She could be friendly with Ryan, she decided, but nothing more.
“Why not? I was a twenty-year-old kid, still in love with the woman who’d dumped me. I was curious about where she was and what she was doing. Checking to see if you were alright.”
Lisa had a million questions buzzing in her brain. Part of her wanted to hang up, to stop this chat before it went somewhere awkward. She felt overwhelmed by all the questions in her head and just wanted to end the call before things got weird.
But they’d both moved on, hadn’t they? They could talk as adults. And Ryan seemed to be a reasonable guy. He didn’t sound angry with her.
“How did you feel when you saw the notice? I mean, were you mad at me for moving on?”
“Babe,” he gruffed. “Nah. We didn’t end nastily, did we? Yeah, I didn’t want us to end; you knew that. So seeing you were gonna marry another guy bruised my heart some, but I got over it.”
“Good,” she exhaled. “I’m glad, Ryan. I still feel bad about leaving town the way I did. I just...”
“You weren’t able to face me,” he finished for her, and she nodded silently. “I understood after a while.”
“Do you think, maybe, we can leave all that stuff in the past?”
“Sure. But you know the past can’t hurt, right?”
“I know that.”
“Do you hold any residual bad feelings against me?”
“No. Do you?”
“Babe.” He laughed in that tone she knew was Ryan’s way of telling her not to be silly. “We had a great fucking time, then broke up. It was forever ago, yeah? No bad feelings on my part. But you don’t gotta avoid talking about the memories we made together, yeah? If you wanna focus on the here and now, I’m fine with that, too.”
It was difficult to keep her long-buried feelings at bay when faced with a man who’d once meant a lot to her, especially as she listened to his easy-going voice.
Some people were impossible to forget.
Especially when they left traces of themselves all over her heart.
Emotion was stuck in her throat, but she realized Ryan was right.
“Do you have time to let me know how your life has been?”
“That’s a lot of things to catch you up on.” He replied. Then his voice softened, “But I’ve got time, sweetheart.”
So that’s what they did for more than an hour.
Two former lovers reconnected to discuss their lives.
And it felt good.
The time between them seemed non-existent. Lisa frequently found common ground in what Ryan shared with her. Though his lack of filter sometimes surprised her, she valued his candor.
That felt good, too.
THIRTEEN
Splice
October went by in a flash, and now it was the second week of November.
Splice blew warm air into his frozen hands, his steps matching those of his two brothers. He shouldered Tomb, who was walking beside Diamond.
“Do you ever get the feeling we spend all our time chasing down D-bags who owe us money?”
