Stuck with that large table and larger boy blocking my door, I sat on the steps with my purse swinging from my fingers, and looked up at the sky, unaccountably self-conscious with him so close to me.
But, I couldn’t take the silence or the feel of indifference that radiated from him. When someone is hurt, it’s human nature to want to help. And that night, Ransom’s silence had seemed like an unbearable wound.
The sky was dark and peppered around the few spindly clouds were four stars brighter than the rest, twinkling in a square.
“Pegasus,” I said, to fill up the silence.
A quick glance to see if he heard me and Ransom followed my nod to stare up at the sky. He didn’t say a thing.
“My grann told me once that Pegasus brought renewal wherever he ran. He was a mammoth, guarding the skies, giving the earth a new start, something to look forward to.”
When I didn’t hear even a low grunt of acknowledgement, I glanced over my shoulder to find Ransom watching me.
“Pegasus is charging above us,” I said, looking back up at the constellation.
It seemed like a minute, maybe two, before Ransom said anything. “Hydra is bigger, fiercer. Pegasus isn’t charging. He’s fleeing.”
Present
Ransom Riley-Hale had swagger. It wasn’t something I noticed very often because, being honest here, nobody really gets the definition of “swagger” quite right. It wasn’t the way he carried himself or how the dip of his chin made me think no one could pull off flirting like Ransom. It wasn’t even how those black eyes of his sometimes looked right through you, like he saw people deeper, could claim to know the filthiest secrets you tried to keep from the world. It wasn’t any of those individual things that had my attention focused directly on him. It was everything—the skill it took to make the world think he was perfectly himself. The strength in his body, the power in a single look that could make any woman desperate to know everything about him and too cowardly to make the attempt.
His swagger was this undefinable way he had to take the challenges set in front of him and overcome them like the effort was nothing. But behind that boldness, the cool, confident man the world saw, there was someone else. Something darker. I’d seen a hint of it that night he’d barged into the studio calling me a liar. His anger had been real, a stinging bite that had shoved back any composure my introverted mind told me to put on display. He’d pissed me off with his shouting and put me into a rage when he called me a liar. No one, not even Ransom, could quell my temper when it had been stoked.
So that night, it was my anger, my irritation with myself at not perfecting the dance and his attitude that kept me from shying away from him. At his parents’ lake house, the first time we’d sung together, I didn’t have my anger pushing me to lash out. I went in utterly unprotected.
Keira was amazing, a determined woman who, in my mind, could tackle anything and usually overcome it. She was fierce, but then she’d have to be to endure a life on her own, raising a son when she’d barely been more than a kid herself.
She and Kona welcomed me, trusted me to look over their son, take care of their home and I felt humbled by their determination to make me comfortable. The woman even helped me with my voice lesson, gave me advice on stage presence and pitch and everything seemed normal to me then, easy. I liked Keira and Kona, respected how much they’d endured together and instantly fell in love with Koa when I first met him. The day should have been relaxed, being there, getting first rate advice from a Grammy winner. And then, he walked through the door, larger than life, engulfing the empty space between me behind that piano, and the path he blocked for an escape. There would be no running, not with him watching me the way he did. So, I shot for subtle, casual, hoping I could make myself small enough that he’d continue on not realizing I existed. But my wrong-note singing had caught Ransom’s eye.
It made him want to help me.
He’d played that guitar like it was a lover he’d forgotten he could touch. With every note, Ransom poured whatever he kept to himself, all the things he would not say to the world into each strum. He played with confidence, and with joy. I’d been powerless, scared, sure, but entirely powerless to keep from watching him. The deflection was there, but when he touched me, put his hands on my stomach, that mask began to crumble. He taught and I listened, with the eager need just to hear him play, for him to keep his hands on me.
I’d been so caught up in him, the way he sounded when he hummed that melody, the way his gaze focused on me, me of all people, like no one in the world could hear him but me, that I imagined he stared too long, his gaze lingering on my mouth.
He’d looked hungry, predatory, and I’d wanted to offer my entire body to fill him up. I’d settled for the voice lesson and the soft brush of his fingers against my arm while he played.
That almost kiss after the fundraiser? Yeah, that wasn’t a figment of my imagination. He’d brushed my lips, made me think impossible, desperate things. Make wishes I was convinced would never come true. Not with Ransom.
My fear, my awkward bumbling that I’d tried to hide from him since the day I met him, had sort of disappeared the more time we spent together. Usually, on the weekends, he came to visit his family and though it was my day off and I’d assured her I was completely fine, Keira insisted that I have Sunday lunch with them.
“Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches isn’t a meal, Aly,” Keira had told me when I feigned having a pantry full of groceries. “Besides,” she’d said, “Ransom can help you with your audition song.”
The woman wasn’t as slick as she thought she was, but she’d begun to feel more run down than normal, the preeclampsia diagnosis bothering her more than she let on and though I didn’t know if it was having a possible nap that made Keira insistent, I’d found myself spending Sundays at the lake house with Koa on my lap, telling his brah that I was his girlfriend and Ransom strumming his guitar, not telling me how badly my singing voice sucked.
I kinda fell in love with all of them.
Well. Maybe not Ransom. Not yet.
Sunday afternoons we’d practice for my upcoming audition and Leann had managed to sweet talk Ransom into three nights a week at the studio helping me work on the Kizomba number. Tommy would be back in a couple of weeks and when he returned, there would be a smooth transition from one partner to another.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
That thought brought me back to my Skype chat with Tommy, the night that Ransom had been a no-show.
My ex’s stupid flirting had only put me in foul mood and that mood stayed put the more he tried flexing in his webcam.
Tommy Diez was a tall, beautiful man I’d somehow entangled myself with at seventeen when Leann held a mini-camp and Tommy picked me out of a crowd of eager, flirty girls to help him demonstrate routines. He was a professional, spending summers touring with pop stars and falls teaching a few classes at CPU for the freshman dance students. He was a nice guy, funny, very talented. He’d been a horrible boyfriend.
I hadn’t bought his weak attempts at flirting, had even laughed at those attempts because they were so weak. Tommy’s charm had worn thin with me by the time I turned eighteen, but still I allowed him to distract me from my silent stalking of Ransom.