I stare at him. Holding my eye contact, he puts his fork down and leans forward, resting his chin in his palm.
“Unless what I’ve just said has completely freaked you out, in which case, please forget it,” he says slowly, scrutinizing my expression. “I get that this is all very new, so if you think it would be inappropriate, then that’s absolutely fine. I just don’t like the idea of you facing that kind of evening alone, so if you need a friendly face, then I’ll be there. That’s all.” He pauses. “Harper? Are you going to say something? You want me to talk about cutlery arranging in the dishwasher again to make this less awkward?”
“No, no,” I say, breaking into a smile. “It’s really nice of you to offer. I would like that very much.”
His eyes light up and he sits back in relief. “Phew! For a minute there, I thought I was a goner.”
“No, I was just processing how lovely you are,” I assure him, elated at the idea of not having to face them alone for once. “But if you change your mind, please don’t worry.”
“I won’t,” he says confidently.
“Are you sure? Big deal, meeting the parents.”
He shrugs. “Not really. You met mine.”
“In a professional capacity. To them, I was your colleague.”
“My parents aren’t idiots, Harper,” he says, picking up his fork again and digging into his meal. “They knew exactly who you were to me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
When something starts going wrong in an area of my life, I go into overdrive at work. My job makes me feel in control: I know what I’m doing there, and, with perseverance and focus, I almost always get what I want. If there’s someone I want to interview, I’ll go to unusual lengths to get them on board; if I want to cover a story, even if Cosmo is against it initially, I’ll find another way of packaging it that he’ll agree to. It’s rare that I lose.
I’m currently on a mission to find out what’s going on with Artistry. No one has got the inside scoop yet on the ill-fated reunion tour, so I’m determined it will be me who gets the lowdown.
And the reason I’m putting all my focus into this? Ryan.
Something is off.
Last week, everything was fine, better than fine. Things weregreat.I felt like I was walking around on a cloud, suddenly understanding what people mean when they say how falling for someone can make you delirious. I was infatuated with him, entranced by everything he did.
My heart fluttered when he shot me a secretive smile in the office. I hardly heard a word anyone said in the editorial meetings because I was studying the line of Ryan’s sculpted jaw and the perfect slope of his nose and thinking about the softness of his lips, getting shudders of excitement when I imagined kissing him later. I loved that he was stern and serious at work. It amused me that people thought he was quiet and guarded. I enjoyed the way he frowned, his brow tightly furrowed, when he studied thelayouts of the magazine. His edits were brilliant. His ideas, astounding. Ryan Jansson was something else and I couldn’t quite believe he was mine.
And the secrecy of it all made it even more exciting.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt like this before—excitable and distracted, vulnerable and open. It was amazing and terrifying at the same time. Usually, I’m able to keep a level head in a relationship, to focus on work and not let myself get carried away like a naïve, lovestruck teenager, but with Ryan, it was different. Iwantedto get carried away. The world suddenly felt like a beautiful and dizzying place, and that was all down to him. It was madness, but I didn’t care.
I realized I might just be falling in love—and when I caught Ryan looking at me in a certain way, I allowed myself to believe he was, too.
Then Monday happened.
Something changed that afternoon. Ryan had a morning of meetings, and then suddenly he was distant, cold, guarded. The longing looks vanished. He could barely meet my eye, even when discussing work-related things. Those secretive smiles that made me weak at the knees were replaced with irritable frowns. I thought he might be having a bad day, so I messaged him asking him if he’d like me to cook for him that night, and when I said cook, I obviously meant order some kind of delicious takeaway. He sent a cold, terse reply that he had to work late. I suggested Tuesday night instead, but that didn’t work for him, either. Sorry, he said.
The doubt was immediate, consuming my brain, devouring my heart.
I scrutinized every word I’d said, everything I’d done over the weekend, desperately trying to work out where I’d gone wrong. When I couldn’t think of anything that would put him off so abruptly, I put it down to things simply moving tooquickly. We’d jumped in headfirst and it was too much; he’d gotten spooked. The Florence bubble had been intense, and now we saw each other every day. Yes, he claimed to have wanted this for a long time, and, yes, he made out as though he was all in and always had been.
But people don’t always know what’s best for them.
The bubble had officially burst.
We needed some distance and space. I had to embrace his pulling away from me as an opportunity for me to pull away from him.
So, work, as usual, saved me.
In the midst of filling my diary with work events, berating myself for losing my head in the clouds last week and missing some networking opportunities, I remember the Twitter storm over Artistry announcing they had no intention of doing a reunion tour. I try calling their agent, but the person manning their phone is well-rehearsed and, in an admirably polite voice, repeatedly tells me the agent is unable to speak right now.
That evening, while wandering around my bedroom wearing a face mask and trying not to stress over Ryan, I have a brainwave. A few years ago, the lead guitarist, Dylan Knox, took a stab at acting. He had a bit part in a Hollywood film that flopped and, after that, appeared in the pilot of a sitcom that didn’t get picked up. Just before the film release, he did an interview with that smarmy journalist Jonathan Cliff. Dylan said he had always wanted to try his hand at acting and he had high hopes, and Jonathan wrote that he could sense that Dylan had what it takes. A few weeks later, Jonathan Cliff tweeted that he’d seen the movie and hoped that Dylan Knox didn’t give up his day job.
