I WAKE UP PIECE BY PIECE, my body sounding no alarms, but languidly shaking sleep from one limb at a time until I’m fully aware. The bedside lamp I left on still shines a dim, soft arc of light across the bed. I’m huddled under the covers, basically the same position I passed out in after I took my meds. Bristol left to work on whatever she works on for Rhyson soon after our conversation in the kitchen, and I’ve been here at the house all day waiting for calls that never came. Information about what’s happening. Confirmation that Rhyson is okay. I fell asleep alone and anxious.
But I wake up with him beside me. He’s sitting up, shoulders against the headboard, his eyes pewter-dark and set on me.
“It’s kind of creepy waking up to you watching me like that.” I toss back to him the words he said to me what feels like a millennium ago in this very bed, hoping it lightens the air between us. “But I could get used to it.”
One side of his mouth tips up a degree, but his eyes remain sober. I brace myself for whatever he has to say. If the tape is coming out, I can take that. It would be humiliating and debasing, but I can withstand that. If I have to stay with Malcolm for two years, I can endure that. Or if I’ll be sidelined, unable to perform and back at the Note slinging overcooked burgers, I’ll do that, too. Whatever the outcome that has him looking so serious, I can take it. As long as he doesn’t say we’re over. As long as he can forgive me for lying to him and keeping this all a secret. That is the only scenario from which I’d never recover.
“Do you remember the first time we made love?” he asks softly.
The question is like an arrow from overhead in the middle of a picnic. It ambushes me. It goes straight to the center of my heart. I can’t keep up, my poor, half-asleep brain struggling to process this unexpected conversation. It’s not the test I thought I’d be taking, but I think I have all the answers.
“Of course, I do.” I don’t sit up, but instead burrow deeper under the covers, searching his face. “On your pool table.”
Half a smile crooks his lips.
“I’d never felt anything like that.” He gives into the rest of that smile briefly. “I mean, the sex, yeah. But the closeness. I’d never felt that close to anyone in my life.”
“Neither had I.”
I hold my breath, not wanting to disturb this memory with anything from the present. That night went beyond flesh. I recognized him in my soul. In that deep place of which my father spoke, when that other person’s soul is merely an echo of your own.
“Every wall I’d ever raised, every defense I had, you got past them all,” Rhyson says. “You went deeper than anyone ever had. You peeled away every layer of skin, sunk through the flesh, and I felt you right next to my bones. For the first time in my life I felt fully . . . known.”
Rhyson’s smile fades, and his eyes drop to the hand in his lap.
“I wanted to give you everything that night. Money, houses, jewelry—you could have asked me for anything. I wanted to give it all to you.”
I don’t know what to say because I didn’t want anything from him that night other than what he gave me. And more of it.
“Mostly I just wanted to give you all of me,” he says. “But you ran from it.”
Tears burn my eyes. I’d never thought of it that way. I’d been freaked out by my feelings. Afraid to trust him. Scared we’d ruin our friendship and that what we’d felt couldn’t last because I’d seen love not last. I didn’t want things to end that way for us.
“I was so scared, Rhys. I didn’t know if I could trust you. If I could trust myself, but I got past that.”
“Did you?” He frowns. “’Cause it feels like you still don’t trust me. When you said we hit reset, I believed you. We said no more secrets, no more lies, but then you—”
“Lied.” My voice barely slips through my lips. “And kept things from you, I know. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know how much it hurts. I didn’t realize what I was asking of you,” he says. “To forgive me after I’d betrayed your trust until I had to do the same. It’s not easy.”
“No, it’s not easy.” I shake my head, stealing a look at him. “But it’s worth it. I think we’re worth it, Rhyson.”
He looks back at me for a moment as if weighing his next words.
“I want to be known, Pep, and I want to know you. Fully. I need to believe there isn’t any dark part of me I can’t trust you with, and I need you to believe the same.”
He finally touches me. Thank God, he touches me. Even though it’s just a brush of his fingers across my hair.
“Nothing will make me walk away from you.” He shakes his head, the heat in his eyes smelting this moment down to something precious and raw. “Today I realized that I made you believe what happened between you and Drex might make me run. I don’t want us to live like your father did, hoarding his secrets. Being known too late and by the wrong person.”
“I don’t want that either.” I lean into his gentle fingers, wanting him to touch every part of me, seen and unseen. “God, Rhyson, you’re all I want. That’s what I know. Everything else can go to hell, but please forgive me, because you’re all I want.”
Everything in my body pauses, waiting for his response. Waiting to see if my words are enough to convince him.
“Somewhere along the way I failed you.” He sinks his fingers deeper into my hair and sighs. “Somehow, I wasn’t clear. I haven’t made it abundantly clear that this—what I feel for you—goes nowhere. Maybe it was your good-for-nothing father that planted this insecurity inside of you. This sense that I might walk away, might leave, might love you less.”
The look he gives me reaches in and squeezes my heart.
“Aunt Ruthie said it’s dangerous to love the way we do because people die and aren’t perfect.” He smiles a little. “She promised me that you would make mistakes, and that the real test would be to love you through them. It’s a test you already passed when you loved me through mine.”
Aunt Ruthie has done an awful lot for me over the course of my life, but she may have just given me the greatest gift. One I didn’t even know to ask for.
“You once told me there are at least two categories of forgiveness,” he continues.
I nod into his hand, closing my eyes like a sinner waiting for atonement.
“My Daddy said that, believe it or not.” I breathe something close to a laugh into the pillow that smells faintly of Rhyson. “In one of his sermons, and I still can’t forgive him, so I’m not sure how much weight it should carry.”
His fingers still in my hair for a few seconds, before moving again, lightly massaging my scalp and pushing the thick strands when they fall forward.
“What was that second category?” he asks.
My mind reaches for the conversation he and I had a few weeks ago. Reaches further back to the day I sat by Mama on a wooden pew, wearing my pink and white dress with roses she sewed on at the waist. I’d absorbed every word Daddy said like water, as truth. And as flawed as he was, as wrong and broken as he was, and despite his lies and his secrets, maybe there was some truth to what he said because I’ve never forgotten.
“It’s that kind of forgiveness where you just love the person so much, you can’t stand being apart from them. You have to forgive them because you’d do whatever it takes to restore the relationship.”
I finally look up from under my mound of covers to find his eyes waiting for me.
He smiles just enough at me to let me know we’ll be okay.
“That’s the one.”
I drag myself out of the covers and onto his lap to reacquaint myself with his lips, but stop when I notice his right hand beside him on the bed, wrapped and splinted.
“Rhys, what happened to your hand?” I’m horrified. I’m afraid to touch it in case I hurt him. I go to pull back, but his left hand pulls me closer so that I’m straddling him, knees folded under, pressed into his chest.
“Don’t move.” He leans into my neck, inhaling whatever scent I have left at this late hour. “Stay.”
Tears blur my vision for a few seconds, but I blink at them so I can see him clearly. I force myself to speak past the sorrow and guilt searing my throat.
“Baby, oh God. What happened?” I palm his face, catching and holding his eyes with mine. “This is my fault.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I lost my temper, missed Drex’s face and hit a stone patio. My bad, not yours.”
“Oh God.” I cover my mouth, closing my eyes with tears trickling down my cheeks and over my fingers. “But you wouldn’t have been in that situation if it hadn’t been for me.”
“Stop.” He buries his face in my hair, his hand splaying over my back and soothing me when he’s the one hurting. “He put me in that situation when he threatened the most important thing in my life, and I’d do it again.”
I pull back as much as he’ll let me, enough to peer into his face with the beautiful tired eyes.
“Your music, Rhyson.” I shake my head helplessly, a sinkhole opening up in my belly as I consider the implications of this injury. “What did the doctor say? Will you need surgery? What’s the prognosis? Should we—”
“Stop.” He presses a finger to my lips. “All great questions that I’ll answer tomorrow. Right now, I’m exhausted. I just want to go to sleep. We can talk details tomorrow, but that tape is dead and so is your contract with Malcolm. I promise I’ll tell you everything in the morning. Right now I just want to hold you.”
I nod, sitting back on his legs a little to look at him. My fingers shake, but I reach for the hem of his t-shirt and pull it over his head, being mindful of his hand. I had fallen asleep again in my clothes, so I peel my t-shirt off next, my skin heating under his watchful stare. I scoot back until I can reach the buckle of his belt, undoing it, unsnapping his jeans and carefully tugging them and his briefs over his legs and feet until his long, lean body is completely naked. Standing, I strip off my jeans, my panties, my bra. I’m as naked as the day I was born when I lie back down on our bed. His eyes rove over me as hungrily as they always do, but oddly, as much as I know we want each other, this isn’t about sex. I was doing more than stripping away our clothes. I was stripping away the last of my secrets, baring my soul to him. Baring his to me.
I press our foreheads together until I can whisper over his lips.
“I live you, Rhyson.” My voice shakes with emotion. With acceptance. With gratitude that he’s forgiven me. Assuring him that I’ve forgiven him. The words land on a slate that is finally completely clean.
He nods, eyes pressed shut and lips open over mine to make his words simultaneously a kiss, a confession, and a promise.
“I live you, too, Pep.”
I explore the sharp, strong angles of his face and roam into the gorgeous mop of messy, burnished hair. I claim him with the pads of my fingers, with the palms of my hands. He is mine and I am his. Our darkest secrets, shared. Our deepest places, reached. We are completely known. Completely loved down to our very souls.