Zara was listening.
"After college we ended up at the sa company. ridian. The job was miserable, the pay was bad, but I told myself I was happy because I was with her." He paused. "I noticed things. The way she and my boss Jas were around each other. The amount of ti. The way conversations stopped when I walked into rooms." He looked up. "I never let myself think the obvious thing. I kept explaining it away."
"Ryan—" She started, but decided to let him finish.
"I found out they were engaged the sa ti everyone else did. At the company gala. She announced it in front of the whole room. I was the last person to know what my own relationship had beco." He said it without much emotion — not because the emotion wasn’t there, but because it had been processed into sothing flat and factual. "I’ve never felt worse in my life than that night."
Zara reached across the table and put her hand over his.
He looked at her hand. Then he turned his over and held it.
"I’m sorry," she said. "That’s a genuinely awful thing."
"It was." He looked at their hands. "After that I made a decision. That kind of relationship — the kind where you give everything and organize your entire existence around one person — I wasn’t going to do that again." He paused. "I was certain I wouldn’t."
Zara was quiet.
"But when I’m with you," he said, "it’s everything Emma made feel at the beginning, amplified until I can’t think clearly." He looked at her. "And that terrifies more than it should."
She squeezed his hand. "Ryan, I would never—"
"I know you wouldn’t." He said it gently. "That’s not what I’m saying." He looked at the table for a mont, then back at her. "You asked if I’m a playboy. I think the honest answer is that I might be sothing worse."
She looked at him. "What does that an."
"I care about you," he said. "I’ve spent more ti thinking about you than I’ve told you. When I kissed you on that balcony I couldn’t think about anything else for days." He held her gaze. "But even knowing all of that — I can’t promise you that you’d be the only one. I can’t give you that. I’m not built for it right now and I won’t tell you I am."
The table was quiet.
Zara looked at him for a long ti. The restaurant moved around them, soone laughing at a nearby table, a glass being set down, the low consistent warmth of a room full of people having their own evenings.
She nodded slowly.
Then she withdrew her hand.
"Well," she said, her voice even and quiet. "I’m sure we’d make great friends."
Ryan looked at her. He smiled, because there was nothing else to do, but the smile had sothing behind it that didn’t match.
"I’m sure we will," he said.
Her phone buzzed on the table. She looked at it briefly.
"My car," she said. "It’s here."
"Yeah." Ryan looked up and caught the waiter’s eye. "Of course."
He paid without looking at the total, left cash on the table, and they both stood and got their coats and walked toward the exit in a silence that was different from every silence that had preceded it that evening.
---
They ca through the door and the caras were there.
Three of them, positioned with practiced patience of people who had been tipped and had waited and were now getting what they ca for. The shutters started imdiately, the flashes cutting through the dim street light.
Zara’s exhale was quiet and resigned.
Ryan raised a hand instinctively against the flashes and lowered it because it made him look worse in the photos, which he knew because he’d seen the last set.
Zara turned to him. The caras kept clicking.
"Well," she said. "A firm handshake goodbye. To make it clear to them we’re just—" she glanced at the caras, "—friends."
Ryan looked at her. "Yeah." He extended his hand. "Of course."
She looked at it.
Her eyes ca up to his face.
She looked at his hand again, then back at his face, and sothing in her expression shifted into sothing he recognized as a decision being made.
"I shouldn’t," she said. "Ryan, I know I shouldn’t."
"Zara—"
"But I can’t stop myself."
Her lips t his.
Her hand went into the back of his hair, the other finding his shoulder, and she kissed him with a desperation that was honest in ways the whole careful conversation had been trying not to be.
Ryan’s hand found the dip of her waist and pulled her closer without deciding to, and she was warm against him in the cold street air and the caras were going insane sowhere behind them and neither of them moved.
They separated after a long mont.
Her hand still in his hair. His still at her waist. Both of them close enough that everything else required a slight effort to pay attention to.
Her eyes found his.
"Don’t ghost again," she said quietly. "Or I’ll co find you myself."
He looked at her.
She stepped back, smoothed the front of her dress once, and walked to the black car that was waiting at the kerb. The door closed.
Ryan watched it pull into traffic and disappear.
He stood on the pavent in the cold with the caras still clicking from sowhere behind him, and he didn’t turn around or acknowledge them or do anything except stand there for a mont with the feeling of her hand in his hair and the weight of everything he’d said inside and the specific understanding that so decisions had already been made without him.
He turned and walked.
The caras followed for half a block and then didn’t.
He kept walking.
Feeling things he didn’t have nas for yet, which was the most honest sign he knew that they were real.
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