“I just think—” she started.
For the first time since sitting down, Tarik cleared his throat and spoke up. “I heard there’s a really cool kayak eco-tour we could take. I looked at the reservations, and there were four spots available.”
“There are six of us,” Gracie pointed out. Hasan leaned over and whispered in her ear. Her eyes went wide, and then she scoffed. “Oh, come on!”
“No,” Hasan said. “We’re the ones who were uninvited.”
Her jaw ticked, and she looked at Ryan as though she was waiting for him to give in. When he didn’t do anything except lean on me a bit harder, she sighed. “Fine. You win. We’ll go take the kayak tour, and you can let us know when you’re ready to talk.”
Bowing his head, Ryan took a deep breath. “I appreciate the thought. From all of you, I guess. Though it’s super fucking weird that all four of you deciding that dropping in on someone’s private vacation was the right move.”
All of them looked properly chastised, and I almost laughed because I could picture him doing that to a room full of his students too. I had no trouble believing he was very good at his job.
“We can do dinner,” I said. “And maybe an excursion together, depending on how we’re feeling?—”
“Are you not feeling well?” Tollin jumped in, reaching for my arm.
I pulled back. “I’m feeling fine. We’re both just a little tired. For fade-to-black reasons,” I added.
He paled. “Gross.”
I wasn’t going to say sorry. I was done with him acting like he was sitting on a land mine that was about to blow up every time I so much as winced. “When we have something to tell,” I added, “ifwe have something to tell, you’ll be the first to know.”
No one looked particularly satisfied about that, but I was hoping my tone conveyed that that was all they were going to get.
Fourteen
ATLAS
Breakfast was quieterthan I expected after Ryan and I put our joint feet down, and both Tarik and Hasan managed to corral our more enthusiastic family members and pull them away before anyone could ask any more invasive questions about what we were doing for the afternoon.
If it was just sex, I probably wouldn’t have cared so much. But it wasn’t. This thing with Ryan was so much more.
We’d only been here a short while, so it wasn’t like I could ask Ryan to make me deeper, bigger, more important promises. That wasn’t fair to either of us. But I wanted to talk to him about how I felt before everyone else cornered us and coerced us into revealing how we felt.
“So. Dinner,” Tollin said as the six of us started toward the hotel lobby. When I didn’t say anything, he grabbed my arm and urged me to hang back. Ryan glanced over his shoulder, but I nodded for him to go on without me.
“What do you want?” I asked my brother once everyone was out of earshot.
“Do you really think this is healthy?”
I stared at him.
“I’m not trying to be a dick or imply that you don’t know what you’re doing?—”
“Yes, you are. I mean, maybe you’re not trying to be a dick, but just because I was hurt…”
“No,” he interrupted quickly. “This isn’t about your accident. This is about the fact that right before you got hurt, you had a massive public breakup with the world’s biggest dickhead, who you’d been living with for years.” His voice started to rise, and when I glared at him, he cleared his throat and lowered it. “I just want to make sure that you’re being careful. The bar Raleigh set is six feet beneath the crust of the earth. Anyone is better than him.”
“Ryan’s different,” I said.
“You’ve known him for two days. This could be some kind of…I forget what it’s called. Where you idolize the dude who saved you? Hero worship?”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I took a calming breath. He wasn’t wrong to be worried, but nothing I could say would make him understand what it felt like to be with Ryan. It wasn’t just what he’d done for me. It was who he was as a person.
“You knew you were going to marry Lyria the moment you saw her,” I told him. “Even though she hated your guts for the first two months you knew her.”
He bit his lip. “That was different.”
