Chapter 12
1605words
My silence was like a wall, standing between him and me. He finally let me go and stepped back. That face, which had just been full of vigor under the spotlight in the arena filled with thousands, now showed only exhaustion and defeat.
"I'll take you back," he said, his voice as flat as a sentence of judgment.
Neither of us mentioned that kiss again.
For the next few days, my life fell into an eerie calm. I buried myself in my studio, numbing my nerves with the smell of latex and oil paints. I worked frantically, cleaning molds, carving skin textures, creating broken bones, as if as long as my hands were busy enough, my brain would stop thinking.
Ryder didn't contact me again. His silence hurt me more than any questioning could. I owed him an answer, but I couldn't give one.
When the doorbell of my studio rang, I was designing a head model of an alien creature for a sci-fi movie. I thought it was the delivery guy bringing pizza, so I ran to open the door with gray clay still stuck to my hands.
Then, I saw him.
Leo Vance。
He just stood there, in the glaring Los Angeles afternoon sunlight, like a phantom who had walked out of the depths of my sealed memories.
He had grown thinner, with more defined lines on his cheeks, shedding the last traces of youth to appear mature and sharp. He wore a simple white T-shirt and jeans, no longer carrying that thousand-yard coldness from a year ago, replaced instead by the weariness of a long journey and the nervousness of someone approaching home.
Time froze. The clay in my hands began to dry and crack, reminding me this wasn't a dream.
"Jules." He spoke, his voice hoarser and deeper than I remembered, with a hint of uncertainty, as if afraid he had called the wrong name.
My heart suddenly stopped, then began pounding against my ribs at a frantic pace. I opened my mouth, but found myself completely speechless.
One year. Three hundred and sixty-five days. I had imagined our reunion countless times, rehearsed numerous opening lines in my dreams, but when the moment actually arrived, I stood frozen in place like a robot drained of all its programming.
"Can I... come in?" He looked at me, his eyes showing a vulnerability I had never seen before.
I mechanically stepped aside, making way for him.
He walked in, slightly furrowing his brow at the pungent chemical smell in the studio. His gaze swept over the monster heads and dismembered limbs hanging on the walls and arranged on shelves, finally landing on me, on my hands covered in clay.
"You did it," he said, with genuine admiration in his voice, "You really became a special effects makeup artist."
My throat finally found a bit of voice, "Just an intern."
The air once again fell into an awkward silence. He stood like a lost tourist, stiffly in my world, while I, the owner of this world, had no idea how to host him.
Just then, the studio door was pushed open again, this time without the sound of a doorbell.
"Jules, I brought you..." Ryder's voice abruptly stopped the moment he saw Leo.
He was holding a takeout bag from my favorite Thai restaurant, with a cautious, conciliatory, ingratiating smile on his face. But that smile instantly froze when it met Leo's face.
Shattered scenes.
Ryder stood at the doorway, holding the dinner that symbolized our year of intimate daily routine.
Leo stood in the center of this small studio filled with my dreams. He was the beginning of all my chaos.
And I stood between them, my hands covered in gray clay that would never wash clean, like a criminal caught in the act.
A space for three people, so narrow it was hard to breathe.
Ryder's gaze slowly moved from Leo's face to mine, the hurt and questioning in his eyes like a knife, precisely stabbing into my heart. He didn't need to say anything; that look contained thousands of words: Is this why you rejected me? Because he came back?
He put the takeout bag down heavily on the nearby table, making a dull "thud" sound.
"Who is he?" Leo spoke up, his gaze also scanning back and forth between me and Ryder, but he was asking me while his eyes remained firmly fixed on Ryder. It was the kind of scrutiny and hostility that a male animal would display when discovering an intruder in its territory.
The atmosphere dropped to freezing point.
"Ryder Kang," Ryder stepped forward, deliberately positioning himself between me and Leo, shielding me behind him like a wall. He looked straight at Leo, his tone icy and full of challenge, "Her current... everything."
This definition was vague yet full of possessiveness.
Leo's jawline instantly tensed. He looked at Ryder, then peered at me through Ryder's shoulder, the fragile expectation in his eyes completely vanishing, replaced by a burning anger of betrayal.
"One year," Leo's voice seemed soaked in ice water, "Jules, just one year."
"How much longer do you expect her to wait?" Ryder sneered, not backing down an inch, "You disappeared for a year! Not one phone call, not one message! What makes you think she would wait for you chastely for the rest of her life?"
Every word from Ryder seemed to be defending me, but to my ears, it felt more like he was judging me.
"That's none of your business." Leo's gaze moved past him and locked onto me again, "Jules, we need to talk."
"She has nothing to talk about with you." Ryder immediately refused.
"I wasn't asking you!" Leo's volume suddenly increased, emotions suppressed for a year finally finding an outlet to explode, "I was asking her!"
All eyes focused on me. My mind went blank, caught between the deep, unforgettable love and questions from the past on one side, and the companionship and debt I couldn't let go of in the present on the other.
What should I choose? What should I say?
"Leo," I finally found my voice again, dry and hoarse, "why... why did you only come back now?"
This question, like a key, unlocked the floodgates of his emotions.
"I had no choice!" He stepped closer, his face showing a pained expression, "My father's company ran into trouble, not just a financial crisis, but something worse. They froze all my accounts, took away my phone, and I was kept under house arrest in a house in Europe, like a prisoner. I tried countless times to contact you, Jules, I swear!"
He tried to explain, tried to make me see the predicament he had been through, but these words crossing the long divide of a year seemed so pale and powerless.
A year ago, I was just as helpless, I was trapped too, but he didn't show up. Now, he's back, right after Ryder had just opened his heart to me.
The cruelty of fate is so precise, yet so absurd.
"So what?" Ryder's voice was like a block of ice, crashing down on Leo's passionate explanation, "So now that you've solved your problems, you want to come back as if nothing happened and have her return to you?"
"This is between her and me." Leo's eyes were bloodshot.
"Now this is my business too." Ryder declared without backing down.
The two of them, one my deeply etched past and one my undeniable present, were like two cornered beasts facing off, tearing at each other in my small studio that carried all my dreams.
And I was the bloody, mangled trophy they were fighting over.
Seeing my pale face and indecisive eyes, the last glimmer of hope in Leo's eyes extinguished. He suddenly smiled miserably, a smile more heartbreaking than tears.
"I understand," he stepped back, creating distance between us, that familiar coldness that kept people thousands of miles away returned to him, like a layer of hard armor, "When I left, I gave you a choice. Now that I'm back, I'm giving you a choice again."
His gaze moved from my face to Ryder's, no longer filled with anger, but with a frighteningly calm fighting spirit.
"I will not let this go," Leo said, enunciating each word as if each one was an oath carved with all his strength, "In the past, I lost because of misunderstandings and cowardice. This time, I will take back everything that belongs to me."
After speaking, he looked at me deeply one last time, with a gaze too complex for me to decipher. There was pain, determination, and a hint of deep affection that I dared not touch.
Then, he turned around and walked out of the studio without looking back, disappearing into the blinding sunlight.
The war had begun.
Ryder didn't watch Leo's departing figure; his gaze remained firmly fixed on me, as if fearing I might run after him the next second.
"Jules," his voice was tense, "don't go."
I didn't move. I just stared at the sunlight-bleached floor by the doorway, feeling as if all the strength had been drained from my body.
Ryder slowly walked up to me, raised his hand as if to touch my face, but halfway through, his hand dropped dejectedly. He knew that the moment Leo appeared, all the unspoken understanding and balance between us had been completely shattered.
"I won't let go," he looked into my eyes and said in an almost stubborn tone, "Never."
