Page 74 of Resonance
Ryder swiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “You’re the only man I’ve ever been with until recently. You know that?”
Christ, talk about left fielders. I narrowed my gaze at him and let the silence stretch. “I never made any kind of assumptions, and eventually I didn’t really give a three-legged goddamn. Hope you aren’t telling me you were stepping out on Iona ’cause I’d be tempted to knock you upside the head. She and I may never see exactly eye to eye, but—”
He set his jaw. “Cool your heels. That’s not where I was going with that. I was faithful.”
I waited, but it took a few seconds of him shifting around in the seat before he spoke again.
“I thought of you a lot over the years. Couldn’t be helped, I guess. That’s one of the strangest fucking things about getting older, how you start to realize everything’s not black and white. How you can be of two minds about the same damn thing and have them both make sense.”
A clawing sensation dragged through my stomach. A canyon wide, a heartbeat long. That deep and that quick. “Tell me you loved her.” If he was about to tell me he’d never loved Iona, I might’ve actually hit him.
“I did,” Ryder snapped. “Ido. Not the same now, of course, but I did.” His voice got quieter. “And I thank whatever’s above that gave me my son. I was young and stupid, and I got lucky a lot of times that what could’ve been huge mistakes turned out okay.” He paused meaningfully. “Not all, but most of them.” Tipping his head back, he polished off his whiskey, then leaned to put the glass on a table. “Iona said you were all somber when you came out to the house.”
“Of course I was.” I was unsure where Ryder was going with this conversation and more than a little on guard. “It was the kind of confrontation I hadn’t had to make in years. Even the rearview shit can still get to you sometimes.”
“Don’t I know it,” he muttered.
“Yeah?”
“You know I do.” His gaze wavered toward the window, then landed on me.
Discomfited, I knocked back the rest of my whiskey and started to rise, but Ryder lashed his foot over my hip, applying pressure to urge me back down while I tried to keep my expression neutral. “We don’t need to have this conversation,” I told him. “That’s past and we’ve got plenty ahead of us to deal with.”
“That’s exactly why we need to have this conversation,” he countered.
I nudged his foot away but relented and eased back into my seat, staring levelly at him.
“I’m sorry.”
“You said that back then.”
“As a kid, and now I’m saying it as a man. You quit playing because of me. You know how often I think about that?”
How often had I thought of a moment like this in the years shortly after our breakup? I’d wanted some showdown, wanted to fling my hurt in his face. Make it enormous. Let it crash between us like thunder and lightning. I’d played it out so many times. And now we’d arrived at that moment, a chance for a little retaliatory vengeance.
But I looked at him and thought of Owen, instead.
Owen, who rambled and broke my displays and used towels as aprons. And who made me laugh and provoked me endlessly. Who threw his head back and gasped so sweetly when I was inside him.
I sighed. “I quit playing because I was an idiot, because I let it get to me, and because I was tired of all of it. Ryder, shit…” I trailed off with a shake of my head. I hated the way he was looking at me. Too damn close to the way he used to. You could be over someone and they could still pierce through the armor of time, even when you were eyeing the horizon of a better life.
“For years I wondered what happened to those notebooks you took with you. Figured you’d tossed ’em, maybe burned them. But you didn’t, did you? Couldn’t get rid of them.” Ryder waited a beat and when it was clear I wasn’t gonna say anything else, said quietly, “Me either, as you saw. There was a part of me that hoped when we did this tour that we could go back. To like it was before.” He let out a mirthless chuckle and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Not gonna happen, though, is it?”
I guess I’d known that was coming. At least my gut had. The words still spread through me, joining old regrets in the pit of my stomach and unfurling in a tender sadness for him. And maybe a little for me, too. For the stupidity on both our parts.
It was strange to realize that something I’d carried with me for so long no longer rested on my shoulders with the weight it once had. “I’m not interested in going back anymore. I’ve got too much at stakenow. So do you,” I reminded him.
“Is it Owen?”
I groaned and pressed my fingertips to my temples for a second, then let them slide down the roughness of my cheeks. “He’s part of it, yeah. I don’t know how it’s gonna play out. We’re both—” I cut myself short because I didn’t reckon it was any of Ryder’s business, and because I read pain in the way he lowered his eyes and looked away. “It broke my heart, how it went down with you and me, you know that. I was in love with you, would’ve done damn near anything to keep you. But you wanted other things more. And I don’t fault you for that anymore, but I couldn’t ever go back to it.”
Ryder tipped his head back to keep the sheen in his eyes in check, then nodded, swallowing hard. His sadness was so palpable, it seemed to thicken the air between us. “Think I just needed to hear you say it out loud.” He swiped a thumb under his eye and let out a huge breath and another one of those mirthless chuckles. “Fuck, rejection’s got some kinda bite to it, doesn’t it? I’m out of practice.”
“Sure as shit does. It gets better, though.”
“Yeah, yeah, time and all that bullshit.” He waved his hand and dropped his heels to the floor, straightening like the change in posture would cause a corresponding change in atmosphere. “I’m aware.”
I reached for the whiskey bottle and tilted it toward him in question. While everything he’d said tonight had satisfied some vestigial desire for redemption, that was just ego, and I didn’t have any desire to make him suffer orseehim suffer any longer. “Sometimes whiskey helps. Especially if you want to drink it with me and go over that set list for the next show, because I noticed you left out ‘Days of Dust’ and ‘Gunslinger,’ and I think you’re goddamned wrong about that.”