The temperature was perfect, and there was a partial buffet set up not too far from the table she earmarked for us. “Help yourselves to the buffet, and your server should be by to get your drink orders soon.”
Ryan set his phone down, and I followed him to the lengthy tables full of cold selections. I wasn’t really in the mood for anything heavy. Not after how athletic we were the night before.
The fruit looked amazing—tropical and different from anything we could get on the East Coast in the winter. He handed me a plate, smiling over his shoulder. “You okay?”
For a moment, my heart sank. Not him too. Please, not him too. Don’t let him think I needed help with everything. That I was incapable of filling my own plate, and?—
“You look a little lost.”
Oh. He wasn’t going to ask if I needed to sit down or if my legs would hold me up through the non-line. “I don’t eat a lot in the mornings. The fruit looks good, though I don’t know what half of it is.”
Grabbing a spoon, he piled pineapple on my plate, then something pink with black specks, some melons, and I think the last thing was chopped apples. “You’ll thank me,” he promised when I frowned.
I did trust him. It was such a strange sensation, but I couldn’t deny how good it felt.
We settled at our table, and my gaze fell out toward the ocean. The water looked inviting, though I hadn’t ever been much of a swimmer. Hell, I hadn’t been much of anything. By the time I had money to enjoy what I hadn’t been able to growing up, I didn’t have time.
We were either on tour or in the studio, and when we had those rare moments without some sort of promo obligation, I was sitting in my loft, staring at the wall and wondering why Raleigh wanted to be anywhere but with me.
He certainly enjoyed the fruits of our labor. Just…without me.
Christ, I needed to stop thinking about him.
“You okay?”
I glanced up at Ryan and smiled. “Yeah,” I said, because I was. It was not a lie for the first time in a long time.
“Regrets?”
I stared up at him, rocked by the question. “Do you have any?”
He smiled shyly. “At the risk of sounding like a prepubescent middle schooler…I asked you first.”
I snorted a laugh into my coffee. “No regrets. I think I’m just processing.”
“I get that. I mean, this time of year with the holidays, and then your anniversary,” Ryan said, trailing off a bit.
I pushed a bit of fruit around my plate. “I didn’t know how it was going to feel. The worst and best night of my life.”
Ryan’s brows lifted. “Best?”
“Well. You were there.”
“Oh.” He swallowed heavily.
“Was that more cheese than all of France?”
“No, shut up. It was sweet.” He covered a laugh with his hand. “Eat your breakfast so we can do tropical island stuff, okay?”
That was an easy ask. We sat in silence, feeling the breeze, listening to the gentle waves, existing in a sort of calm I hadn’t felt in so, so long. A few times, I went to check for my phone before realizing I’d left it in my room.
That had been on purpose. I still hadn’t spoken to my brother, and I didn’t want to. Especially not now. I didn’t want to hold back talking about Ryan, but I also didn’t want to hear him raining on my parade. I didn’t want him to think I was being reckless.
I didn’t need to hear that all of this was a dangerous mistake.
It might have been. I might have been leading myself toward having my heart ripped out of my chest. So far, we’d made no promises to each other about what could come next. We each had our separate lives, and I was still working on escaping the comfortable prison my brother had built for me.
I had no idea what I could possibly offer Ryan.
