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Chapter Nine
Savannah
I knew shutting him out was childish.
I knew that the adult thing to do was to talk to him.
But I was terrified.
Petrified, even.
I was even slightly embarrassed.
He’d caught me watching the show replay last night. When he turned over in his sleep, he hadn’t really been sleeping.
And I was the fool who was caught pining over something she couldn’t have.
But can’t you?
This was a different voice than the one that I often called the devil. The devil was the negative thoughts that played over and over. My anxiety dealt with a lot of untruths.
Rarely did it deal with potential.
I didn’t know what to do with those words.
However, I let them simmer in the back of my mind as I read a new book on my Kindle app, from one of my favorite authors. I’d started the book on the plane, and was now to the black moment—the moment in a romance where either an outside force tried to tear the couple apart, or as was the case in this book, when the hero did something stupid to drive the heroine away.
Again, the words repeated in my head: But can’t you?
Why couldn’t I have Ryan? Why couldn’t I believe what he told me? For the first half of my life, I believed every word he said.
He was my savior.
My rock.
And never once lied to me.
The negative thought pattern started to try and push through, trying to convince me that there couldn’t be something there, but I mentally knocked it back before full sentences could form in my mind. I knew where the negative thoughts were going, and I wanted nothing to do with them.
Why couldn’t I believe that he’d loved me since we were young?
I mean...
I cared about him.
So deeply.
To the point where I often pictured him as the hero in my books, and I was the heroine, and it wasn’t hard to believe the confessions of love when I read a love story as if it were us in the pages of the book. I didn’t know that my feelings for Ryan were love, but putting us in my stories...
I could relate to the heroines.
I was curled up at the top of the bed, my knees drawn up as I held my phone by my thighs, and I peeked my eyes toward where Ryan sat at the small kitchen table. He had Bluetooth ear pods in and watched his phone. I wondered briefly if it was a movie, like he’d invited me to do with him, but then his face made an expression of thought.
Not an expression I’d expect if he were watching the latest Christian Bale film.
When he shifted in the chair, I immediately brought my eyes back to my book and tried to concentrate but now, after I’d let my mind wander, I knew it was a worthless task.
The words were beginning to swim and cause a headache.
