Soulmates ✓

12 | If I Stay

Ryan hates nights like this.

Even more when he is just a fall away from escaping the fraudulent smiles of the people gathered in the rooftop ballroom. He walks straight to the bar, popping off the top two buttons of his shirt. He suddenly feels suffocated with her scent still lingering in his nostrils. The burning sensation of finding her with another man has his senses going rampage.

He takes a swooping look around the room, not hiding the distaste on his face for the charade, the rehearsed deal sealing conversations, fakery visible on the faces turning his way as he walks past them, not sparing so much as a nod. Why should he? He knows they don't give a fuck about him. They're pretending to feel happy for their boss and raise halfhearted toasts while they are actually enjoying themselves without him.

"At least, try to pretend you are enjoying the party." Matt joins him at the bar, waving at the bartender. Two glasses of bourbon slide their way, and he doesn't waste another second to gulp his drink down.

"You know I can't do that," Ryan says, his eyes flicking towards the glass door opening in the terrace where he left Shay with her fiancé. Fiancé. The word sizzles his brain, and he grits his teeth, his fingers vise around the glass.

"What? You can't pretend to acknowledge your staff." Matt scoffs, shaking his head. "Should I be offended? Because now I am one of them."

"Don't be dramatic. You will always be my friend first before anything else." Ryan slaps his chest with the back of his hand. Matt's his only companion over the years. They graduated from college together, and Matt ended up taking the job of his managing director, his right hand as he calls himself. He wonders how Matt will react if he mentions another one of his manic attempts to feel something, anything at all.

"Speaking of dramatic," Matt grumbles, his eyes turning towards a pair of toned legs strutting towards them. Ryan recognizes the woman flashing her toothpaste-commercial teeth, her pixie-short hair bouncing with each of her steps, six-inch heels clicking against the tiled floor in a sensual rhythm.

"If it isn't the man himself," the woman says, a thick sultry smile decorating her red-painted lips. Ryan almost regrets not jumping off the ledge.

"Ryan, this is Sienna Tahir." Matt fills in the introductory line as if Ryan doesn't already know her. He runs a hand at the back of his neck and subtly pleads Ryan not to mess up this unwelcome attention from the woman.

"Do I look regal enough for tonight's event?" Ryan lifts his bourbon to his lips along with a lazy smirk. The woman who doesn't stop calling him regal in every article she writes about him.

"Well, how can you not?" She doesn't let go of the subtext, maintaining her sensual composure. She leans on the bar top beside him, her dress brushing his. It hardly stirs any feeling in him except for a quick flicker of his jaw muscle tightening. He scoffs at her poor vocabulary, purposeful or not.

"Next time, try using some other words like pompous, majestic, otherworldly, etc.," he says, bending down enough to speak into her ear. "I might get impressed, you know."

When he lifts his head, however, his eyes collide with a set of brown eyes. Shay has walked into the room, but she isn't alone. Ryan's inside catches flame once again as he captures her fiancé's hand against her lower back, guiding her towards the bar. Their eyes meet, and they both maintain that stare, reaching deeper into each other's soul every passing second.

This time, it's not the guilt. It's years of longing encapsulating them together. The flashbacks reel around them, flooding them with each of the emotions from the beginning when they were not two but three souls, to the tragedy that broke them apart to this moment when fate has given them another chance.