Page 42 of Unlucky in Love
His mouth lifted at one corner and then dropped again, like he had prepared a hundred jokes and none of them would do. “Because I’m out of excuses,” he said quietly. “Because I have been in love with you for a very long time, and I finally grew up enough to say it out loud.”
Her fingers tightened around the tickets. “Ryan.”
“I know.” He exhaled, and the breath left his chest like it had been trapped there for years. “I should have told you then. At the gym when you taught me to dance to that ridiculous song. On the porch the summer you and Emma spray painted your names on the driveway and blamed the neighbor kids. At the fountain when you hurled pennies like you could bully a wish into coming true. I should have said it a thousand times, and I said nothing. I walked away. I let months turn into years because I convinced myself you were safer without me.”
He searched her face to make sure she was still with him, that he had not knocked the air out of her with the force of all the words he had held back. She was with him. Tears had gathered and not fallen. Her fingers were white where they pinched the paper, but she didn’t look away.
The practiced speech he must have rehearsed in the empty apartment thinned into a confession. “And then I came home, and you were moving through rooms like a ghost. You were kind to everyone, and you kept the whole town running on caffeine and comfort, and still no one seemed to see you. They saw their orders. They saw what you gave them. But not you.”
She lifted her chin a fraction. “You saw me.”
“Yes.” He swallowed. “I always saw you. Back then I pretended I didn’t because I was nineteen and a fool and leaving and absolutely obsessed with all the wrong ideas about what it meant to be good. Then later I kept my distance because guilt is a heavy, stupid thing. I thought leading had to mean never asking for anything. I thought wanting you made me a liability.”
Her laugh broke raw in her throat. “You left to protect me and I learned how to disappear. What a pair we were.”
Something like pain flashed through his eyes. “I am sorry.”
The apology landed without fanfare, simple and square as a stone. He didn’t pack it in justifications. He let it sit between them with the rest of the truth.
Taylor looked down at the tickets again, the crisp edges softened now by her grip. “Paris,” she said, half wonder, half accusation. “You really bought tickets.”
“I did,” Ryan said. “One for you. One for me. The conference is in April. Elise Marquette is giving the keynote. There is a panel on pen names and another on distribution and three on craft that I don’t pretend to understand, but I read the schedule like it was a field manual and built you an itinerary that doesn’t look like an itinerary because I know you hate being told where to be. There are quiet mornings and afternoons for writing. There is a bookstore quarter with a cat that sleeps in the window. I found it on a blog. The cat’s name is Monsieur Biscuit and I can’t compete with that.”
A startled laugh burst out of her. He took it like a prize and kept going, careful now, threading intention through every line.
“You don’t have to take me,” he said. “You can take Emma. You can go alone if that is what feels right. I’ll eat the cost and never mention it again if I’ve misread anything. This is not pressure. It’s a door. I’m standing beside it, not in front of it.”
Her eyes burned and cooled in the same breath. “You thought of the bookstore cat.”
“I thought of you,” he said simply. “And all the things you love that you talk yourself out of. The third row at the bookstore. The violet ink you use for first drafts. The bench on the mountain where you get quiet. The diner jukebox when you pretend you don’t care who is watching. The bridge where you taught yourself that you matter even on days when the world is late to the party.”
“How did you know about the bridge?” she asked, voice low. “I never told anyone.”
He didn’t move closer. He didn’t reach for her yet. “I saw you once,” he said. “Years ago. I was home for a weekend and restless. I walked until I found the river, and then I saw you here with a thermos and a brownie that was probably the day old special. You were flicking a penny like it had insulted you. I should have turned away. I stood under that tree and watched the water move and thought if I stepped onto the bridge I wouldn’t be able to step off without carrying you with me. I stepped back because I was a coward with a schedule.”
Her throat closed around a sound. He heard it, and his own breath faltered.
“The scavenger hunt,” she said after a moment, words careful. “You planned all of it.”
“I did,” he admitted. A rueful smile touched his mouth. “The bookstore clerk owes me a favor because I carried her new shelves in from a delivery when the driver bailed. The diner waitress cried when I asked her to queue your song, then threatened to disown me if I hurt you. The library was your key, not mine, but I called the janitor and told him if he found two raccoons on the camera feed he should let them finish their research in peace. The fountain was easy. Everyone knows you and Emma grew up there. The pressed violet came from Mrs.Abernathy’s garden. She told me to get out of the way so she could tape it properly.”
Taylor let the list wash over her. Each piece had felt like magic. Hearing the practical scaffolding beneath did not make it less tender. It made it more, somehow, a structure built with hands and time and the kind of attention that still felt new on her skin.
She made a helpless motion with the tickets, an arc between them. “And Paris is what, then?”
“Paris is me saying out loud what I could only say sideways before,” he answered. “It is me putting my shoulder under your dream and lifting. You don’t need me to do it. I know that. You have been doing hard things alone for a long time. But I want to be the person who says yes every time your fear says no. If you want me there, I will carry bags and order croissants and sit in the back row of panels like a very tall houseplant.”
She had known in the café when the envelope slid like a secret into her hands. She had known when the playlist played not just their school years but the years inside her she never showed anyone. She had known at the fountain when he said not even close and kissed her like a wish finally granted. But knowing and hearing are different currencies. Hearing it landed in her bones.
“The fact that you found the part of me I kept behind every locked door and decided it deserved a plane ticket makes me want to cry and also throw you in the river.”
“Don’t throw me in the river,” he said softly. “I have a leather wallet.”
A wet laugh escaped her. He smiled like he had been waiting for it. The hurt was still in the air, but the joke gave it a handhold and it climbed down a notch.
The tickets crackled as she loosened her grip. She slid them back into the plastic sleeve with a care that felt ceremonial and then put the sleeve on the railing like an offering. The river moved under their feet, black and steady. She reached for him.
His hands came up as if he were approaching a skittish animal, and then he set them against her face, palms warm, thumbs gentle at the hinge of her jaw. Taylor stepped in until her coat brushed his. She could smell cedar and laundry soap, the same clean scent she had breathed in at the diner, the one that had made the fluorescent lights feel like stars.
