The Sun and the Moon (Giving You ... #1) (25 page)

Then we waited a long, long time and we were told that we could visit him.

We went into the room together, instinctively holding hands. Ryan was lying in a bed, asleep, with machines beeping. There were wires and an IV and medical things around him. I had no idea what most of it was. But I realized that one of the machines broadcast the steady beat of his heart, and this soothed me.

It had been my experience in hospitals that people normally looked smaller, diminished, when they were lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by medical equipment. Not Ryan. He was so tall and muscular, with his broad chest and defined biceps that he took up the whole bed, and he looked beautiful. And while he was asleep and was bandaged up, he still looked strong.

He had a bandage on his temple, some cuts and bruising on his face, his arm in a cast, cuts on his other arm and hands, and apparently some broken ribs that I couldn’t see under the blanket. While he was pretty beat up, and was unconscious when they took him to the hospital, the doctor told us that the prognosis was good.

Hope.

I needed something to hold on to.

I decided to hold on to his hand.  I waited for him by his bed, gently stroking his hand, and looking at his handsome sleeping face.  Jennifer stayed with me the whole time. It was heartbreaking to realize that she had no one else to call for him, except me, and perhaps, Yoda. They had no parents. And Ryan had told me that he was estranged from his aunt after battling her for custody of his sister. I didn't know if there were any other family members. After a while, when she was falling asleep in the chair, I sent her home and told her that I would stay there until she came back.

I didn't know how much later it was when he finally opened his eyes. While I normally lost any sense of time with him, this was something entirely different. It was like I was willing him to get better, willing him to recover, willing him to be my Ryan again.

Because he was my Ryan. My idiocy over silly things and wrongful conclusions, well, I hoped it was a thing of the past. I was not going to be so unrealistic as to say that I would never again jump to stupid conclusions about my awesome guy, but I was going to try like hell for it to be never again.

I trusted him. He was it for me. And I loved him.

And when he opened his eyes, I wanted to tell him.

Fuck it. I wasn't going to wait any more and if the feeling wasn't reciprocated, oh well. I was going to take the risk. Life was too short and I had shut myself down, kept myself from risking, from feeling, for too long. Maybe I had a good reason for doing so, but I needed to move forward. He mattered to me and I was going to tell him; I was not going to keep anything from him. If I got hurt in the process, I knew that I would survive. I was strong.

"Ryan," I whispered, as he looked around the hospital room.

"I guess I ate it big time, huh?" he asked with a small smile. Then he asked me what happened and I told him what I knew.  He lifted his finger and stroked the back of my hand.

After a while, he closed his eyes and dozed, and I dozed with him, sitting in a chair by the bed, my forehead by his hip, holding his hands, as the machine beeped, singing his heartbeat to me.

I woke up later and looked at my Ryan, vibrant eyes open, propped up in bed, looking at me.

"Movie Star, you need to go home and take care of yourself."

I felt groggy and gross, wearing the same clothes that I had thrown on who knows how many hours ago. I had basically no makeup and my hair was thrashed. I'm sure I looked like a total a mess. I didn't care. I was with him.

"I don't want to leave you."

"You're not leaving me," he said with a smile. "You're just going to get some sleep and a shower."

"Well, maybe in a little bit. How are you feeling?"

"I don't know that I've felt much worse," he admitted. "I have a headache, but I think the drugs are keeping me from feeling too much pain right now."

"What would make you feel better?"

"Honestly, some water. All these ice chips are getting to me."

I went and got him some contraband water, medical rules be damned, and he drank it gratefully.

Taking a deep breath, I started, "There's something I need to tell you."

"I'm listening."

"I'm an idiot. I was really mad at you and you didn't do anything wrong. I wanted to surprise you at your house and I drove by and I saw you hugging your sister and I thought that she was, fuck, was … ."

His eyes widened and he dipped his forehead down to look at me.

"Fuck, I'm sorry, that I ever doubted you. I jumped to conclusions about you, yet again. You've never done anything to me except be honest with me. You've been honest with me about your feelings, about what you're thinking, about what you want to do. I'm the fucked up one and you’ve helped me to be less fucked up." And then I just went for it. "I like myself when I'm with you. I lose myself in you but I also find myself in you. You're the best friend I ever had and the best lover I ever dreamed of. I love you."

He tensed his hand on my hand and looked at me. My heart beat so fast I thought it would outpace the machine that he was hooked up to.

"You've been the only one for me since I saw you on the first day of school all those years ago, and I've carried you in my heart since then. But I didn't know you then. And now that I know you, I
know
I love you." He continued in a whisper, "You're the only person, besides members of my family, who I have ever loved and the only one I ever will love."

I leaned over and kissed him very softly on his lips, avoiding his cuts. Then I kissed his eyelids, very soft butterfly kisses. Then I brushed my lips over his forehead and inhaled his soft hair.

He smiled at me and said, "Go home, get some rest, get a shower, and then come back."

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

He smiled. "A little bit of both."

Ryan returned home from the hospital a few days later, with his arm in a cast and his beautiful torso bandaged up. He also had some stitches on his temple that were covered in a bandage.

I took a leave of absence from work to take care of him and I found that I loved taking care of him. While he did not like to be lying down—he was normally all energy—he seemed to be channeling this energy into healing rather than anything else. So he got better at a faster rate than the timeline that the doctor told him that he could expect.

During this time, I found that I was healing as well.

I would never really recover completely from depression. There were too many scars, too much pain. There was always going to be a part of me that reacted to uncomfortable events in my life by shutting down, by numbing myself out, by avoiding my feelings.

But those times were starting to come less and less and I called that fact, "recovery." I also consciously tried feeling all of my feelings, both the pleasurable and the painful, and I survived. But I felt like more than a bare survivor; I felt like I was starting to thrive.

I found that I was not needing to see my therapist as much. I still saw her, but not multiple times a week as I did before I met Ryan. I still took antidepressants, but I could take a lower dose. My mood stayed mostly stable.

I also found that I was only rarely having nightmares about hospitals anymore—not about my time in the hospital, my time in the mental hospital, or Ryan's time in the hospital. I was generally having sweet dreams (and they normally featured him naked). After he got healthy, he was perfectly willing to reenact any part of them that I remembered.

It was many weeks before I could launch myself at him with any vigor.

But those parts came back too.

Ryan missed Thanksgiving because of the hospital, but he was well enough to make a big deal about Christmas. I learned that he usually went all-out for his sister on holidays, trying to make it a special day for her, given the absence of any other family in their lives. He bought two Christmas trees, put up lights everywhere so that it looked like a fairy had exploded, made sure we all went to Candy Cane Lane to look at the over-the-top Christmas lights, and even took us to a professional performance of the Nutcracker in Los Angeles, because he knew that Jennifer loved it. My guy liked holidays. Amusing, but also bittersweet, because I think he was trying to keep a connection to his parents by keeping up their traditions as the parent-figure for his sister.

He met my parents and got a stamp of approval that he didn't need to get, but I was glad to have anyway.

For Christmas, I gave him pictures, framed in silver, lots of them, of us, of him with his sister,  Of the memories we were making.  He put them next to his freshman yearbook, which now had a place of honor.

He gave me a Tiffany silver necklace with a diamond "S" on it for Sabrina, saying "you'll always be her mom." With this, if he wasn't there before, he cemented himself permanently in my heart. I wore it every day.

After the holidays, I visited my therapist.

"How are you feeling these days, Amelia?" asked Christian Gray.

I let out a deep breath.

"I am feeling so much better," I answered. "Truly. It's amazing. You know, when I was depressed, I didn't know it at first. It snuck up on me and I didn't realize that I was suffering. I was just numb. But then, after a while, with the treatment, with the medication, and with a whole lot of support, I started wanting to get out of bed every day. I started wanting to feel things. I wanted to smell the ocean, enjoy drinking good coffee, get mad, get angry, stand up for myself, and, for God's sake, feel sexy. It's a little embarrassing to admit, but I think that your advice to 'feel sexy' was the best advice that I could have ever received."

She smiled, a warm, gentle smile. And a little knowing.

I continued. "It matters how I feel about myself. It matters what I think about my body. And it matters that I feel comfortable in it, that I feel like it is okay to, I don't know,
inhabit
my body."

"That's absolutely right," she agreed. "This is progress. Well done."

"And you know, I think that the orgasms helped," I giggled.

"Of course they did," she laughed.

"Seriously," I went on. "I think they altered my brain chemistry. I think that the depression was an imbalance in there somehow, and getting in the good stuff, the pleasure, helped."

She nodded.

"Falling in love helped, too," I continued shyly.

"How is Ryan these days?" she asked.

"He's amazing," I answered. "He is a rock. I think that because of his past, because he lost his parents so young, and had to work through those issues, and take care of his sister, all the while being just eighteen or nineteen or twenty, meant that he grew up. Plus having to deal with having money all of a sudden and all of these people asking him for things. He is just solid. I couldn't have tethered my recovery to a better anchor."

She smiled.

"He also just accepts me as I am," I said quietly. "He doesn't try to change me. Sometimes he gets pissed at me, but he always tells me. He doesn't play games. He just loves me. And I love him."

She nodded. "I am happy to hear that your relationship is going well. How do you feel about your communication with him?"

"It's great. He knows all of my secrets. And I mean all of them. And he challenges me, he laughs with me. Half the time, I really can't believe he's real. He tells me what he's thinking, what he's doing with his business, what he thinks about the future."

"Do you ever fight?"

"Sure, we have. I got mad the other day and let him have it and he gave it right back. But I feel like we can work through it. I guess I just feel
healthy
."

"It sounds like it."

"So now at work, I'm still stressed about this case I'm working on," I continued, telling her about how Jake wanted me to do a case that I didn't think was good for my career, but would be good for his.

Having someone to talk things over with, was so unbelievably wonderful. My therapist was a key to my recovery: having the ability to unburden myself every week of my troubles, and being able to look at them from a distance, really mattered.

Ryan was a major source of my recovery too. My Sun God. My gorgeous, loving, beautiful man.

But the real part of my recovery was me. I was the one who was enough. I was the one who was no longer fucked up inside—or at least not as fucked up as I was before. We're all fucked up inside to some degree. But you could get past it. You could feel good about yourself, and feel all of the feelings, the good and the bad, and let it be.

Having friends, a partner, a professional, and others to help made it all worthwhile. I couldn't wait to see what the next adventure would be.

Two months later.

I was driving down Highway 101 with Ryan in my convertible. The top was down and the wind was blowing through our hair. Even though it was late January, it was unseasonably warm. California, my friends. These days, I found myself not caring if my hair was mussed. I wanted to feel the air, smell the ocean, and taste its salt, even in the daylight.

We were headed back from a dinner in Santa Barbara and going to Ryan's house for the night.

Oh, and I must brag about something. At dinner, I was accosted by yet another fucking blonde bitch warning me off of Ryan. I know, ridiculous, right? But this time, I was sober and prepared to launch a counter-attack. Before she finished the "I can't believe you're with Ryan Fielding" speech, I interrupted her, gave her The Hand, and said, "I don't know who you are or why you think you can judge him or me. You can't. He is the most sincere person I have ever met. He's proved it over and over again to me. He doesn't have to do it to you."

And with that, I flounced away, pleased with myself for finally sticking up for myself and for what I knew to be true about Ryan.

So we drove to his house, listening to Marie's Wild Child CD, which I still needed to return to her, the last part of that last song, "The Tale of You and Me" came on, the part where it changed tempo from the dark lyrics to the message of hope, and everyone sang together that it really was going to be alright—we'd make it so.