Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(25)

I don’t know if I collapsed against Ryan’s shoulder or if he pulled me there, but I was suddenly wrapped in his arms. He held me tight, and as much as I didn’t want to be in another relationship again—especially not with someone I had a history with—I didn’t have the willpower to pull myself away. I let him hold me, and greedily soaked up his comfort.

“I wasted so much time trying to be who he wanted me to be—who I thought I was supposed to be—and now I find out that it was all a lie from the start.”

I pulled my face back so that I could look at Ryan. My eyes brimmed over and a few tears ran down my cheeks. “He let me torture myself over his feelings. He let me force myself to be in a relationship with him. He lied to me about everything, and then he got mad at me when I didn’t love him back. How could he do that to me?”

Ryan shut his eyes and took a few more of those weird yoga breaths, or whatever they were. He pulled my hand into his, squeezed it tightly, and brought it to his lips. After a soft kiss that made me shiver, he held my hand against the side of his face and breathed deeply, as if he were soaking up my essence like it would soothe his heartache. “I’m sorry you had to go through that, Jamie, but you don’t have to worry anymore. It won’t be like that with us. I promise you it won’t. You never loved him, but you did love me.”

His words hurt. “There is no us.” I pulled my hand out of his grasp. “I’m sorry. You seem like a nice person, but I can’t do that to myself again. I can’t live like that anymore. I can’t be the girl that you want me to be.”

Ryan met my gaze, and it made everything so much worse. “I can see how much you love me every time you look at me,” I continued, “and it makes me sick to my stomach with anxiety.” I tried to make my voice as gentle as possible. “My amnesia is permanent. I’m never going to remember you. I will just end up hurting you over and over again, like I did Teddy.”

“I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit,” Ryan argued. “You’ve never disappointed me. We were strangers once before and it turned out okay. We’ll be fine again.”

I shook my head. He wasn’t going to talk me into this. He didn’t understand. “We can’t go back to the way things were. That’s impossible. Please don’t ask me to try. Don’t pressure me to feel the way you do. I know from experience that it will never work. Try to remember that you are a stranger to me. You might love me, but I only just met you today.”

I sat back and steeled my heart against the look of anguish I knew was coming. I was no stranger to heartbreak. I’d hurt Teddy so many times I’d lost count. It never got easier to see. But Ryan surprised me. He looked me over with a calculating expression and then said “okay,” as if he’d come up with some kind of plan. “Let’s say—hypothetically—that some random guy on the street asked you out tomorrow.”

I couldn’t fathom where this was going, but he wasn’t sitting there sulking and heartbroken, so I decided to play along. “Okay…?”

“Would you go out with him?” Ryan asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Would you go on a date if someone asked you out?” He scanned the plane and pointed to the cute Hawaiian guy. “Eyes, for example. Eyes has never met you before. If you’d sat next to him instead of me, and over the course of the flight you got to talking and he asked you to get a cup of coffee together when we reach Colorado, would you go out with him?”

Eyes was a good-looking guy—though with Ryan Miller sitting next to me, it hardly seemed fair to judge anyone else’s looks. But his looks didn’t matter. I knew what Ryan was getting at, and, after thinking about it for a moment, I decided that I would.

“Yeah, I think I might,” I admitted. “It would be nice to get to know someone who didn’t know the old me and had no preset expectations. You don’t understand what the pressure is like to have to try and act like myself when I don’t know who that is.”

Eyes glanced up then and gave me a big, bright smile. The twinkle in his soft brown eyes made the nickname ring true. “It’s a date, Angel.”

Startled by the response, I glanced around the plane and realized that everyone was listening to our conversation. Nosy much? Though, I couldn’t blame them for their curiosity, and it’s not like this ride came with any other in-flight entertainment. Besides, I couldn’t really judge. I had superhearing. I was a master eavesdropper.

When I rolled my eyes at them all, Ryan chuckled. “It was hypothetical, Eyes,” he joked. “Don’t get any ideas.”

I looked back up at Ryan, and he beamed a smile at me so big and bright that it seemed to warm the entire cabin. Somehow, though my troubles were far from solved, that single smile and the sparkle in his eyes made my heart feel lighter. “So what we need to do, then,” he said, excitement creeping into his voice, “isn’t help you remember Jamie Baker. We need to help you get to know Jamie Baker.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again as I processed his words. I’d never thought about it like that before. Ryan patted my hand and said, “Okay, here’s how it’s going to go. From now on I’m not Ryan Miller, your fiancé who loves you more than life itself and has spent the last six months looking for you and refusing to believe that you were dead. I’m just a random guy on a plane who hit the lottery when it comes to seatmates. I have no expectations, and there’s no pressure for you to like me back. I’m just a friendly guy, curious to talk to the amazingly hot woman sitting next to me.”