Only With You (37 page)

“Yes, Ryder. I did. I told you I was going to look for one.”

“Yeah, but you said it jokingly. What the hell? When did you do this?”

“I met with a realtor when I was visiting you, while you were in class one morning, and we talked about what I wanted. She found this place for me, and I had my dad go down to Gainesville to check it out. He said it was great, I took a virtual tour, and I bought it.”

Ryder stood up. “So, you’re moving to Gainesville?” he questioned, and I was relieved to see the excitement in his eyes. “Like moving there, as in going to live there year-round?”

“Yes! What is so hard about this concept?”

“You bought a house, Sydney, and you’re
moving to the middle of nowhere? For me? Are you sure?”

“
Yes, of course, I’m sure! And I’m not just doing it for you. I’m doing it for me too. Besides, I’m not moving to the middle of nowhere. I’m moving to a place called Melrose. It’s very cute, very small town America. I’m excited, personally, especially because my boyfriend lives so close by, and now I can see him whenever I want.”

He laughed. “Holy shit! You’re serious.”

“Yes, I’m serious!”

“This is so cool!” he said, grinning widely. “
Do you know how long it’s been since we lived in the same town? It’ll be just like when we were growing up, except now we get to have sex.” I didn’t miss the gleam in his eyes. “I’ll come over and hang out all the time. Shit, I’ll probably stay there most nights.”

I laughed as he jumped up and
punched the air. Then he crouched down by the tub, my face in his hands, kissing me frantically. “I love you, Sydney. I love you so much.”

“I know. That’s why I’m doing this,” I said, his hands still holding my face on either side as he looked at me with sparkling
hazel eyes. “You can move in with me if you want.”

He let my face go and fell back, so he was sitting
down, his arms wrapped around his knees. Then he was laughing. “And she asks me to move in with her. Can this day get any more surreal?!” he shouted, looking up at the ceiling and then back at me, a big smile on his face.

“What? I don’t like living alone – especially in the woods in the middle of nowhere.” I shivered, imaging all the crazies who could come after me, and no one would hear me scream.

“You want to live with me?” he asked, shaking his head.

“Yes! Would you stop
questioning the sincerity of what I’m asking when I ask it? I’m obviously serious about us or I wouldn’t be
buying a house
sight unseen in a part of the country I’ve been to twice for limited amounts of time. I also wouldn’t be telling it to the world, and neither would you for that matter, if this relationship wasn’t a big deal. Yes, we’ve only been dating for two months, but I’ve known you forever. We’ve talked about
getting married
down the road. Bottom line, I want to be with you, and that’s final, but if you’re not ready to cohabitate, if you want to live with Jake in the frat house, that’s fine. I’ll just get a big dog or a big security guy.”

Ryder looked at me like I was crazy. “Like I would live with Jake ‘I have sex with different girls nightly and don’t care who hears me’
in a cramped room in a house that smells like stale beer, piss and sex when I can live with you.”

“Well, you were acting all weird. What was I supposed to think? And it is sudden
, but I’ve always been the type of girl who knows what she wants and goes after it. I’m going after this. I’m going after us, because I can’t live like this – us living across the country from each other. It sucks, and this way I can have the best of both worlds. After the tour is over, I’ll travel from time to time, but not a lot and not for long periods at a time. And my next tour will start right before you graduate, so it’s timed kind of perfectly.”

“And I’m pretty set on being in L.A. for law school,” he said.

“I know. I’m going to keep my house in Malibu, so it’ll work out great. We can just move in there.”

“You’ve thought of everything,” he said, shaking his head.

I shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s going to be perfect. I don’t think me being an active part of your college life is going to be any easier, but this way I won’t miss out on
you
. And to me that’s the most important thing.”

He nodded. “
It’s what’s important to me too – my life with you. I’ve done the frat thing for two years. I don’t need to be at every party.”

“But I want you to go to things if you want to go,” I insisted, not wanting him to miss out on any second of his collegiate experience. “College is important.”

“My
education
is important, and so are you. Everything else is just details,” Ryder said, as he finally stood up.

When he did, he stripped his shirt off, followed quickly by his pants and boxers. Then he stepped into the water, sliding down across from me. I set my champagne flute down, and crawled across the large tub toward him. When he could reach
me, he pulled me onto his lap, and I smoothed his hair off of his forehead with my wet hands.

He smiled. “This was the shittiest day that just turned into the best. Thank you.”

I retuned his smile. I didn’t think either of us were under any delusions that the aftermath of today wouldn’t follow us for a long time, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it. I had to hold my head high and own it, and face the facts that I’d be scrutinized, but at the same time, if I could find a little light in the potential darkness, it would make everything okay in the end.

Celebrities got nailed for doing stupid things all the time, and now I could add that to my resume. The world now knew I enjoyed giving my boyfriend blow jobs. Who cared, really? Okay, so a lot of people would care, but I couldn’t please everyone. Haters are going to hate, and the people who’d end up not liking me probably weren’t fans in the first place. I just felt bad for the young girls whose parents might censor them from coming to my shows.
They shouldn’t have anything to be afraid of, but maybe they didn’t want their daughters looking up to someone who was so seemingly gratuitous with oral sex. I could respect that. If I had a young daughter, I’d be wary of who her role models were too.

Or maybe I was overreacting. Who honestly knew how t
his whole thing was going to play out? But it was out of my hands now. I’d done what I could.

I leaned forward and kissed Ryder, sliding ever closer to him. “When we have our own place, we can do this whenever we want.”

He grinned against my lips. “I love that idea.”

“I love this idea,” I said, sliding so the tip of him
moved against me as I continued to kiss him.

“Condoms,” he murmured. “I forgot condoms.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I’m on the pill. Do we really need them?”

He pulled back and looked at me
. “Are you going to surprise me with anything else tonight?” he asked, and I noticed his pupils were wider than they’d been before since I’d been rubbing against him for the past couple of minutes.

“
No. But we’re exclusive. I’ve been tested since the last time I slept with anyone besides you. Have you?”

“Yeah, in February. It was this Valentine’s Day thing some student organization was promoting
by giving away take home kits, so Jake and I each took one. You sent your samples into a lab, and they mailed you the results four weeks later. I was clean.”

I laughed. “You tested yourself for STDs on Valentine’s Day?”

He grinned. “Yeah, they were calling it VD Day Testing or something. It was funny. You know Valentine’s Day, venereal disease? VD.”

“I got it. It’s just so unromantic.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t have a girlfriend, so what did it matter. And I was feeling pretty bad about myself after my best friend rejected me the month before and then suddenly had some new boy band boyfriend, so sue me for not wanting to take some random girl out for dinner and buy her flowers and candy.”

I rolled my eyes. “For the last time, I didn’t reject you. I’d call it more of a miscommunication.”

He laughed. “Yeah, let’s call it that.”

“So when was the last time you had sex before me?” I asked him, realizing we’d never discussed it.

“January,” he said, not looking me in the eye. “It was when I first got back to school. I was really upset about our kiss, so I got drunk and hooked up with some girl. I feel bad that I can’t remember her name, but she didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t you. How about you?”

“Whit. In December. I didn’t want to hook up with anyone after I realized how I felt about you. I knew it wouldn’t be the same. It’s why I started ‘dating’ Dillon.”

“So did you go out with him on Valentine’s Day or something?” he teased, and I smiled.

“Yes, I did. It was why his girlfriend started hating me.”

“Are they going to be able to be together now?” he asked me, and I shrugged.

“I don’t know. I talked to Dillon the other day, and he was trying to get his management team to come around. I think he was
a little jealous of us to tell you the truth.”

“I’d be jealous of us,” Ryder told me, as he slid me close to him.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, we have the best sex ever,” he said, grinning
widely.

“I have best boyfriend ever,” I told him.

“Okay, yeah, I’ll agree with that,” he said, and I kissed him, just to get the smirk off of his face.

Epilogue

Ryder

“Honey, I’m home!” I called out
playfully to Sydney as I walked in the front door of our house.

Yup. Our house. We’d officially moved in at the start of the semester three months earlier and had spent two weeks getting settled before Syd left to go on tour again. She’d been back for a month, and I was enjoying the hell out of playing house with her.

I found her in the kitchen baking cookies and wrapped my arms around her from behind, picking her up. She squealed in delight.

“How was the library?”

“Stuffy. Smelled like old books,” I said as I pulled myself up to sit on the counter, and she stuffed a warm cookie into my mouth.

I groaned. It was that good. For some reason, and I never knew this before, Sydney liked to bake. When she wasn’t sitting on the dock out back that extended over the lake, playing her guitar, I found her a lot of times in the kitchen trying out recipes. In fact, she was planning out the whole menu for our first Thanksgiving at the house.
Our parents were coming to visit for the long weekend.

“If
Celebrity Weekly
could see you now,” I commented, and she just smirked at me.

“I put a picture of my cookies on Instagram and Twitter,” she told me as she shoved another batch into the oven.

Ever since the photos had leaked back in July, Sydney had been extra cautious about how she portrayed herself to her fans. I knew it still rocked her to think that people thought of her as a slut, and those comments had definitely been made. I’d wanted to kick a lot of asses for a long time when I heard different people comment on our text message conversation. The late night comedians were the worst, but fans on Twitter didn’t help things, nor did the people I heard make the comments in person. Jake and Trey had held me back from fighting more times than I could count for a few weeks at the start of the semester.

And you’d better believe I’d laid into
Kirsten when I saw her out one night back when school first started. I’d gone to a party at the house since I’d been feeling a little bad about making the decision to move out and had been missing my brothers. I’d wanted Sydney to come with me, but at that point she wasn’t comfortable doing those sorts of things with me. I think she was afraid of being stuck in a place where she didn’t have any bodyguards and people would either bombard her for autographs, make comments to her that would piss us both off or just stare and talk about her as if she wasn’t there.

So she’d stayed home, and I’d gone to the party. It was a good thing too, because I wouldn’t have wanted Syd to see me go off on a girl, but I also wouldn’t have wanted her to get the urge to confront
Kirsten. It wouldn’t have done anything for the image she was trying to keep in line. And Kirsten didn’t deserve her attention.

In the end,
Kirsten had denied selling the pictures of us, but I didn’t believe her. I could see in her eyes that she was lying to me. I still let her have it, and then I’d walked away to go find Jake, Trey and Alec. After all, I’d gone to the party to hang out with them, not Kirsten. She didn’t deserve my attention after what she’d done.

Jake had been bummed to hear that I was moving out of the house, but his little brother Austin had moved in with him. He was pledging that year, and even though pledges usually weren’t allowed to live in the house, they’d made an exception in that case. I think Austin suffered the worst though since he got hazed more than the other pledges just from being around the older brothers all day and night.

Jake and I still saw each other regularly, though. When Syd was touring in Australia and Europe, I’d had the guys over on the weekends to watch football since Syd had built me a man cave with the biggest TV I’d ever seen. The guys were jealous, and they were already trying to talk me into hosting a party for the National Championship Game in January. It wasn’t going to happen. But we’d started a tradition of watching football at my house on Saturdays when the Gators were on the road. It was usually just Jake, Trey, Alec and Austin, because I was still wary of letting other people into our lives and our home. I could trust those guys, though.

And now that Syd was back from her tour, life was as normal as possible. I went to class and
studied a lot during the day, and at night, I spent my time with her. Truthfully, I was a little concerned that she might be bored in a city like Gainesville where there wasn’t much to do outside of things having to do with UF. It definitely wasn’t L.A., but that wasn’t the case. She’d worked out her own routine with a personal trainer who came to the house, she’d found a yoga studio that offered private lessons, and she was even working on her own clothing line. In addition to that, she had a few sponsorships going on with different companies that kept her busy. She still traveled for different things like photo shoots and interviews and film festivals, and at times she was truthfully busier than I was. When I could, I accompanied her to different events, especially if they were on a weekend, but if not, she went by herself or went with Dillon.

It had become quite the ironic situation, as Dillon had finally convinced his management team to let him be with his girlfriend, Meredith. But she was in a situation
similar to mine as a sophomore at Michigan, so she wasn’t always available to pick up and go to the different events that Dillon went to. I’d met her in August at the fundraiser Sydney and Westside had hosted for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and we realized we had a lot in common. We’d spent the show backstage talking and swapping stories of what it was like to date someone famous.

At the time, I hadn’t been exposed to what it would be like to have my friends – or just random people I went to school with – know who I was because of who I was dating. Meredith had been a freshman in college when Dillon had been chosen for Westside and had started to become more well-known. She gave me tips on what to do and what not to do when people asked for me autographs – which for some reason they did
, along with wanting to take my picture. She also told me how to react when someone made an off-handed comment about your significant other, since everyone and their brother felt like they actually knew the person, and how to handle the paparazzi.

Thankfully by the time I’d gotten back to school, the media attention around Sydney and me had dwindled, but I was asked to be interviewed for the school paper. I
’d politely declined. The national and local media were excited to learn that Sydney had bought a house near where I went to school, and when we did venture out for dinner or a movie, we were usually followed. I felt bad for the other patrons who had to put up with our uninvited entourage.

At first, Syd had wondered if she’d even need security, but we soon learned that if we went out, it was just easier. Now we had Nate, an ex-Marine, who she kept on retainer to use whenever she went to the grocery store alone or to the mall. It was the normal things
she did that people usually wanted to capture on camera.

“So did you have a good day?” I asked Sydney.

She turned and smiled at me. “Amazing! I got asked to provide a song for the soundtrack of a new rom-com. I’m kind of excited. They want to fly me out to L.A. for a screening in a few weeks so I can see what direction they want me to take.”

“That’s awesome, babe.”

She shrugged, and then she smiled. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool. You’ll come to the premiere, right?”

“When is it?”

“March, I think.”

“Sure,” I said not sure what I’d be doing in March outside of school, so I was game.

Then her gaze drifted to our backyard which was relatively small if you didn’t count the lake. Beyond it were eight acres of woods that gave us the privacy we both wanted and needed.

“You okay?” I asked her, and she looked up at me and smiled.

“Yeah, I’m great. I was just thinking back to what I was doing this time last year and how much my life has changed since then.”

“Oh yeah? And what
exactly were you doing?”

She stepped between my legs and ran her hands up my denim-clad thighs. “You know, it doesn’t
even matter, because I wasn’t doing it with you.”

“Aww, good answer, babe.”

“Have I told you today that I love you, Ry?” she asked, looking up at me with those big brown eyes.

I shook my head. “No, you were asleep when I left for class.”

She smiled. “Well, then I love you. And thank you.”

“For what?”

“For being the guy I always dreamed about falling in love with. For being you. I’m glad I got to you before another girl could steal you away.”

I laughed. “I told you, there was never another girl for me. It was always you. Ever since I hit puberty and realized you had boobs, I was hooked.”

She smacked my leg. “Hey now.”

“Hey, I’m just being honest. I was always in love with you. Your boobs just made it that much cooler.”

“Aww, you probably say that to all the girls,” she teased.

I shook my head. “Nope, only you get this charming side of me. Only you.”

She leaned up and kissed me then, letting her lips linger for a few seconds. “Consider me lucky then, because I wouldn’t trade you for anything, Ryder Thompson.”

I could say the exact same thing. I was right where
I wanted to be with the girl of my dreams. Life was pretty much perfect if you asked me, even with all its little imperfections, I was convinced it didn’t get any better than this.