The Sun and the Moon (Giving You ... #1) (24 page)

As I continued down the street past that fucking bastard's house, I got on the freeway at the next entrance and headed back up to my house.

My heart seized up and I didn’t breathe.

My body seized up and I had no idea how I was going to drive.

My mind seized up and I couldn’t think.

I couldn’t deal.

Those fucking blonde bitches were right. The fucking looks I got, the fucking warning. They were all correct.

All those warnings.  All those signs.  I should have paid attention.  I shouldn't have ignored them.  I shouldn't have trusted him.

I shouldn't have trusted myself.

I should not have trusted, period.

It hurt too much to trust.

The thing was, as I drove, after a while, I realized that I was not in my deep, dark depression place. I was fucking mad. I was hurt. I was pissed. I was sad. And I was heartbroken.

But I was not numb.

And in this place of strange, unbelievable hurt, I realized that I was not shutting down. I had learned something, and I was recovering.

It fucking hurt, but I was strong, and I was getting stronger.

The feeling that I felt was not one of closing in on myself. I was not looking for a railroad track. Instead, it was hot, horribleness coursing through me, racing around, pumping through my veins.

And while it hurt, as I drove, I realized, with the training that my therapist had given me, that I was still breathing. I was still alive and I was going to make it.

I felt like I deserved a trophy for getting the fuck out of depression.

And a little part of me felt proud of myself for not collapsing into numbness and nothingness.

I was recovered.  For real.  At least as much as you could ever recover from a mental illness.

But I needed to get these feelings out of my body. I needed to scream, to yell, to cry, and to expel these demons.

What I needed was a pity party. I hit "call" on my phone.

"Marie, I need a pity party. How soon can you be over?"

"About an hour or two."

"Okay, here's the deal. We're having vegan cake, champagne, and we're watching
Bridget Jones's Diary
. I need medicinal Colin Firth and Hugh Grant."

"What happened with Ryan?"

"I'll thank you to never mention that low-down, no-good, dirty, rat bastard to me again. Fucking asshole."

"I'll be there in forty-five minutes, and help you frost the cake."

"Deal."

So here's the thing. I throw pity parties literally. It's a party. There's drinks. There's cake. There's a celebration. I wallow in my pity. And then I move on.

So, a half hour after I got home, the cake was in the oven, I had had a shot or three of tequila, and Marie knocked on the door. She barged in the second I opened the door, and said, "Smells good, though you smell like a bar. Give me some."

I poured her a shot of tequila, and myself another one, and we clinked shot glasses. No salt or lime this time. Too many memories with that one.

"To all of the assholes who have ever hurt us. May they go away and suffer pain like they've never felt," I toasted. I felt a twinge of guilt because Ryan had never been an asshole to me. Just a cheating bastard. Fucker.

"To the assholes," said Marie. And we downed our shots.

She handed me a CD. "Here's a present for you. Well, just put the songs on your phone and then give it back to me."

"Wild Child?"

"It's a band out of Austin. They sound like Of Monsters and Men."

"Thanks, I'll check them out."

I turned the oven timer on for the cake, pulled out the champagne and the champagne glasses, and went over to my movies to put on
Bridget Jones
.

"What happened?" asked Marie, flopping on my comfy couch.  I looked at her, straight in the eye, and took a deep breath.  Then I admitted the horrible thing that I’d witnessed.

"I saw Ryan with another woman."

"No!" Marie looked utterly shocked, and set down her drink.

I grabbed the remote and slunk down into the couch.  "Yep. Bastard. I fell for him, hook, line, and sucker."

"Don't you mean 'sinker'?"

"Nope. I'm a sucker. And I'm drunk. And he was really the player they said he was."

Marie was loyal, but she was no fool, and she always pushed me. "Are you sure?"

"I saw him, Marie. I'm a fucking lawyer. I saw the evidence."  

Her brown eyes, warm and analytical, wandered over me.  "What did you see?"

"Him with a blonde in his arms in front of his house."  The movie started to play, and I paused it.

Marie looked pissed.  "That's fucked up. But isn't it 'innocent until proven guilty'?"

"Nope. He's no criminal. This is a civil matter. The burden of proof is 'preponderance of the evidence.'" Tequila shots ingested, and on to the champagne. I must have been getting drunk if I was starting to talk law. I never talked law with civilians if I could help it.

"Fucking men. Who needs ‘em?" said Marie with a glass in her hand. I knew there was a reason why I invited her. "But are you sure about Bridget Jones's Diary? You sure you want a love triangle?"

"Good point.
Magic Mike XXL
. Best plot ever."

"What plot? I thought the plot was a road trip to a stripper convention?"

"Exactly."

I switched the movie, we settled in, feet up on the coffee table, and we watched Channing and Joe and the rest of the six-packs gyrate. At some point I took out the cake. Later, when it was still warm, we frosted it. We ate big pieces with gulps of champagne.

And we were drunk. It was a party.  A pity party.  I felt bad for myself, for having wrecked my life, yet again, and now I would move on.

Well, I was too drunk to move on right now.  I'd think about it in the morning.

At some point we called Marie a taxi and I went to bed.

Strangely, afterward, I felt better.

I didn't call him; he didn't call me.

I didn't want to think about how I was going to have to restart my life, yet again.

Too early, Friday morning, my phone rang. It was Ryan.

Man, I was in Hangover City from too much tequila and champagne. Damn. I didn't want to talk to him, but I felt like I should pick it up. I needed to tell him what a fucking bastard he was. "What, Ryan?" I asked mulishly, and winced, since my head hurt.

An unfamiliar woman's voice, faint sounding, and wavering, asked "Is this Amelia?" I was instantly on alert. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

"Yes."

"This is Jennifer Fielding, Ryan's sister. I found his cell phone and wanted to call you. He's at the hospital." I froze and stopped breathing. "He's unconscious. He had a bad accident at South Jetty while surfing early this morning, hit some rocks … " she trailed off in a sob.

"Tell me where to come," I demanded.

"He's at Community Memorial Hospital. In the trauma unit. He's lost a lot of blood. I can't lose another one. After losing my mother and father, I can't lose my brother too," she sobbed.

Fucking hell.

I couldn't lose him either.

"Shh, shh, it's okay, I'll be there in less than an hour."

I caught a glance in the mirror. Holy hell, I looked like I had thrown a pity party last night. I piled my hair on the top of my head, slathered on some moisturizer, gulped a Gatorade, and puckered up to put on lipstick. I grabbed my purse, shoved my feet in some shoes, and headed out the door, driving like a maniac from Santa Barbara to Ventura.

I loaded the new Wild Child CD in the player to distract me from the drive.

It didn't work.

When it got to the second song, it was like I couldn't listen, but had to listen at the same time. Fuck, what a song. “Silly Things.”  Heartbreaking lyrics about how a relationship started around a coffee pot until silly things got in the way.

No time to process.

I slid into the parking lot, barely remembering to lock my car doors, and ran into the hospital.

"Ryan Fielding," I panted to the information desk.

"Are you family?"

"He's my boyfriend." Or was, at least.

The information desk checked his records on the computer. "He's in surgery on the fourth floor. You can wait for him in the waiting room up there, although I don't know if you will be able to see him."

I didn't care. I would find a way to see him. I ran-walked past the gift shop to the elevators. Once the elevator door opened, the car lumbered up. Could they make slower elevators?

It was not like getting there faster was going to make him better but still, I had to be there. I didn't have time to sort out all my feelings. I was just reacting.

I’d never met his sister, never seen a picture of her, so I was not sure where to look for her.

The elevator opened and I walked into the waiting room.

She was there.

A beautiful blonde with long legs and long hair. Wearing short shorts and stacked sandals.

The blonde who was hugging Ryan.

She was crying and holding his phone.

His phone.

His green eyes.

His sister.

Shit.

I’d made a mistake. A fucking mistake that belonged in a two-bit romance novel. I had jumped to conclusions, yet again, because I couldn’t trust the good that was around me.

We all did this.  Why couldn't we be happy with what we are given?  Why do we have to assume that something needs to be wrong?  Why can't we just live and be naturally happy?  Why do we need to constantly look over our shoulders, waiting for some bad thing to happen?  Why do we assume that it's going to happen?  Why do we assume that people are going to let us down?

What I had learned with Ryan was that it all boiled down to trust, opening yourself up, and vulnerability.  I had trusted Ryan, opened myself up to him, and been vulnerable with him.  And I’d never felt better in my life.  I had never felt more
alive
in my life.

Whatever psychological need I had to make him a bad guy could stop right now.  I didn't need to go looking for something wrong with him, which is exactly what I had done.

I turned to his sister.

"Jennifer?" I asked.

She looked up at me, the same eyes as her brother, but put on a different, softer, female face. "Amelia. Ryan has told me so much about you." Her pretty lip trembled.

"Shh, shh, it's okay," I soothed her, although I knew that I was the one who was going to need to be soothed.

What an asshole I had been.

Again.

I assumed that Ryan was a surf bum. I assumed that he was a coffee shop manager. I assumed that he was insincere. I assumed that he cheated on me.

I had assumed the worst of the best guy that I’d ever known.  I was glad that this most recent assumption only lasted a night.  And I was glad that he wouldn't ever know, unless I told him.

I wasn’t going to live my life in fear of how he was going to hurt me.  I had been hurt before and I had survived and if it happened again, I would fucking survive, again.  But I wasn't gonna go looking for bad shit about the most marvelous man I'd ever met.  The one who had crushed on me for a decade.  I was just going to trust that it would be okay.  Starting here, today, in the hospital.

He wasn't any of those bad things that I had thought or that had been told to me.  He was just Ryan, the man that I love.

And now he was hurt.

Fuck.

Heartbeat

Hours later

"AMELIA," RYAN RASPED
as he opened his groggy green eyes.

I had spent hours at the hospital with Jennifer, waiting for news about his condition. I called into work to beg off due to an emergency, then checked my messages so many times that my phone died. I had forgotten the phone charger, and ended up staring at the posters on the walls, flipping through magazines, and jumping with a start anytime anyone opened the door. I was wired from caffeine from too much coffee. Bad coffee, not like his amazeballs coffee. Ugh.

My Sun God touched every part of my life.

During the hours that we waited, Jennifer and I talked, not awkwardly, but there were long periods of silence since we were both nervously waiting for news. I found out that she had come home a week early from college because she had arranged her classes so that she had a long break. She told me that she wanted to teach kindergarten and was working on getting her teaching credential. She had stayed up late last night talking with Ryan, and they had lost track of the time. Then he went out surfing this morning, early, at the south jetty of the Ventura Harbor, hoping to get in a session before work at Southwinds.

I knew where the harbor was, an area with shops and restaurants on one side, but several rocky jetties on the other side to protect the boats moored in the harbor. Apparently the area had amazing surf, but it was very dangerous. Even if you knew the area well, you could still get hurt. Jennifer told me that the area is really shallow and has hollow waves, which made it attractive to surfers, but you could get slammed on the shore. A really famous surfer got his neck broken there recently.

I didn't want to think about that.

After a long, long time, we were told that Ryan was out of surgery and they were moving him to another room.