Shaking his head, he kissed the side of my jaw. “I was struggling with so much doubt and self-hatred for giving my parents what they wanted in spite of the fact that it made memiserable. Your music sparked a courage in me that I didn’t realize I had.”
“Oh,” I breathed out. I hadn’t realized.
“Then you spoke to me in the ambulance. You made me promise not to give up on myself. I took that with me.”
I hadn’t realized that either. “There are parts I don’t remember, and I wish I had them back.”
He drew a touch over the side of my neck, then down my chest. The weight of his hand was comforting, and the heat from his body soothed my raw, frayed nerves. “I remember enough for both of us, I think.”
I couldn’t help a small laugh. “That’s probably true. I just remember feeling very safe. Like no matter what I learned after I got to the hospital, if you thought I was going to be okay, I would be.”
“And you were right,” he said. “You are.”
I pushed up on my elbow and met his gaze. “Andyouwere right. Youarebrave.”
He yanked me into a kiss, letting me press him into the lounger as our tongues danced, lush and heavy. We kissed for a long, slow moment before he pulled back, knocking his forehead against mine. “So, tonight. New Year’s Eve…”
I closed my eyes. “Yes?”
“How do you want to spend it?” He eased back, though he kept my hand, holding my palm against his chest as he drew lines over the top of my arm.
“For years, I had this…superstition, I guess.” It had been a long while since I’d thought about this. For the last decade, I’d spent my New Year’s Eve playing a show, then passing out on my hotel bed or in the tour bus while Raleigh went and got shit-faced with groupies and came back smelling of a stranger’s cologne and come.
A decade of pretending like I didn’t care.
“Tell me,” Ryan said quietly.
I took a breath. “That no matter what you did, you’d always spend the next year exactly how you ended the last one.”
“Like with your ex?”
I shrugged. “I was resigned to his bullshit at that point. I told myself I didn’t care until I couldn’t anymore.”
“So last year…”
“I was afraid,” I confessed. “I didn’t think about it right away. New Year’s Day, I was unconscious, but sometime in…god, maybe February?” I bit my lip, but those memories were so hazy. “I remember being in PT and shit-scared because I wasn’t making any real progress. My legs were still numb. I couldn’t stand, I could barely move my toes. And I thought, fuck, that’s how I spent the night. I was riding in the ambulance with you, unable to move my legs, so nothing’s going to change. Then I started walking again. Feeling started coming back. So I thought maybe I was wrong.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, his brows furrowed.
“But now I’m realizing that’s not exactly how I spent the last day of the year.” I glanced down at my toes, which were coated in sand, then at his, which matched. “I spent it with you. I spent it with a total stranger, and we convinced each other to be brave and to live. And for all that the year was hard, I think we did just that.”
He laughed softly and leaned in, kissing my jaw. “I think so too.”
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t bring this up until after tonight—until all the weight of the anniversary had passed. But I couldn’t. “I want to spend tonight with you because that’s how I want the rest of my year to go.”
“Atlas—”
“I know that’s probably a lot. I mean, we technically just started getting to know each other, and there’s a chance that theway we feel—the wayIfeel,” I amended, because I didn’t want to assume, “is…altered by being here.”
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“But I feel like I have hope for the first time in a long time. And I want this to be real.”
He linked our fingers together and squeezed. “So do I.”
I rolled onto my side to face him. “I’m not exactly a catch right now. I’m jobless. I’m technically homeless?—”
“Oh my god. You can’t say that. You’re on a tropical island with probably seven figures in some investment account somewhere.”
