I flushed. It was true. I’d gotten an expensive apartment, but other than that, I never spent money. I sent it to my brother and his family when they needed or wanted it. I sent it to my parents just because. I spent it on charities and food banks—whatever helped me feel a little less like a man who didn’t deserve wealth.
But that was it. I was a simple person. I didn’t necessarily want fame. I just wanted to be heard.
So he was right. I did have more money than I knew what to do with, and fuck, that felt so empty.
“I’m just saying, I don’t know what I want the rest of my life to look like. I have offers from agents and record labels asking me to go solo. I have a thousand songs I want to write, and I want to spend time figuring out who I am outside of my past.”
Ryan cupped my cheek and met my gaze. “There’s no shame in that.”
“But I’d like to not do it alone. I’m not proposing,” I said quickly, though the truth was, I probably would if I knew he’d say yes. “I’m just asking if maybe we can try to make it work.”
“I can’t move,” he told me softly. “I don’t love my job, but I need to start somewhere, and leaving now?—”
“No.”
He flinched back a bit. “No?”
“Sorry, fuck.” I was such a mess right now, Jesus. “I mean, you don’t have to leave anything. You don’t have to give anything up. I’m saying that I can be anywhere. I’m sort of free-falling right now.”
Ryan blinked, then surged in to take another kiss. It felt…desperate, almost. Frantic. “Do you want me to catch you?” he murmured against my mouth.
My kiss back was the answer.
Because yes. God yes.
Please, yes.
We left the conversation at the beach, heading inside to order dinner. We showered, then put on the impossibly soft hotel robes before taking the room service tray out to the back deck. Off in the distance, I could see people milling around the beach. There was faint music playing, lights, and not too far from where we were, someone was setting up a fireworks display.
It was a very, very different mood from last year. Even before the accident, the snow had been falling in a thick blanket, the roads iced over, the people more subdued than usual. There was a heaviness to it that was starkly absent now.
“Move in with me,” Ryan said.
I jolted. Neither one of us had said a word in a long while. We’d been enjoying the comfortable silence and each other as we ate. And that was not how I expected him to start the conversation up again.
“Um. Ryan?—”
“Or get a place near me. I’m pretty sure you could bribe my neighbor to break her lease if you pay enough.”
I burst into nervous laughter. “Ryan.”
He smiled at me, clearly nervous but braver than I would have been in this moment. “I want to end this year the way I want to spend the next one, and that means with you. I don’t care if we’re neighbors or roommates or…fuck. I don’t know. Lovers. Though I hate that word.”
I snorted. “It doesn’t flow off the tongue nicely, does it?”
“No, but it’s better than what we had been before you came here to find me.”
Which was nothing. A memory, at best. A stranger I’d never see again at worst.
Ryan reached for me, taking my fingers and holding my hand in the gap between our chairs. “You asked me to catch you, and my arms are open.”
That wasn’t exactly how the conversation had gone, but it might as well have been. And I knew there was no other answer than yes.
“I can be anywhere you want me to be,” he told me. “With you. Next to you. The boogieman in your closet…”
“Oh my god.”
He grinned. “That’s the title of your first hit single.”
