by Kelly Oram
That made Ryan smile. “Did you know that’s where we were the last time I saw you? It’s where I asked you to marry me.” He chuckled and then said, “Well, I guess, technically, you asked me first. You asked me to spend the rest of my life with you. But I was the first one to actually say ‘marry me.’ And I already had the ring, so I think I still win.”
His story hurt my heart. It sounded like a beautiful memory, but it was one I’d never have. I dug into my purse—the ACEs found it in the mess at the motel and had given it back to me minus my compromised phone—and pulled the engagement ring out of it. I was glad I hadn’t gotten rid of it now, but looking at it still made me sad. It was perfect, exactly the type of ring I’d pick for myself, and yet I couldn’t stand the sight of it. I should have loved it. It should have been one of my most cherished possessions, but, thanks to Teddy, I now hated and resented it. I handed it over to Ryan. “I think this belongs to you.”
“Actually, it doesn’t,” he said, smiling. “It’s yours.”
I shook my head and insisted. “Please take it.”
Ryan pushed my hand back to my lap without taking the ring. “We don’t have to be engaged, but I still want you to keep it.”
“I don’t want it,” I blurted, finally looking up to meet Ryan’s gaze. “I hate it.”
Ryan’s face went white, and he reared back as if I’d slapped him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to get ahold of myself. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but this ring means something entirely different to you than it does to me.” I hoped I could explain this right, because the pain in his expression was killing me. “This ring is a manacle for me—a prison. It’s the thing that’s kept me so miserable for the last six months, which, since that’s all I can remember, is basically my entire life. Now it’s also a reminder of how betrayed I was. When I look at it, all I see is a lie. All I feel is anger and heartbreak. Please take it back. I need to be rid of it. I need to be free.”
I’d been staring at the ring, but when Ryan didn’t respond, I looked up. His eyes were closed. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and he took a very long, deep breath. The way he let it out seemed almost Zen-like. He did this twice more and then tucked the ring into his front pants pocket. I thought he’d be mad, or maybe devastated, but if he was, he didn’t show it. When he finally opened his eyes, he looked at me with nothing but concern. “Will you tell me about it?”
My first instinct was to say no. I didn’t think I was a very open person by nature. At least, I’d always had a hard time talking to Teddy that way. But I needed to have this conversation. Ryan seemed like a very nice guy. I didn’t want him to hurt any more than he had to. If it would help him to understand my rejections, then I needed to be brave. “When Teddy found me after the explosion, I didn’t know who he was, but he knew me. He told me that I was his fiancée.”
Ryan sucked in another deep breath and asked, “And you believed him?”
I turned my face away from him, embarrassed that I could have been so completely fooled. “I was wearing his ring,” I whispered. “He brought me home to a house filled with clothes that fit me. He had my ID. He knew about all my different abilities—he was the one who explained them all to me and helped me regain my control of them. I had to believe him. My heart never bought it, but my brain had no choice.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I never loved him,” I admitted. “I tried to. I tried so hard to make myself want him the way he wanted me. At first, he was so patient and sweet. He was kind and sympathetic. He really helped me through the whole terrifying ordeal of knowing nothing. He was all I had—all I knew—and he wanted me so much. He loved me, and I just kept disappointing him.”
My eyes glossed over with moisture, and I tried my hardest to push back tears. “I tried to be the girl he told me I was, but I just couldn’t. He was my best friend, my family, but I could only ever love him like a brother. I let him down over and over again, until he started to resent me. I couldn’t understand why things had changed so much, but I refused to give up because I was wearing that stupid ring, and I thought that meant I’d loved him once.”
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 h
ave 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.”
It was a really sweet thought, but I was skeptical. “I’m not sure that’s possible. How could you ever separate yourself like that? You can’t just turn off your feelings, and you can’t forget the past any more than I can remember it.”
Ryan wasn’t deterred at all by my cynicism. “But I do have to get to know you again. You’re right that you aren’t the same person as you were before. Neither am I. Our experiences shape who we are. Your personality is still the same, but the things you’ve been through have changed you. It’s the same with me. The past six months have taken me so far from the guy I was before. Even if you did get your memories back, I’m sure we’d still have a lot of adjusting to do in our relationship. We’d still have to get to know each other again. You’re right that we can’t go back to the way things were. That’s impossible, so it would be a mistake to try. But that doesn’t mean we can’t start completely over.”
I bit my lip, considering his proposal. He had a point. Maybe he wouldn’t ever be able to let go of his feelings for me, and he’d always have memories that I didn’t, but if he could really start over, then maybe it was possible for us to be friends. “All right,” I agreed hesitantly. “I guess we could try it. But, if it’s okay with you, could we try to be just friends?”
“Just friends?” Ryan crinkled his nose at the thought.
I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling at the pout on his face. His antics were softening me, and I wasn’t about to let him know that he was getting under my skin. I had a feeling he was the kind of guy who, if given an inch, would take a mile.
“Yes. Just friends, please.” I gave him a look that I hoped was convincing. Hard to do when my mouth dried up every time I looked at his lips. “I just got out of a really messed up relationship. I need a break. I’m not really ready to start dating again.”
Ryan’s pout evaporated and he shrugged nonchalantly. “Okay.”
I was surprised at how easily he’d agreed to it. I’d expected more of a fight. Suspicion crept into my mind when he chuckled to himself as he settled back into his chair. “What?” I demanded.
“What do you mean, ‘what?’”
I was so not falling for the big, innocent puppy-dog face he gave me. I narrowed my eyes at him and he grinned even bigger. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m cool. We’re good. Just friends. Should be fun.” He snickered again.
I don’t know where the cocky attitude came from all of a sudden, but I found it so infuriating and made the cabin’s lights flicker again. Ryan glanced up at them and raised an eyebrow at me, trying his hardest not to laugh. It was so annoying, and yet it was going to make me laugh, too. I’d have rather fried the plane and sent us all plummeting to our deaths than let Ryan know he was amusing me. “Are you trying to make me crash this plane?” I hissed. “What is so funny?”
“Nothing,” Ryan insisted again. “I’m just a random guy with no memories of you, remember? I don’t find anything funny about this situation.”
I was so ready to kill him. “Just tell me,” I snapped, loud enough to earn strange looks from the rest of the ACEs.
Ryan attempted to smooth out his face. “You may not remember,” he said, “but you telling me to get lost and me completely ignoring your request is sort of our MO.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “You’ve made us try the ‘just friends’ things before, and you’re not very good at it. I give you a week at the most before you kiss me.”
My jaw hit my lap.
Ryan took in my expression as if he’d been waiting a lifetime to see whatever look was on my face. With another laugh, he leaned over and kissed my cheek. “It’s good to have you back, babe.”
After the plane ride—which I luckily fell asleep on, and was not awake to make us crash during landing—I found myself in the back of another transport truck, squished yet again between Ryan and Tyson while the rest of the ACEs stared at me.
Most of the military personnel stationed in Colorado stayed at the base in Colorado Springs, where our plane landed, but the ACEs hung their hats in the nearby nuclear bunker called NORAD. It’s this huge, heavily armed top-secret base built inside a freaking mountain. I guess because PACs are so top secret, they needed a more private place to train than the rest of the military. They needed a place where they can use their abilities without other people learning what they can do.
When we finally reached NORAD, the mountain swallowed up the road. There was a small, unflashy tunnel sticking out of the side of the mountain that just seemed to eat the road. It reminded me of a turtle missing its head. On either side of the tunnel was a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire like the fences that surrounded prisons. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see. It gave me the creeps.
As we drove into the tunnel and were consumed by darkness, my heart started beating faster. A few hundred feet into the tunnel, the truck stopped at a set of thick metal doors made of solid steel. I shivered at the sight.
“So,” I asked, swallowing back my nerves. I didn’t want these men to see my fear. “How many of you have powers like Tyson and me?”
“Just one,” Ryan said, and all eyes shifted to the large African man.
“Abiodun, right?”
The big man gave me a shy smile. “Yes, Angel. And I must thank you. You saved my life when you freed me from Visticorp. Their experiments would have killed me.”
His gratitude felt misplaced because I couldn’t remember actually helping the man, but I forced a smile anyway and said, “I’m glad I could help. Ryan told me a little about what happened after the explosion. I’m very sorry about your friends. I’ll do everything I can to help you get them back.”
“Thank you, Angel. That’s very kind.”
Again, his praise made me squirm. I shrugged. “We can’t leave them there. Plus, they got Teddy, too. I know he lied to me, and I want to kill him for it, but I can’t leave him with them to be experimented on. I’m going to get him back. And then I’m going to stop Donovan once and for all so that we can all be safe again. That man took my memory from me, and he’s going to regret it.”
I met Abiodun’s eyes and found nothing but grim understanding. He was in—no matter what we had to do to stop Donovan. “We will help you.”
“Hell yes, we will,” Tyson agreed. “With our powers combined, we could take on the freaking X-Men. Donovan’s going to be no match
for us.”
“So…” I wasn’t sure if it was polite to ask Abiodun what his power was, but if we were going to work together, then I needed to know. “What exactly can you do?”
“We call him the Fireman!” Tyson boasted before Abiodun could answer. “The guy can light up like a torch. He throws a mean fireball, too. He discovered his power when he got caught in an explosion in a petroleum production plant in South Africa and didn’t get burned. The whole warehouse was reduced to ashes in minutes. Hundreds of people died and he just walked right out of the flames stark naked—clothes burned right off his body. He wasn’t even singed.”
I was stunned speechless by the story, but also horrified that he’d lived through his nightmare and had to remember it. I wondered if that’s what the explosion I was in had been like, and how I’d survived it. I didn’t think I was fireproof, but maybe there had been no flames. I’d still been wearing clothes when Teddy found me. I shuddered, but I wasn’t sure what I found more disturbing—Abiodun’s story, or the missing details of my own accident.
“I will show you sometime,” Abiodun said, breaking me from my thoughts. “We have a great training facility here on base. They’ve modified it to make it fireproof.”
“What about electricity—lightning proof?”
Every soldier in the truck perked up at the thought of seeing a demonstration.
“Not yet, Angel,” Major Wilks said, interrupting the conversation as he appeared at the back of the truck. We’d reached our final destination. “We couldn’t do much without seeing how your power works and the kind of damage you can cause. If you’ll allow us, we’d love to have you do your worst so that we can figure out what type of modifications need to be made.”
