The Reunion by Kayla Olson(39)
“I’m glad we get to do this,” he finally says. “The show, the press tour. This.” He holds up his plate of fruit and cheese in one hand, his wine in the other, gesturing to the sun as it dips lower on the horizon. Another beat, another breath. “I’m glad we get to do this together.”
Together.
I savor this moment, take a mental picture: this stillness, the peaceful crash of waves on the shore, the sand and the sea and the shorebirds, the singular focus in his eyes that says there’s nowhere on earth he’d rather be right now.
“Me too.” My voice catches, raw and quiet in my throat. “It’s good to be together again. I’ve missed you.”
His hand shifts on the blanket, so close to mine I feel the heat radiating between our pinkies. “I’ve missed you, too, Liv.”
I hold my breath, not sure what I’m hoping to hear, but very much aware of how invested I am in what he’s about to say.
“I know I had no right to be hurting as much as I did when I was the one who suggested we take a step back, but holy shit, Liv, it felt like the world ended when we stopped talking. I’ve wanted to call you so many times since then.”
I don’t have to ask why he didn’t—I can see the memory all over his face, can hear my own words like the slap they were. You probably shouldn’t call me anymore, then, I told him, swallowing harsher words, truer words. We can take a step back if that’s what you really want.
“Everything just felt… so… empty without you,” he goes on.
“You seemed to manage okay,” I can’t help but say. “Lots of girls willing to step in and hang out with you.” I keep my tone light and airy in a way that says I absolutely did not keep up with all the headlines from my little cabin in Montana whenever the internet actually decided to work.
“Those girls were fun and all, but no one knew me like you. No one even tried to, honestly, not until Gemma—and even with her, there was still something missing.” He looks back out to the sea, where the sky has just begun to explode into a thousand shades of rose-tinted fire. “I lost part of myself when you and I stopped hanging out, Liv, and I kept looking for it in every place but the right one. When I saw you at the Fanline dinner, and we started talking like we never stopped, it was the first time in years that things felt right again,” he says, turning back to me. “I’ve never felt more like me than when I’m with you. You make my world make sense.”
I take in his words. It’s the perfect way to say it—I’ve always felt that way, too.
It’s why I can’t resist the pull between us, why I can’t stay hurt: at the end of it all, I’ve missed him too much. I’ve missed us. I’ve missed myself—the feeling of knowing there’s someone out there who radically accepts me for who I am on days when I’m grieving and seething and haunted by shadows, not just everyone’s favorite girl-next-door who can do no wrong.
“I kept hoping it would feel worth it,” I say. “The step back.”
He shakes his head. “I never should have listened to my dad. It was his advice.”
His words sink like stones, shifting the landscape of my memory: it was his dad’s idea, not his. I should have known.
When my father died, my mother was my fiercest advocate, working with Mars to keep me grounded, protected. She knew Hollywood would eat me alive if my own grief didn’t, and she was determined to be a safe space for me.
Ransom’s dad was just as involved in his career, but my mother was always wary of him. Textbook stage dad, I overheard her saying one night on the phone when she thought I wasn’t listening. It’s like he thinks Ransom is his own personal show pony.
If life were fair, I would have gotten more time with my father, and Ransom would have gotten a better one.
“I have a question,” I say, because I’ve always wondered. “Why did you go the blockbuster route?” He’s talented enough to have scored multiple award nominations by now, maybe even wins.
Ransom lets out a long exhale, his expression clouded by something I can’t quite read. “After the show, everyone had all these plans for my career—my publicist Andrea, and my dad—he’s still my manager. Everything they put in front of me seemed great on paper, and worth the time, at least in theory—”
“And lucrative?” I interject.
He grins. “Very lucrative,” he agrees. “So I took the roles they found for me, did what they thought would put me in the best position to… you know.”
“Make every human with a heartbeat fall in love with you?”
His dimples deepen. “Stay relevant, as they say.” He says it lightheartedly, but underneath, I sense an undercurrent of tension. “At some point, the line started to blur, and it was hard to tell where Ransom Joel the action star ended and the real me began. What I wanted, not what everyone else wanted for me.”
“And what do you want?” I ask quietly as a cool breeze picks up between us.
His gaze lingers on mine, the golden flecks in his eyes lit up by the sunset. “I think I’m finally starting to figure it out.”
I’ve looked into these eyes ten thousand times but never like this, where time stands still and I’m afraid to move for fear of breaking the magic of this moment. His gaze flickers down to my lips briefly; to the bare skin of my legs stretched out on the blanket.