Ryder looked at the bag, then me, then the bag again, lips parted in surprise and eyes shining, like he was on the verge of tears.
I wanted to touch him. I wanted to hold him.
I wanted so much more than a fake relationship with a man I’d been in love with since before I knew what love was.
“Don’t you cry, you’ll make me cry,” I said. “I lost you once, I don’t wanna do it again.”
“Is that supposed to stop me from crying?” Ryder sniffed. “I’m gonna be using this memory to make myself tear up on cue foryears.”
The key glinted in the light as Ryder tipped it out into his hand, staring at it as though he didn’t believe it was real.
“Glad to be of help, then,” I said, dabbing a stray tear away from my own eye. “Isthatwhat method acting is?”
Ryder laughed. “Kind of. The thing is that you have to actually have had an emotional experience to draw on, and for some characters you have to go out and do that on purpose. Not for the kind of characters I play, though. I...”
He paused then, looking up at me with something in his eyes that I couldn’t read. Something I’d seen before, though. The one look of Ryder’s I’d never quite understood.
“I know what it’s like to want to kiss someone,” he continued. “I’ve been holding onto a memory of wanting it so bad I felt like I’d die if it didn’t happen for a long time.”
“Did it happen?” I asked, a tendril of something coiling around my gut. Anticipation, or hope, something that wound up tight like it was ready to spring right out of me.
Ryder shook his head. “No.”
I licked my lips, fighting with myself to say something, to say therightthing, not to let the moment pass and risk regretting it all over again.
If I didn’t reach out and take what I wanted now, I’d never know what it was like. I was right smack in the middle of my second chance at getting something I wished I’d been brave enough to ask for a decade earlier.
“I was about to kiss you,” I blurted out. “Before you got those texts from Seth.”
The look in Ryder’s eyes changed, the shiest smile I’d ever seen on him turning up one corner of his mouth.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he said.
“Yeah?”
Was my voice trembling as much as it felt like it was? My legs definitely were.
But Ryder wouldn’t mind that, would he? He’d always taken me as I was. Shy and nervous and not good with crowds or big cities or loud parties.
He’d never wanted me any other way.
“Yeah.” He bit his lip, but there was such a warm smile in his eyes that even nervous as I was, I couldn’t tell myself I was imagining it. “Still want to?”
I nodded. My throat was too tight to get the words out, but Ryder only broke into a full beaming smile, looking up at me as bright as the sun, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“What’re you waiting for?”
If the whole world had stopped spinning the next second, I wouldn’t have noticed it.
I swooped in too fast, and our noses bumped and our teeth clicked and it wasn’t anything like the movie magic kisses I’d been watching Ryder act out since the first time he’d been on screen.
It was so much more perfect than anything that’d ever been in a movie.
Ryder laughed as he adjusted the angle, curling a hand around the open edge of my jacket, reeling me in to try again.
We could try as many times as he wanted if it meant I got to keep kissing him.
This time it was better, my stomach clenching as Ryder kissed me like he meant it, like he wanted this, with no one else around to see it. Even when my lungs were burning for air I didn’t want to back off.
