His hand reached across the table for mine, and I moved it toward him.

  He intertwined our fingers together and squeezed. “You were all I saw when I was in there. My end goal was always you. I know I wasn’t supposed to think like that in order to get better, but how could anyone blame me? You think I could ever get over a girl like you, Quinn Johnson? It’s never going to happen.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from smiling if I tried. No one had ever said anything so romantic to me before, not even in the scripts I’d read. This was better than any movie, better than any fiction novel. This was real, and it was mine.

  “So, you’re done with the drugs? Just like that?” I snapped my fingers, not meaning to come off unsupportive, but I was concerned for our potential future.

  How bad had Ryson’s drug habit really been? Would it continue to be an issue forever or something he had to fight against doing for the rest of his life?

  “It was a brief moment for me, Quinn. A mistake,” he said before moving from his side of the table and scooting next to me, our thighs pressing together as I tried to focus on his words instead of the fact that our bodies were touching. “A mistake I won’t make again; I can promise you that.”

  Ryson’s face was mere inches from my own, and my heart sputtered inside my chest with his penetrating gaze.

  “You’re done with them forever then?”

  He knew I didn’t want drugs in my life, and I couldn’t imagine a time when my feelings would change.

  A small smile played across his face as he wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Yes, I’m done with them forever.”

  “You won’t want to use again? How can you be sure? What if things get hard or go bad?”

  His head shook vehemently. “I never did them before. I was stupid. And angry. So angry with my dad. I had no idea what I was getting into, and I trusted people I shouldn’t have. I’ll never let myself get out of control like that again.”

  God, I believed him. I really believed him and not just because I wanted to.

  “I’ll never do anything to risk losing you,” he added, catching me off guard before his lips crushed against mine without warning.

  My shock was quickly replaced with desire as need raced inside me. Our tongues touched before he nipped at my bottom lip with his teeth, and I let out a moan. Kissing Ryson without cameras rolling was what life had been made for. Our mouths opened and closed, our tongues pressing and pushing against the other.

  I couldn’t touch him enough. My hands dug into his back, and I pulled at him, wanting every inch of him as close to me as possible. His hands fisted my hair, tugging as I moaned, and I arched my neck in response. It was as if our mouths being fused together wasn’t close enough for him. He wanted more, and I gave it. We breathed each other in, neither one willing to pull away as we moved in unison—tongues dancing, spines tingling, the need for each other growing.

  I hadn’t realized just how badly I wanted this with Ryson until it was happening. He’d made me a promise, and I’d silently been counting on him to deliver. I’d tried to convince myself for weeks that I’d survive if he never showed up, but I had known even then that it was a lie.

  He gently pulled away from me, and I breathed out, “I can’t believe you really came for me.”

  “I told you I would.”

  “I know, but—” I started to say before he cut me off.

  “No buts, Quinn. I meant what I said to you, and I always will. Always. It’s you and me now. Say it,” he demanded, and even though I was only sixteen, I knew that this was one of those life-defining moments I’d never forget. “Say it, Quinn.”

  I didn’t even have to think twice. I wanted to be with him. “It’s you and me, Ryson.”

  “Forever,” he added with a cocky grin.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  His grin quickly fell. “How do I know what?”

  “That it’s forever?”

  “Because this”—he placed his hand on his chest right over his heart before doing the same to mine—“isn’t something you just find every day. The way I feel about you”—he moved his hand back over his heart—“it’s not puppy love. It’s not fleeting. I know people would probably say we’re too young to know whether or not it’s forever, Quinn, but I know. I want you today. I’ll want you tomorrow. I’ll want you fifty years from now.”

  I found myself swallowing hard and fighting back tears as his hand cupped my cheek.

  “Forever, Quinn.”

  “And then some,” I added a line of my own, and his grin reappeared.

  The car slammed on the brakes, and I jolted back to the present, my seat belt pressing against my shoulder.

  “Fucking paparazzi. Move!” Walker shouted, and I knew we were back home.

  I pulled out my phone and typed in a code, opening the gates as Walker waited before parking in the driveway.

  “At least there aren’t ten thousand of them here anymore.” Paige rolled her eyes.

  I looked out the window, realizing that she was right. The number of paparazzi had definitely reduced, and I briefly wondered why. Had something bad happened to another celebrity? I hoped not.

  “Yeah, but if they aren’t here, where are they?” Madison asked, echoing my silent sentiment.

  We piled out of Walker’s SUV and headed inside, ignoring the shouts and questions from outside the gates. The press outside my house might have dwindled in numbers since we first left, but the desire for answers hadn’t. And even though Madison had her cell phone on silent, we all saw how often it rang.

  I led us through the entryway and into the kitchen before taking a seat at the table. “Okay, so we need to figure out a plan,” I said as everyone helped themselves to drinks from the fridge and sat around the table.

  It was clear that something needed to be said, and Ryson obviously couldn’t be the one to say it.

  “Are we not going to talk about what just happened?” Tatum asked, his Southern twang in full effect.

  He was worried about me. They all were.

  Lifting my arms, I asked, “What do you want to talk about?”

  “We heard what Ryson said,” Tatum added, and they all stared at me with sad expressions and even sadder eyes.

  “Which is why we need to figure out what we’re doing since he has no interest in being involved.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Tatum said.

  I gave him a shrug. “I know.”

  “How are you feeling?” Paige asked. It was the million-dollar question at the moment.

  How was I feeling?

  “I don’t know.” It was an honest answer. My emotions seemed to flip around, switching from one extreme to the other with each breath I took. “I think I’m doing a lot of compartmentalizing right now. I want to deal with the press and how we’re going to handle them first. Ryson and his stubborn ass second.”

  That garnered a few laughs.

  Madison pulled out her phone, her fingers working wildly over the screen as her face pinched. “Okay, I’ve made a very small list of people I think will be best to have a sit-down interview with. It’s going to be a prime-time slot. There’s no way around that. They are going to want huge ratings and will most likely center million-dollar advertising campaigns around it. So, if you turn on the television, Quinn, you’re going to see the interview advertised nonstop until it airs. Understood?”

  “Yeah, I get it. I know how this works.”

  “I know you do, but you’ve never been in a situation quite like this before.”

  “I understand,” I said, knowing that Madison would never put me in something she thought I couldn’t handle.

  “I was also thinking that we should do a group exclusive with a trusted magazine and maybe a couple of online blogs. We would make sure we had editorial approval before they printed anything, online or otherwise.”

  “Will they agree to that?” Tatum asked.

  “They will if they want the interview,” Madison remarked, and Tatum complimented her badassery.

  I raised my hand like we were in class and waited for Madison to call on me. “Do you think we should be giving online blogs and bloggers exclusive content? Maybe it’d be a better idea if we handled anything online ourselves and posted the information directly on our websites. That way, the bloggers wouldn’t be making any more money off of us. They wouldn’t have anything on their sites that the everyday person couldn’t find by going to our individual websites. Does that make sense?”

  “That’s actually a great idea,” Madison said with a smile. “I wasn’t thinking about it like that, but that’s good.”

  “Old Ryson would have loved that idea,” Walker said before smacking his mouth closed like he’d said something wrong.

  “It’s okay. He would have. He would have been laughing his ass off right now at us pulling one over on them,” I said with a smile.

  “He would totally have approved of this,” Madison agreed. “But I still think we should do a group interview with a print magazine. They could use portions of that interview on their online site, of course, but that would be it.”

  “I think that’s good. I also really like the idea of the magazine being all five of us together.”

  “To clarify, the on camera should just be you,” Madison added, her tone sincere.

  “I know,” I agreed, and that was how we got the ball rolling.

  The group of us tackled each one of Madison’s interview options before deciding on a woman who was known for being fair and honest. She had actually cried during more than one of her interviews, but that was part of what made her so captivating and charming to watch. Carolina French came across the television screen like a real person, as opposed to some hardened, robotic, unemotional journalist.

  “I’ll make sure I get a list of potential questions from her before we film. We’ll go through them together and get rid of anything you aren’t comfortable answering. I can also give her parameters to start with, so she doesn’t stray off topic. It’s the best we can hope for during a live interview.

  Madison was back in full-on work mode, and I loved her for it. It kept my mind distracted. Even though the main topic was still my and Ryson’s relationship, it felt more like work instead of my broken heart.

  I shook my head. “I’d actually like to hear what questions she has before we give her lines not to cross. It will be interesting to hear what people want to know. It might help us decide what we put online.”

  “Again”—Madison held out her hand toward me—“Quinn for the win.”

  “Please don’t start that hashtag,” I groaned, hating the whole rhyming thing that people did.

  Madison pushed back from the table. “I’ll work on getting this scheduled. And I’ll set up an interview for all of us with the magazine. And, yeah”—she shrugged—“that’s all for now.”

  “Sounds good,” everyone agreed, and I realized that they were all going to leave.

  I was apparently good at compartmentalizing when I was with a group, but once I was alone, I knew I’d lose myself in the past memories and my present heartache. Ryson didn’t want to be with me anymore. It was a fact that could no longer be denied or avoided.

  And soon, the entire world would know it too.

  FINDING A NEW NORMAL

  Ryson

  After Quinn and the group had left the other day, I hadn’t felt relieved like I’d figured I would. I’d honestly thought that admitting the truth to Quinn instead of avoiding it and her would make me feel better. But ever since that day, I’d been feeling uneasy and on edge, and I had no idea why.

  No matter what I’d said to Quinn or admitted out loud to my mom, there was a part of me that very much still hoped I’d get my memories back. No one in their right mind would willingly choose this hell.

  The doctors had told me over the phone yesterday that this wasn’t entirely normal but to not give up hope. The tone of their voices told me what they didn’t—that I should have already gotten my memories back by now and they were concerned. Have you ever noticed that doctors are pretty shitty liars?

  I really wanted to remember my life, but so far, that hadn’t happened. Every morning when my eyes opened and my brain snapped into place, it was the same thing—blank spaces and holes where the people and places I had known were supposed to be instead. I started believing that the old me might never come back.

  “Hey, honey,” my mom said as she walked through the front door, a bag of groceries in her arms. I stood up to help her, but she waved me back. “It’s only one bag. I’ve got it.”

  She had recently started leaving me alone during the day for a few hours at a time, so she could see her patients. I’d had to practically force her out the door that first day, asking her what she thought I was going to do or where she thought I’d go in her absence. She’d finally admitted that she didn’t want me to be alone. She was scared that I might be depressed.

  Guessed I wasn’t so great of an actor after all. Of course I was depressed, but I hadn’t wanted her to notice.

  “How was work?”

  “Good. Tiring.” She shot me a quick look, and I knew better than to ask her detailed questions about her clients. Patient-doctor confidentiality and all that. “I thought I’d make Grandma’s famous fish and chips for dinner.”

  I offered a noncommittal shrug. “Sounds good. I liked it before?”

  “It was one of your favorites,” she said before stopping short, her hand on her hip. “But maybe you might not like it anymore?”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” I said with a laugh.

  She nodded as she finished unloading the food, pulling out various mixing bowls and ingredients. “I guess we will. What’d you do while I was gone?” She puttered around in the kitchen, trying to appear nonchalant when I knew that she was digging for insight.

  My mom didn’t want me to feel like she was pushing too hard or treating me like one of her clients, so she tried to pretend like her questions were no big deal when I knew she was mentally filing them into some category that only made sense to her.

  “I was making a list of questions,” I said, catching her off guard as I held up a pad of paper in the air.

  “Really? What kind of questions?”

  Glancing at the list, I started reading them all off, “I wanted to know what used to interest me. And not acting, I mean. What was I like as a kid? What did I do? Did I like pets? Did I like sports? What did you think I was going to be before I became an actor?”

  “That’s a good question.” She looked almost perplexed as she coated the fish with some sort of breading mixture. “You’ve been acting for so long; I’m not sure I ever imagined you doing anything else. And when you were little, it was the typical thing that most boys said they wanted to be.”

  She paused, and I waited for her to continue.

  When she didn’t fill in the blanks, I asked, “Which was what?”

  “Sorry. Um, you know, fireman, police officer, professional baseball player. That kind of thing.”

  All things that didn’t pique my interest as she rattled them off.

  “What else did I used to do?”

  She stopped messing with the fish and wiped her hands on a dish towel, facing me. “Ryson, honey, you’ve been acting since you were a kid. You’ve been famous almost your whole life. Your dreams and aspirations have changed as you’ve gotten older, but they were still all entertainment industry–based. I know what you hoped to do outside of acting, but it still wasn’t a normal, everyday occupation like you’re looking for right now.”

  “I wanted to stop acting?” I asked through my surprise.

  “Well, yeah,” she offered like I should have known that already. “You wanted to start directing. Quinn mentioned something about writing too, but you’d never said anything to me.” She sounded almost wistful.

  I found myself nodding because … writing. It struck a chord.

  “That reality show I told you about in the hospital. Do you remember?”

  I nodded.

  “You were so excited and proud because you’d fought really hard to be able to tell your story in an honest way. It was going to be your directorial debut. And you were going to have editorial control over it as well. It was a pretty big deal.”

  “And now, it’s not happening?”

  “You know, I don’t really know,” she said as she started peeling potatoes. “But I can’t imagine that they’d want to do it without you.”

  “So, I haven’t just ruined my own life, but everyone else’s too,” I mumbled under my breath.

  “You haven’t ruined anyone’s life, Ryson. Changed things, sure. But ruined, no.”

  “But you just said this thing we were working for isn’t going to happen now.”

  “None of your friends need that show. They agreed to do it because you’d asked. It was your idea. This doesn’t change their lives at all.”

  I actually believed her. “Okay. Thanks, Mom. I still wish I knew what else I’d wanted to do with my life.”

  “Well, lucky for you, you don’t have to decide right this second.”

  She was right. I didn’t have to figure out what I wanted to be today or even tomorrow.

  We had gone through my finances the other morning, and my eyes had almost shot out of my head when I saw the amount of money I had to my name. It was fucking crazy. If I wanted to, I could live off of that money for the rest of my life and never lift a finger again. But I didn’t want to.

  “You want to know what I’d suggest to you if you were one of my patients?”

  “What?”

  “I’d tell you to start keeping a journal. To write it all down—your feelings, your emotions, everything.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said, not wanting to tell her that I’d already started doing that.

  “I have a bunch of blank journals in the top drawer of my desk,” she said with a smile.

  I walked away to go grab one even though I’d already taken three.

  I’d started writing the first night we came back with no plan or motive in mind; I just knew that I needed to get the thoughts out of my head, and writing seemed the best way to do that. It was the only thing that made me feel even remotely better. The journals didn’t judge me or get their feelings hurt. I could be as cruel as I wanted with my pen, and no one would be the wiser because I never planned on sharing them with anyone.