“Doesn’t matter,” Ryder said.
Before I could insist that it did matter, the sounds of a scuffle playing out wherever Ryder was stopped me in my tracks.
“Ryder?” I asked, heart pounding with worry over what might have happened to him. “Ryder, are you okay?”
“He’s fine,” Seth said over a muffledgive that backfrom Ryder. “His agent is dropping him if he doesn’t produce a Ward-shaped boyfriend to show off to the world. Take your time to decide, he’s got until this afternoon. But it has to be you.”
I blinked as the line went dead, then stared at my phone for a second as I struggled to process what I’d just heard.
The photo thing was fine, no one knew who the hell I was, it didn’t matter to me at all.
The boyfriend thing, though?
Talk about mixed feelings.
“How was your boyfriend?”
I turned around to see Liz grinning at me from the lawn, Charlie perched on her hip.
The automatic denial I would’ve given a minute ago died on my lips as what Seth had said ran through my head again.
Ryder’s career was on the line, and I could save it. I was theonly onewho could save it, apparently. It was hard to believe, but then Seth had no reason to lie to me and Ryder had been cagey enough about it that I was convinced it was the truth.
“C’mon Ward,” Liz said when I was quiet for a half-second too long. “This is good! You’ve only been in love with him since you were what? Fourteen?”
“Fifteen,” I said.
Liz raised an eyebrow. I guessed I’d never told her. It wasn’t something I’d thought about until years later, but now when I looked back I remembered the moment I knew how I felt, and how quickly I’d told myself it was nothing, it wasn’t like that, they were normal friend-feelings.
“Remember when I broke my arm?”
“Sure, doing stupid tricks on your stupid bike,” Liz said. She’d seen the whole thing, of course she remembered.
It was hard to forget. Sun so hot you could smell the tar melting on the road—or the bike tires melting into the road—three in the afternoon on the last Saturday before school finished for the summer break.
“The bike wasn’t stupid,” I defended.
“It had flames on it,” Liz said.
“Yeah, it was the coolest bike ever,” I grinned at her.
I’d always blamed hitting a pothole, but Liz was right—I’d been doing stupid tricks on my extremely cool bike, showing off to all of my friends. One minute I’d been king of the world, the next I’d been flying over the handlebars.
After that, my memory got fuzzy until later. All I could remember of the hospital was throwing up when the x-ray technician touched my arm because it hurt so bad, and then nothing. The combination of pain and painkillers had blocked most of it out.
No, the next thing I remembered was being curled up in bed when Ryder came tumbling through my open second floor window. He was all limbs as he picked himself up, and I’d expected him to be grinning, but he wasn’t.
“Anyway, Ryder sneaked into my room in the middle of the night.”
Liz’s eyebrows made a break for her hairline.
“Not like that, it wasn’t like that,” I said, heat rising up the back of my neck. “He just climbed into bed with me. And I remember him whispering that when I passed out he thought I’d hit my head and that was it, I was gone, and he’d been scared. Then he snuggled up next to me like he belonged there and we both fell asleep. And I remember thinking how nice it was, how much I liked the way he felt pressed against me. How good he smelled. And how much happier I was when he was within touching distance, how scared I’d been, too, that I’d never see him again, that I hadn’t told him…”
“Told him…?” Liz nudged.
“I dunno.” I shrugged. “How much I cared about him, I guess. I was fifteen, I wasn’t clear on how stuff worked. Feelings and stuff.”
Liz stared at me like I’d just explained my five-year plan to dethrone the pope.
