Stealing Ryder (12 page)

“What are you doing here
, Ryder?” I hissed at him, this time, annoyed that he was even here pretending like fighting for this was going to work.

“Harper, please stop and let me in.” He cried desperately.

“You’re in the room; what else could you fucking want?” I bitched.

“I need to explain what you saw. I need to tell you that everything is okay. What you saw isn’t what you think it was.”

“I know what I saw, Ryder. I saw you kissing Kylee. I saw you sharing an intimate moment with your ex-wife, and that’s enough to see. I don’t need to see anymore than that.”

“But that’s not what happened
!” He cried, with tears now being angrily swiped away.

Shit, he almost looked sad and desperate. I almost felt like I needed to go to him. I wanted to hold his
trembling body in my arms, and rub my fingers through his dark hair. I wanted desperately to tell him that everything was going to be okay with us. Until I realized it wasn’t going to be okay with us. Nobody was perfect, but our love is to blame. I relied on him. I depended on him to be there for me, but he wasn’t. All I could see was the fact that he was there for Kylee, and not me.

It all started from the very beginning. He was always there for his family, which he should have been
, but the least he could have done was talk to me about it all. When he left me at the hotel room when we first met, he should have told me where he was going. It was the first time he took me out on a date, and he abandoned me. He left me there, stuck in the dark, and he was leaving again. This was no different than when we first met.

“It is what happened
, Ryder. You left for Texas, the very bane of your existence, without telling me or giving me any clue as to what you were doing. You left me anyways. You are always leaving me. Really, it’s what you’re good at.”

“But
—” He tried to interrupt me, but I placed my index finger to his lips to quiet him.

“There is going to be no buts,
Ryder. Let me finish, please.”

“Go on.” He beckoned,
frustrated because I clearly wasn’t going to let him continue with whatever long-winded speech he had planned on his way here.

“You came out
here after telling me repeatedly how hard it would have been to come back to Texas, and didn’t tell me you were even planning on coming out here. I couldn’t be here to support you, which upset me. Of course I wanted to be out here, but when you brought it up, you told me to stay in California. I would have come on the first plane out if you asked me, but you never even asked. It hurt me.” Tears spilled from my eyes, and I turned my face away with wet pain. A pain that was very familiar to me. A pain that told me to leave. It was time.

“Baby…”
He tried to walk over to me, but I pushed him away, and he understood and sat back down.

“It didn’t end there
, Ryder. I wish it ended at the fact that you were just coming out here that upset me. The fact of the matter is that the minute you got here, you ended up sleeping with your ex-wife.” He looked defensive, as if he was going to say something about that, but I cut him off quickly.

“I know it was just in the same bed and nothing happened, but do you realize how horribly wrong that is? Do you realize that
regardless if you had sex with her or not, how much you cracked my heart in two when you called me to tell me that? It absolutely broke me, so I got on a plane here. I got on a plane to surprise you, and well, quite frankly, we know how that turned out. I was the one surprised.”

“I get that you have a daughter, Ryder. I understand that you will always put her first
; and I also know that I won’t know that feeling until I have children myself. That doesn’t mean that you have to have that same emotional connection with your ex-wife. I know that much. I am a naturally jealous person, and that’s just a flaw that I know I have. I could work on it, but I think anyone would be disgusted with your behavior.”

“I know
, Harper. It was wrong of me. I’m totally aware of it. But, please…don’t leave me,” he begged, as he grabbed my wrist.

I shook
him off and continued, “Then I come here, so excited that I was finally going to be able to surprise you, and what do I see?!” I screamed at him.

“I see you with your stupid ex
-wife, holding each other, and you are kissing her on the forehead. You KNOW how much I love that, right? You know how I thought it was our special thing—to kiss each other on the forehead. It was such a ‘fuck-you’ to our relationship. You sharing our special moment with another woman.”

“Harper, that’s not how…”

I couldn’t let him continue. I was heated, and anger was coursing through my veins. It felt almost like there was a large gaping hole in my soul and he kept prodding it with a knife.

“No. FUCK YOU
, Ryder!” That pretty much summed up how I felt. There wasn’t really much more I could say or do. I wanted him out of this tiny little hotel room. But, I continued my word-vomit assault, all while watching his face morph through a range of different emotions.  I wanted nothing to do with this piece of shit.

He shared
our
personal and private moments with other people, and I was getting so fucking sick of his shit. I was sick of having to share myself with the world. When I was with Tye, I was shared with the abuse I had to encounter. I was sick of sharing myself with pasts.

I had worked very hard to not share myself with Ryder, but he was still sharing me with Kylee. I felt like I had to work to steal him from his past
, and I wasn’t sure if I had the gusto in me to continue fighting for him. Essentially, his past was going to win and take him away from me.

“Fuck you for going back to your ex-wife. Fuck you for making me confess everything to you and then go stab me in the back…again. Fuck you for having an ex-wife in general
, who you can’t seem to get away from. Just, seriously, get the fuck out of here, because I can’t do this anymore. It’s over, and I don’t want to do anything else with you. I want nothing to do with you anymore. I have to leave.” Tears were spilling down my face now, and my hands were shaking beneath my solid composure.

“Don’t say that, Harper!
I can’t lose you. I don’t know where I would be without you. All I wanted to do was come back home to you and tell you everything that happened with my family and this trip. I was stupid and thought I could do all of this without you, but I realized I can’t. I cannot live without you. I don’t know how to breathe without thinking about you. You are the center of my world. No, you are the center of my universe. I am sorry for hurting you. You know I would never intentionally do anything to hurt you. I just thought…” he wanted to keep going, but I interrupted him.

“You thought nothing. That’s
the problem, Ryder. You didn’t think about shit.”

“No, in fact, I was thinking about Evelyn. I though
t that when she grows up, she would want one simple picture of her family. A picture of her, her mother, and her father in one frame. That’s what I was thinking,” he said, as he gently laid his hands on top of mine, which were fidgeting in my lap.

“But you could have easily taken that photo without kissing
her on the forehead. You knew how much that gesture meant to me,” I cried, desperate for him to know how much that small thing pained me.

“I know it
was wrong of me, Harper, but I can’t lose you.” He dropped down from the bed, and was on his knees in front of me. I looked up from my hands, and glanced at his face. His eyes were red and puffy from crying, and his hair was fluffed all around his face from constantly raking his hands through it. He had slight lines on his lips, which were turned downwards. He looked…sad. Really, that’s the only way I could describe his features. He looked pained, as if at any moment I was going to run and never come back…which was true. I was going to leave.

I had to leave.

“I have to go, Ryder. I can’t do this to myself anymore. There’s just too much pain, and it’s just not worth it. I am so used to going back to the person who hurts me the most, but this time, I am trying to be independent and a bigger person. I am looking out for myself for once in my life; and with that, I have to go. I just simply can’t.”

Ryder got up and started pacing the small hotel room.

“Harper, my life is all about you. And if you just left me, you would rip a small part of my heart out and take it with you.” He came over to me after pacing back and forth a few times.

“I just can
’t, Ryder. It’s the timing of all of this. Right now, I just can’t do this. You have some issues you need to work through with your past, and I have some shit I have to deal with. The timing between us was always too perfect and too right, but it just fell apart. You have to accept that things might fall apart to come back together.” I had hoped that maybe with a light at the end of the tunnel, it would be easier to leave. He needed that hope I was trying to give to him.

“I don’t want
you to leave, Harper. I want to work through this,” he begged, now standing above me.

“I have already worked through it
, and it’s over. I am done with everything we had. I have to go, and I really don’t want to make this any harder than it already is.” I secretly hoped it would be easier than this.

I
urged that numb feeling to come over my body because I needed it to protect me from the rush of emotions I was actually feeling. I was trying to be strong and make it appear that this was easy for me.  It was an easy coping mechanism I used to escape the harsh realities of life itself.

That thing in my dream was right though
, and always the voice in the back of my head when I felt like I was going to crack. I had to realize I was always going to be that other woman to Ryder, and no matter what he said, nothing was going to change that. He was never going to change and I knew that. I just had to make the best out of this so we could leave as easily as he came into my life.

“Please, don’t do this. Look at me, Harper. I’m broken in two. I’m cryin’ like a damn baby right now. I don’t want to think about my life without you in it. Who will I wake up with in the mornin’? Who will be curled up next to m
e when I open my eyes? Who am I going to talk to about my day? Who will sit next to me, eatin’ junk food and rubbin’ their incredibly sexy body against mine?” He cried, and when he stopped, waterworks came down my face.

It pained my heart because he didn’t think I was going to miss all of that too,
that I was dreading losing him for those reasons.

“I don’t want to do this!
” Ryder cried, dropping to his knees.

“It’s already done
,” I whispered.

His hands reached up and grabbed the top of my head
; while he rubbed his soft fingers through my hair, I watched the pools of water drip from his eyes. This was going to hurt both of us, but it had to be done. His face was still turned in a gut-wrenching frown, but something else came over his body. It was almost like a hunger to taste me one last time. To share a moment together that we both knew was going to be the last moment of it’s kind.

I grabbed his hands and put them back down. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for one last time with him. I just sort of wanted a clean break, but this was going to happen. It was a moment that was bound to occur. We were initially bound by our intimate ties, so it made sense that we would be broken by them.

“I’m so sorry,” he groveled, while taking my waist and pulling me into his. Tears started forming in his eyes again as he stared at me with his infamous blue eyes, which were a shade darker tonight.

His lips touched mine gently
, as if he was yearning for more, but oh-so-careful not to upset me or surprise me. When they touched mine, there was a spark that elicited hope throughout my body, but I quickly suppressed that thought. This was goodbye and nothing more. We both knew it. It was over, what we had was something amazing, but neither of us could do it anymore. When a relationship became too difficult, it was easier just to give up, and I was giving up and letting go.

His hands slowly moved from
my sides and ran through my hair, pushing it back while he looked at me, tears now exploring the bottom of his cheeks.

“I will
—” he began, when his lips left mine.

“Shh
,” I commanded, and pressed my lips against his, inhaling his scent and taking him in one last time. I pushed him against the wall, and he grabbed my legs and lifted me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist and crossed my feet so I wouldn’t slip.

Emotions were eating at me
, and I felt so completely empty and worthless that I hugged him tightly, trying desperately to feel something with him. I was in this for the long haul at one point, but I couldn’t believe anything he said now, and the trust we’d had was broken. I saw the look on his face when he talked about having a family with Kylee and Evelyn, and I had to let him go.

“
It doesn’t have to happen like this, Harper.” He whispered hoarsely, desperately hugging me tighter to him and lifting my legs as high as they would go around his hips.