Chapter 15
The soft rustle of sheets. Diffuse light seeping through sheer white curtains. The scent of hotel soap, brought to life on Ryan’s skin, both provocative and comforting.
It’s this recognition that stirs me awake.
“Good morning,” he says from the other side of the bed.
“What time is it?” I ask, my voice sleep-logged.
“Early,” he says. “Not even six.”
He looks tired. His vibe is…different than usual. Wary.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I ask.
His hair rustles against the pillow as he shakes his head.
“Off your usual routines,” I posit.
A beat passes. “You could say that.”
I rub my eyes. “Don’t publicists tour around promoting books all the time?”
“Not as much as you’d think.” He hedges. “And that’s not the most unusual thing about this past week.”
Behind him, the room is spotless. Because it’s Ryan’s room, and Ryan is orderly, neat. Everything in its place.
Except for my clothes, strewn haphazardly across the carpet.
I am the odd thing out here.
“Don’t usually have casual sex with your authors?” I ask, trying for lightness. Even batting my lashes in the effort.
“Don’t have casual sex at all,” he says softly.
Maral called it, as usual. And despite the fact that he should be in the museum of impossible things (a man from New York City, with that masterpiece of a body, who could pull but chooses not to?), I can’t help but admit it tracks.
Ryan is serious, mature, loyal. He gave up his young adulthood to raise a child who wasn’t even his own.
He devotes himself fully to everything he does—it makes sense that he’d do the same with relationships.
It’s such a vulnerable thing to admit, yet he’s unselfconscious about it. Probably because he’s a fucking god in bed. “You could have fooled me,” I say. “How are you so good?”
His lips tug at the corners. “I’ve been dreaming of making you come for…a long time.”
I huff a laugh. Don’t know if I’d characterize the nine days we’ve been on tour so far—more specifically, since that morning in Chicago when I first caught him drinking in the sight of my legs—as a long time. But then again, any length of time spent full of unmet desire can feel like forever.
“I’ll admit,” I say, “Ryan Grant, sex god, was not on my bingo card for this year.”
“What was my descriptor instead?”
I make a show of thinking about it. “Ryan Grant, stuffed shirt.”
A soft chuckle. “Ouch.”
I raise one shoulder. “That’s the price for your aloofness.”
“Maybe my aloofness was by design,” he says. “I couldn’t exactly tell you what I really thought. Not if I didn’t want to send you running for the hills.”
“Oh god. Do I want to know?”
Despite the dim light in the room, there’s still that twinkle in his eye. “At that first meeting, you breezed into the boardroom like you owned the place. Confident, empowered. Magnetic. Full of so much life that you were practically lit from within.”
His words reflect a version of me that’s well worn—the version people are drawn to, that’s fun and makes them feel good and beams light into every room I’m in. Brightness and positivity personified, complete with jazz hands. It does come naturally, most of the time. But it’s not the full picture.
The full picture is one nobody ever sees—also by design.
I’m surprised to hear that’s how Ryan saw me, though, given the vibe he gave off in that first meeting. But then, I’ve seen how quickly he draws the blinds on himself around me. Has his standoffishness been a mask all along?
“Then I started listening to your podcast,” he goes on, “and discovered how thoughtful and engaged you are in your interactions. People are comfortable sharing their stories because you make them feel like they’re the most important and interesting stories in the world.
You make people feel seen, made me feel seen in a way I hadn’t before.
The pressure, the loneliness, put into words and validated.
Yet you so rarely shared about yourself, and all I wanted was to know you.
The you that’s inside this perfect exterior. ”
His kind words about my podcast, and me as its host, touch an unexpected chord.
But his reiteration that he wishes I would share more about myself feels different—higher-stakes, somehow—now that we’ve been intimate.
My skin heats uncomfortably. The sheets tangled over my body feel like weighted blankets, heavy and constricting.
“I haven’t exactly been in a position to express myself freely, but now, given this…” He takes my hand, and my heart starts beating double-time, trepidation swirling in my belly. “Ana, I—”
As though sent by the heavens, a foreign ringing sound blares through the room. I breathe a quiet sigh of relief, willing my pulse to calm down, as Ryan reluctantly reaches for the landline on the nightstand.
“Hello?” he says into the receiver. “Yeah, she’s here.” He hands me the phone.
“Where have you been?” Maral asks on the other end. “Actually, never mind,” she rushes to say, “I know where you’ve been. Why haven’t you answered your phone?”
My purse lies strewn on the dresser across from the bed. “You silenced it yesterday.”
“Fuck me.” Her exhale hisses from the speaker. “Okay, don’t look at it. Go to your room immediately. Shanthi and I will meet you there.”
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” I say, worried and instinctively walking toward my phone.
“I’m fine, but stop,” she says, knowing exactly what I’m doing. “Let me tell you before you—”
But it’s too late. I’ve already seen my lock screen, the comment notifications piling up in real time like bricks being laid for a wall.
Jeez, get a room! Isn’t SFL a family show?
that’s her publicist! i was at the reading she did at powells and he intro’d her
hope ur independntly wealthy bro coz ur about to get fiiiired
My brow knits as I read one nonsensical comment after another across social platforms. I tap on one randomly and see the post it’s attached to—a fan has tagged me, and who knows what they’ve said because my eyes immediately freeze on the image they’ve captioned.
It’s Ryan and me, in the San Fran Live studio corridor, bins and equipment piled high next to us, when he showed me the email from Meredith with the NYT news yesterday. When I kissed him. When we thought no one was watching.
Someone captured the kiss in all its glory.
Despite the as-yet-undefined problem hanging in the air, I can’t help marveling at just how glorious the kiss looks.
The way Ryan leans into it with his whole body, the way my hands grip his lapels, the sliver of tongue shining through our open mouths. Damn.
But this damn is on the internet, apparently, for all the world to see.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I say.
“I know,” Maral sighs.
My hands are shaking. “How far does this go?”
“Not totally clear yet.”
“Is there any chance Woodsworth hasn’t seen it?”
“Unlikely,” she says solemnly. “The whole team follows you, and you’re tagged all over the place.”
Notifications keep popping up at the top of my screen—didn’t peg her for a slut; Wonder if that’s how she got her book deal?—and my eyes clench shut.
I try to calm my frantic mind, ease the nails-on-chalkboard feeling in my gut at the injustice of being painted with the wrong brush.
At not being able to defend myself against mischaracterization.
At not being able to defend Ryan against the shitstorm that’s going to come for him because of this. Because of me.
Ryan stands next to me, so substantial and gorgeous it makes me want to cry. He’s clearly heard my end of the conversation. I raise my phone to show him, then watch as his face loses every ounce of color.
“Shit,” he says, cradling the device in his hands.
“I know,” I say.
“It’s limited to social media, at least,” Maral is saying on the landline. “It’s not like it’s headline news or anything. Maybe he can head it off at the pass.”
“Maybe,” I breathe as Ryan’s skin goes from white to slightly green. “Should we put out a statement or something on SPOY?”
“No,” I hear Shanthi yell on the other end. Oh god, Shanthi knows. Obviously—if randos know, she would too. But still, it feels shitty that she found out from a source other than me, when she’s been adjacent to us all along.
“That will only make things worse,” Mar says.
“So, what?” I ask. “Just let it ride?”
“It’s rage bait,” she says, her tone soothing—as though anything about the words rage bait is soothing. “Engaging only substantiates it.”
It goes against everything in me not to stand up for myself as I’m vilified for being a woman who has a sex life. After spending my whole life working my ass off, being depicted by even random internet trolls as someone who didn’t earn her success is a dropkick in the teeth.
But there’s a more practical and much more pressing problem at hand. Involving the man to my left, who’s becoming progressively grimmer as he doomscrolls my phone.
The job he didn’t want to jeopardize? It’s in jeopardy now.
Thankfully we are past the crest of notifications, being in California—the East Coast had already had its heyday by the time we caught wind of the uproar—and they peter off over the course of the morning.
For not the first time, I’m glad my mom is not tuned in online.
She doesn’t know anything about my personal life (nobody does, which makes this all the more mortifying) and I’d like to keep it that way.
The last thing I need is to give Mom fodder for diatribes about how kissing random odars is not going to lead to my marriage and her grandchildren.
But her Good Morning meme came in like clockwork, followed closely by a two-minute voicemail complaining about the neighbors’ dogs who keep defecating on her lawn, confirming that she’s none the wiser.