“Tess, don’t,” I said. “Don’t tell me all the reasons why this is wrong, or why it can’t work. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen, or that you didn’t feel everything I just did. There’s something here. And if I have to do all that again to prove it to you, I’m willing.”
That earned me a tiny smile, but then she shook her head, the dark waves spilling over the pillow in a soft blanket. “I love the idea,” she said slowly. “But the reality is what we need to look at.”
I hated reality. I wanted to stay as far from reality as possible right now. “I don’t like where you’re headed with this.” I moved in to kiss her again, to see if maybe one more perfect kiss could move her to the mindset that was so clearly rooted in my own brain.
Tess rolled off the bed and reached down, pulling her shirt up to cover herself as she stood. “Ryan, this was nice.” She blushed then, and my heart stuttered at how incredibly sexy she looked standing there, blushing and looking down at the floor as she tried to cover her perfect full breasts with her T-shirt. “I mean, honestly, I just had sex with Ryan McDonnell. Forget that no one would ever believe me if I told them, or that this was pretty much my ultimate sexual fantasy fulfilled.”
My brain detached for a moment, letting itself turn over the words she’d just said as my ego soared. But the words she said next pulled it back.
“But you’re leaving the day after tomorrow, and I’ll never see you again unless I go to the theater. And you’ll be pretending to be with Jules, and you’ll both be back to your version of regular while I’m here in the real world …” she trailed off, and looked around as if she was seeing her room for the first time. Then her voice softened, cracking and nearly breaking my heart. “And … look … Could you maybe just go? This is too much. It’s too hard.”
I sat up, shaking my head. “It doesn’t have to be, Tess.”
She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t meet my eye. She picked up my clothes and handed them to me, then stepped back quickly, and I shivered. Could this really be over?
I disposed of the condom in the little trashcan next to her desk and got dressed, watching Tess the whole time as she tried not to look at me. How could I fix this? I wasn’t sure I even knew exactly what was broken.
“I want to stay,” I told her.
“Just go,” she said, and her voice was so full of remorse and sorrow that I felt my heart wither and shred as I did what she asked and watched the door click shut behind me.
I walked slowly down the hall in the quiet house, pausing when I heard Granny yell, “Gotcha, sucker!” from somewhere down below. Juliet’s door was shut, and I knew I should probably just go to sleep, but I didn’t want to be alone.
I hadn’t come to Maryland looking for anything specific, but maybe if I was honest with myself I could admit that I’d been searching for a while. For something. And when I’d found Tess here, in this quiet life surrounded by beauty and water and simplicity and the constant lingering smell of pot, there was a big part of me that was trying to drop anchor. Because all of this felt right.
Well, maybe not the pot part.
For lots of years—even before Hollywood swept me up and gave me direction—I’d moved from place to place, been a stranger. When you only stay places for a year or two at a time, you start to realize there’s no point in trying to find people to care about, or to care about you. You’re just going to leave them anyway. My parents had actually taught me that lesson early on.
And after I’d gotten my break, when I’d been in Los Angeles for a few years, and had some friends, I began to understand that friendship meant something different when you had money, when your name meant more than what was inside of you. If anything, I was more alone now than I’d ever been before, despite more people knowing me than I’d ever dreamed was possible.
But Tess was different … she made me feel like I was part of something else, like maybe together, we were something bigger. Tess gave me a glimpse of a different kind of life, one where you stayed in one place because that was where you belonged, because that was where your heart lived and where you were loved. Because it was where you were supposed to be.
I stood in the center of the hallway in that old house for a long moment, listening to the house creak and groan as the wind wrapped around it outside. My mind turned and twisted, working to make sense of how unexpectedly this place had infiltrated my mind, my heart—how completely Tess Manchester had taken over everything uncertain and afraid in me and lit a path that made more sense than anything in my life ever had. I stared at the gentle glow of light cast up the stairs from below. It probably wasn’t the right move, but I followed that light and Granny’s gleeful shouts down the stairs and into a small office in the back of the house.
The old lady was wearing a headset, sitting in front of a huge monitor in the biggest swiveling chair I’d ever seen. The screen in front of her showed a huge colorful world and a group of cartoony characters gathered around carrying a wide range of weapons
