Page 312

I stare at him while the night from more than a year ago rises between us. His arm behind me in the gondola. My head resting against his shoulder. Thousands of bulbs glowing beneath our feet while the darkness made the rest of the world feel too far away to touch us.

“You told me I was the only man you noticed,” Ryan says. “I remember looking at you and knowing it was love. It hit me all at once, but it wasn’t one thing. It was a million little things that had been stacking inside me since before I knew what the fuck they meant.”

His voice roughens.

“It was the way you got loud when you forgot to behave. The way you argued about books you hadn’t finished because losing a debate was apparently fatal. It was you hiding in kitchens at parties, drinking wine as a choice, and looking at every ugly thing inside me like you wanted to understand it instead of fixing it. I could spend the rest of the night telling you every reason, Charm, and I still wouldn’t reach the bottom of the list.”

Tears blur the dark ink climbing his throat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you pulled away from me that night.”

The answer enters softly and cuts anyway.

Ryan steps closer. “You loosened your hand when those girls looked at us. You called our date hanging out when Evan asked what we were. Then those headlights crossed the truck while I was kissing you, and you froze because somebody might see.”

“I was afraid.”

“I know that now. That night, all I knew was I had fallen so fucking hard for a woman who still couldn’t claim me.” His throat moves as he swallows. “I was terrified if I told you, you would run. I was more terrified you would look at me and not say it back because you were clearly standing on a different page.”

“You let me believe you weren’t there yet.”

“I let you believe I was cautious.” Pain pulls at his mouth. “The truth was I was already fucking gone.”

My tears spill over.

Ryan raises one hand and cups my face. His palm is warm against my wet cheek, and the gentleness of his touch nearly takes my knees out from beneath me.

“The night we fought about Thanksgiving,” he says.

My lips part as the memory reaches me. Dawn around the edges of his curtains. His body above mine. Spanish breaking through his mouth while his face looked like loving me physically hurt.

“You said you wished you could remember what I told you.”

“I remember the way you said it, but I don’t know the words.”

Ryan leans closer, his eyes holding mine while he gives me the words exactly as they left him that morning.

“No me dejes aquí sin ti. No me hagas perderte, mi amor, mi vida… tú lo eres todo para mí.”

His thumb moves beneath my eye, collecting a tear.

“Don’t leave me here without you,” he translates what I understand now, his voice beginning to crack. “Don’t make me lose you, my love, my life. You are everything to me.”

A sob catches behind my teeth.

“That’s what I said while I was inside you, and you came apart beneath me without knowing I was begging you not to leave me alone inside everything I felt.”

“Ryan.”

“Then I told your father before I ever told you.”

The grief in his voice changes shape. “In the study, I told Lance he didn’t get to use my love for you as a weapon. He heard me admit it first.” Ryan’s jaw locks, but tears gather in his eyes anyway. “For fifteen months, I resented you for that. It ate me alive that the first time I admitted I loved you, I was standing in front of your father trying to defend it while you were in the hallway.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.” His hand remains around my face. “Afterward, you knew because I screamed it at you while I ended us. You had to hear that I loved you in the same breath I used to tell you I wouldn’t stay. I never got the moment I deserved, and neither did you.”

The words tear open something grief never reached because I didn’t know it existed. We lost more than a relationship in that study. We lost the first time Ryan should have looked at me and said he loved me without anger, fear, or Lance standing between us.