038:

Melia sat with her phone in her hand, and shook herself. She had to talk to Ryan.

It was providential then, as she stood, that she heard her front door open and close and he called out to her from below.

"Hey!"

"Hey, yourself."

"Are you okay?" He saw she was still dressed in church clothes.

"Yes, I'm not really sick, just needed some time to think."

He saw her phone in her hand. "And did you? Think?"

She nodded, but couldn't bring herself to say the needed words without his help.

Ryan came up the stairs and passed her, biting his lips.

"It's not the same, is it?" he whispered, disappointed.

Melia gave him her frankest stare, trying to be as honest as she could. "It'll never be the same, Rye, but we can build something new together."

He looked away at the mountain out the front window, at the river down the sloping gravel road. "Why can't it be the same?"

Melia wanted to cry, she felt the burning behind her eyes and thought with relief that this was it, she could cry, she could share this.... She shook her head. "You're good for me. We share a past and we share a future. We had a wonderful courtship and that means the world to me, Rye. But something changed out there... I don't know how to explain it, but it happened, and I can't take it back."

Ryan pulled her left hand and laced his fingers with hers. "It's Jared."

Melia waited, feeling the need to answer, but thinking the same thing.

"I didn't want to give you to him, Mia. He said the two of you would disappear forever into the witness protection program, and our life, yours and mine would be over. I tried to give him other ideas, and he said he considered them, apparently he really did consider them; because he managed to kill the bad guys and save the day, but your choice had already been made." He swallowed the pain of that statement. "It must have happened pretty fast right after he took you to Alaska. You guys weren't even gone that long. I had barely gotten out of the MTC, like two or three weeks. Explain that to me, Melia. How could you fall in love with him after what we shared?"

Melia stood still, she jerked her fingers away incredulously. "I told you all this before." she cried, suddenly engulfed in sadness that they had to have this conversation once again.

"But I still don't get it. Did you find that you were in love with him after Australia, or something?"

Melia stomped her foot. "Oh, don't be an idiot! How could I? I didn't even know him, he was a stranger to me, and he took advantage of me, but I really didn't expect to see him again, ever. It was a mystery to me why he turned up in Salt Lake with me, Ryan, I fought him! I fought him! Don't you get it? I didn't know him! I didn't see it as you gave me to him... I didn't even want to be with him."

"But you fell in love with him.... Or just in bed with him." He persisted.

Melia spun around, her heart pounding, the need to say things clogging her throat.

"You know what? You aren't the guy I knew before your mission. You have changed, and you know something else? I've changed too. Maybe more... I've changed the most. I've been hurt, abducted, left alone, stranded on a remote island near a bay in Alaska, married, pregnant, touring, trial, gigs, movies, I've been all over the world... I have accepted our renewed friendship with caution, hoping that what we once shared could be rekindled, because that was what you wanted and what Jared, believe it or not, also wanted. But I don't really know...." She was going to say, "What I want", but she couldn't even bring herself to say those words at all.

Ryan felt her confusion and knew he needed to change his tactics. If he didn't convince her---- "Mia, it doesn't matter. I swear, I'll never bring it up again! I just want you. I have always wanted you! I want you now. Please, Melia. Forget I ever brought it up again."

She wanted to cry, oh how she ached with the unshed tears. Why in the heck couldn't she just let them out? "You will have to accept the fact that I didn't just fall in bed with him for lust, I loved him. I don't know how, I don't understand it all, but I loved him. More than I loved you then. I don't want to hurt you Ryan. I wish it weren't this way. I wish none of it had ever happened. I ---"

He grabbed her chin, stifled her next words with a very passionate kiss, expected her to slap him with his boldness, and wasn't prepared for her response. Melia responded with all the pent up fury she'd not given rise to before. And for the first time, Ryan felt the woman, not the young girl. He saw her as the wife and mother she had become, and realized that in that moment, he would never have the girl back. She was no longer the virginal, sweet, pure young thing he had met and fallen in love with. Could he love her now, as who she was now? See, she even had him vascillating.

He kept the image of her entwined in Jared's arms in the front of his mind. That issue would have to be resolved one way or another.

"Marry me." He said against her lips, holding her face to his, his palms against her cheeks.

"I will." She ground out against him.

"It won't be easy." He agreed, kissing her with longing and determination.

She shook her head. What more could she say? He admitted it wasn't going to be easy. She'd had a lot of trauma in the last two years. They weren't the same people they'd once fallen in love with. But they were both willing to make a go of it. Wasn't that enough?

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