I look up, an unreadable expression flashes across his face. His jaw is tight, his mouth pressed into a thin line.
I drag in a shaky breath, that does nothing for my bunched shoulders. The words that follow, have me breaking eye contact, because I simply can’t do it. I can’t look in his eyes and say them.
“I can't stay here, Easton. You have a career. There are photos of us. And the kind of man Preston is, you don't understand. He told me, in writing, this morning, that he's going to make decisions for both of us. I can't be the woman whose mess takes your life from you.”
“Riley… sweetheart.”
My chest constricts from hearing his voice alone. I can feel the uncertainty.
“Look at me, please.”
I look at him.
“We’re staying home for the rest of the week. Nobody is going to find us. The team has it handled. I’ve already spoken to everyone who needs to be spoken to.”
His gaze locks on mine.
“You’re not leaving. You’re not going to ruin my life.”
The muscle in his jaw flexes.
“The only way you ruin my life right now is by walking out that door before either of us has had a chance to think.”
“B-but you have a career.”
He takes my hands, and his warmth melts into me.
“I have a career and I will still have it tomorrow. I won't have it if I let you walk out of this house and into a worse situation because you are afraid you are an inconvenience to me. You are not an inconvenience. Do you understand?”
“I'm crying on your couch in your shirt and I have a hundred and forty-eight notifications and one of them is my fiancé telling me he's going to make decisions for me. Do you know what that translates to? He’s going to make life difficult for me. For you.”
“Ex-fiancé.”
“W-what?”
“Ex-fiancé. You are out. He doesn't get to call himself anything else.”
Something in my chest opens further.
He's still holding my hands.
His thumbs move over my knuckles in slow, absent circles. His eyes stay locked on mine.