4.7 - So Distant

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Dear Readers: Let's hop to the Campions' hotel room, to see Ryder and Lacey on the first night of their honeymoon...

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Scene 7: So Distant

A.D. 2015

“Ryder.”

Her husband’s face spontaneously twitched, a little bit, to hear her say the name. It sounded like a foreign language, from her lips.

Lacey propped herself up on an elbow in their king-sized bed. She should have looked like an angel, here and now in their honeymoon suite. An angel in a bed of cloud, crowned with a pale gold halo of perfectly groomed hair, smooth skin aglow beneath barely-there lingerie against the billowy white sheets. An absolute angel.

But that was not what Ryder saw. At the moment, at any rate, he wasn’t looking. He was replying to an email from Noelle—touching base with his sister about the smooth landing in Athens, sumptuous hotel, and plans for sunny days of island-hopping up ahead.

He should’ve been excited, thrilled, delighted. Should’ve been. Noelle had thrown in lots of exclamation points, as per usual, which should’ve helped. Ryder replied with very few.

Lacey was ignoring emails from her own sister, for now, because such messages threatened her post-marital bliss. Sure, Madeline wanted her little sister to be happy on her honeymoon. But she was also silently holding her breath, along with Bentley, till the day the Campion marriage fell apart. Lacey knew this, but she was quite determined not to think on it tonight. She couldn’t let the honeymoon phase end before it started.

“Ryder,” she repeated, savoring both syllables and smiling at the sound. “Do you think I could call you Ryder, from now on?”

He swallowed. Stopped typing for a second, turned halfway in his chair and smiled back at her. “Where’s this coming from?”

Her shoulders lifted in a nimble shrug. “It’s just, I don’t know… it’s always been the name that you prefer. With everybody else. Only the Weavers ever call you by your first name.”

“Because anything else would be improper—‘going by an edgy middle name is such a crass and childish trend,’ after all,” Ryder reminded her, with a direct quote by Katherine, from some time ago.

Lacey blushed, embarrassed on her mother’s behalf. “It just might be the only thing my mother doesn’t like about you…”

“Oh, I doubt it,” he countered. Ryder was sure that Katherine had a running list, but that she kept it on lockdown behind sealed lips, for reasons that he couldn’t fathom. Mrs. Weaver had always put on a show of favoring him, with a fondness that frankly freaked him out. The other members of Lacey’s family—besides Grant, who hadn’t even lived to see his wartime friend and little sister get engaged—made no secret of their unpleasant feelings toward this union.

Honestly, he couldn’t blame them for a second.

“Well, I don’t doubt it,” Lacey insisted, porcelain face lit up with a loving grin. “What is there not to like?”

Ask everyone else who cares about you, Ryder responded in his mind. A response kept on lockdown behind a forced smile of a frown. “A whole lot, trust me,” he muttered aloud instead.

“Then you must be hiding a lot from me…” she playfully replied.

He turned a full hundred eighty degrees in his seat, to look at her in earnest. Unable to stomach the joke. He had promised her, from the start, that he would keep no secrets between them. And he had kept that promise, every aching day since he’d accepted her proposal. Her umpteenth proposal, informal and indirect but nonetheless desperately serious, as all of her previous ones had been.

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He had kept no secrets, and all of his promises. He couldn’t let her doubt that. Or else he might begin to doubt it, too.

Lacey cleared her throat, a whispery breath that broke the thundering silence. “So, since I’m a Campion now, I was thinking… maybe I could leave the Weaver days behind… ditch the whole ‘Matthew’ thing… It always felt so distant anyway, don’t you think?”

Truth be told, he hadn’t thought or felt a thing about it. His brief silence evinced as much. Lacey didn’t seem to pick up on that, though.

“…Do you think that’d be okay?” she asked.

He nodded, coerced himself into cracking an encouraging smile. “Of course, Lacey. You don’t have to ask.” He wished she hadn’t. This conversation had been somewhat painful.

But she had. And he had answered. He was Ryder now, to her. This was the name that he’d always preferred, ever since kindergarten, when he hadn’t wanted to be one of a million Matthews in a sea of boys with the same common name. He’d always felt that his middle name suited him better, besides—as if he’d been born with it first. Which of course made no sense, as his late mother had chosen that middle name for him awhile after bringing him into the world.  He had been a toddler, and his obsession with rocking horses and toy broncos at that age had inspired her to come up with the name. The little kid seemed born to ride, she’d always said. It just so happened that ‘Ryder’ had been emerging as a trendy boy’s name at the time.

And the name had just stuck, ever since. He felt that his heart and mind responded to the sound of it much more so than to ‘Matthew’.

Which was why it had always worked out well, Ryder reflected in this moment, that the Weavers called him by his real first name. It helped to maintain a dynamic of formality, a sort of rift between him and his in-laws. It kept his true self safely distant from that frighteningly dysfunctional family. Distant. Just as Lacey had said, moments ago. He realized now that she’d been right. And he seriously appreciated that distance from the Weavers. He was not Katherine’s biggest fan, despite her inexplicable favor toward him. As for Bentley and Madeline—Ryder considered them good people, but their feelings toward his marriage didn’t put them on the closest, fondest terms.

And as for the bride herself, the lovely and lovable Mrs. Campion née Weaver, the Barbie doll whom any other man would die to wed, who was now sitting like an angel in their honeymoon suite bed… he loved her. Ryder did. He really did.

But every time he looked upon her, he was haunted by two faces, by two voices: both so pale, so frail, both perishing so fast, begging Ryder for one thing only as they passed. By his mother’s, on a cancerous deathbed that had robbed him of the bedrock of his life, just this past year, amid the coldest winter that had ever hit the cold Chicago suburb he called home. And by Grant’s dying breath on the battlefield, clasped in the arms of a comrade who could not save him from the many fatal wounds that war had dealt. No matter how hard Ryder had tried. No matter how desperately he had clung to the dear thread of life that had then snapped with Grant’s final gasp.

Two words echoed ever in his ears, the two words in common between the dying wishes of his mother and his battle-bred brother…

Love her. Love her. Love her. So he did. He really did.

Even if one of those ghosts had not been enough, on its own—to make Ryder go through with the wedding against his own heart—the both of them taken together were more than his heart could deny. And there were other reasons, too, for which he’d felt inexorably impelled to marry Lacey. Reasons that neither he nor she, nor anybody really, ever wished to think about. Those reasons were among the million subjects of denial upon which this marriage was built.

With regard to his mother and Grant—they both had meant well, Ryder knew. They both had truly thought that Lacey was the best, most beautiful blessing that could ever have befallen him. They’d thought that he was blind for not loving her back. Maybe he was. Maybe they had seen things, known things, that he had not.

But he felt things that they had not. He felt things deep in his heart of which they had known nothing.

And everything he’d ever felt had been awakened, four thousand times fiercer than ever before, ever since that day beside the gates…

He blinked away the afterimage of those bright brown eyes. Or at least he tried. It was hard, having run into them and gazed upon them twice in this past month. How had that even happened? Who was she? Who the fuck was she meeting for dinner? It was so hard not to think about those questions, every second of this night. Here in this suite with his bride. But he had to. Had to shut out every thought, every feeling about her. No matter how hard it might be, the good soldier, the good man inside of him knew that he had to.

His heart was no stranger to hardness besides.

It worked, for a few seconds. He looked at his bride, her blue gaze downcast toward a travel brochure, biting her nails—a nervous habit for which Katherine chided Lacey to no end—as she thumbed through the glossy pages. It worked, for a few seconds while he watched her.

And then it stopped working. His thoughts jumped to the brown-eyed girl again. Because he realized, somehow he just knew, that the girl was the reason that his wife had suddenly asked to call him by his middle name. To close the distance.

They had never been so distant.

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... Any thoughts on the Campion marriage?

Any #Lader shippers? (somehow I doubt it, but you never know! hehe)

Next takes us back to B.C., with Lachesis on the cliffs, as Cloe struggles to find a way to save her sister... And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)

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