The Unforgiving Minute (20 page)

“See you in Paris,” he said instead, his voice clipped with anger. “And you better believe I’ll be there to win.”

“Good,” Stefan said. “Now if you will excuse me, I have more pleasant company than yours to keep.”

Unexpectedly, that broke the tension Ryan felt, and he found himself grimacing apologetically at Stefan. “Guess that wouldn’t be hard. Really, I just need to sort this stuff out and then I’ll be back.”

“I know you will.”

Ryan knew exactly what it was that Stefan was doing with the positive reinforcement, but it didn’t make it any less effective. Returning to his room, he packed and sent Mitch a text, letting him know he was leaving the next morning. A couple of hours later, he got a text back.

Take care. See you in Paris. M xx

Chapter 20

“W
HAT
the hell are you doing here?”

It was all Ryan could do not to step back off the doorstep, because Roger Andrews looked as if he was about to punch him. He would almost certainly fire the maid service, because Ryan had been dropped off by the cab just in time to slip through the gates as they’d opened to let the liveried van out. He’d figured even sneaking in was slightly more dignified than having a row with Josh over the speaker system, which anyone might hear.

He moistened his lips, reminding himself this was
Josh’s
house, not Roger’s. “I’m here to see Josh.”

“Like hell you are.”

“Dad? What’s going on?”

Ryan froze at the sound of Josh’s voice. He didn’t know how it still had the power to set all those feelings—betrayal and rage and longing—swirling inside him.

Roger turned away from Ryan to answer, which allowed Josh to see past him. His eyes locked with Ryan’s, wide and shocked. “What do you want?”

“To talk to you.”

“We’ve got nothing to say to each other.”

Anger licked up in Ryan. “Actually, I have plenty I want to say to you.”

Josh glanced at Roger. It was as if he was weighing up what Ryan might say in front of Roger and whether or not he was prepared for his father to hear it. “You’d better come in,” he said at last, ungracious and unwelcoming.

“Josh,” Roger warned.

“He’s come all the way here. This isn’t going to go away if I just ignore it.”

And didn’t that make Ryan feel all the better about Josh fucking Andrews, being talked about in the third person like that. He strode through the doorway off the hall that Josh indicated and dumped his cases on the ridiculous thick, cream-colored pile carpet while Josh pushed the door shut behind them.

“Well?” Josh said, turning round. “What is it you want to say?”

He’d gone through it so many times on the flight, had so many things he wanted to say, but when it came to it, all Ryan could think was how awful Josh looked. He was wearing a dark blue hoodie that looked as if it had swallowed him. He was pale, his face pinched with strain, and there were dark bruises under his eyes. Oh, God.

“You’re not sick, are you?” Ryan blurted. Maybe Josh had an entirely different reason for leaving than he’d thought. Maybe it was something serious, even something terminal.

“Why the hell would you think that?”

“Because you look like crap.”

Josh bit his lip and turned away. “Just tell me what you came here for.”

Ryan took a deep breath. “You left,” he said, and damn it
,
he was meant to sound righteously indignant, not hurt and plaintive. He marshaled his resources, his temper winding up again. “If you wanted to break things off, that’s up to you. But not even to bother telling me? You’re a bastard for doing that.”

“What do you want, Ryan?”

“I want to understand.” It punched out of Ryan before he had a chance to stop it, and he knew it was the truth. Forget pride, not that he really had any left when it came to Josh, not after he’d bared his soul and told him how he felt. “I want to know why.”

Josh was shaking his head as he looked at Ryan. “You’ve got what you wanted. Why are you even bothering with this?”

“What I wanted? What I wanted was
you
.”

He turned away from Josh because he knew it was all written on his face, the truth and the hurt, and it seemed that he did have some sense of pride left after all.

“Ryan?” Josh’s voice sounded odd, almost like he couldn’t breathe. “Ryan, look at me. Please?”

Ryan tried to wipe all expression from his face before he turned back to Josh, but wasn’t sure how successful he’d been. Josh’s eyes were fixed on him with a painful intensity. “When you told me…. What you said that evening, you meant it?”

God, Ryan didn’t know whether or laugh or scream. “Why the everlasting fuck would you think I didn’t? I’m not in the habit of humiliating myself, you know. Or at least, I wasn’t.”

“But it was before the match—”

“So I broke one of your precious rules and if
that
was what this was about, then I’m sorry and maybe I shouldn’t have done it but it still doesn’t excuse your behavior.”

“No, wait. Just stop for a minute.” Josh was worrying at his lower lip with his teeth. He finally seemed to come to a decision, determination in his face. “What about Mitchell?”

The non-sequitur stumped Ryan. “What
about
Mitch?” he asked, confused. “I mean, I kissed him, yeah, but only after you left and he was—” He suddenly realized this wasn’t any of Josh’s business, not anymore, and closed his mouth with an almost audible click.

“You weren’t in this together?”

“In
what
together?” Ryan’s head was beginning to ache. It had been a long-ass flight, and then it had taken almost as long to get through immigration at LAX.

“Oh crap,” Josh whispered, and he sank down on the couch next to him as if his legs had failed him. He buried his head in his hands. “Fuck,” he said. Then he looked up at Ryan, his eyes filled with remorse and guilt. “I am so, so sorry, Ryan.”

Ryan still didn’t have a clue what was going on, but he could see the apology reflected a hundredfold in Josh’s face.

“I fucked up, Ryan. I really fucked up, and I hurt you, and I’m so sorry.”

Ryan sat down next to Josh on the couch. He was careful to keep some distance between them, but he was beginning to think it just possible that Josh might not be the complete bastard he’d seemed. “You did hurt me, and I want to know
why
.”

“I saw you with him after the match,” Josh said, and his voice was strained. “I believed you, what you said to me, but then I saw you together the next morning and I let it screw with my game. Then he was there afterward.”

“You’re talking about Mitch?”

“Yeah. We… there’s a history there.”

“Which has nothing to do with me.”

Josh closed his eyes for an instant at the anger in Ryan’s voice. “It shouldn’t have anything to do with you, but it’s screwed me up. And now I’ve screwed up, and I’m sorry.”

Ryan touched Josh on the arm, mute acknowledgement of his apology because regardless of anything else, he knew Josh had meant it. “Talk to me,” he said.

Josh rubbed his hands over his face. “Yeah, you deserve to know, after this. It’s just, I haven’t told anyone about it because I was so damn stupid.” His voice was raw with self-loathing.

It took several false starts of broken phrases and throat-clearings for Josh to say anything more, but eventually the story came out.

“When I got on to the senior circuit full time, Mitchell took an interest in me, took me under his wing a bit. And I was flattered, you know? You know how charming he can be, and I thought he was good-looking, and he was successful, and he was spending time with me.” Josh laughed briefly, but it had no humor in it. “I never noticed how our conversations were all about me; that he was getting to know what made me tick so he knew what triggers to use to unsettle me before a match. I knew he always used to come swooping in if he saw me chatting to anyone else, and he’d take me off for a private conversation, but I was kind of flattered by it. I never realized it was all intended to isolate me.”

He wet his lips, and Ryan found himself copying him because there was something really wrong here, for Josh to misunderstand Mitch’s intentions this way. He just didn’t know how he could tell Josh that, because he so obviously believed what he was saying, hunched over and staring intently at his feet, his voice low and unhappy. Josh ran a hand across his mouth, a subconscious gesture to try and keep in what was spilling out, Ryan thought. Maybe Ryan had learned something from those sessions with Zoe after all.

“I ended up sleeping with him,” Josh confessed at last. “We were together for months, and I thought it was everything I’d ever wanted.”

Ryan said nothing, because he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t seeing the problem here. Mitch’s words about Josh cutting him dead for no reason suddenly came back to him, and he wondered if Josh had gotten some weird notion in his head and not given Mitch the chance to explain. It was, after all, what he’d just done to Ryan.

Josh’s throat was working as he forced the next words out. “I can’t believe I was that stupid, that I didn’t see
what he was doing. Dad was so far beyond furious with me because my game had gone to shit, and I
still
didn’t get what was going on with Mitchell. I believed him when he said it was my fault when things went wrong, that I was too clingy, or too distant, or no good—” He suddenly broke off. “But Danny said— Danny told me— his sister had gotten involved with a complete asshole and he said—”

Josh was splintering into incoherence, and Ryan was still none the wiser. “What did Danny say?”

“That all Mitchell wanted was to mess with my head so he could beat me at tennis. He didn’t care about me, not one bit.” It came out of Josh in an uneven rush, and Ryan had to work to unravel the words.

“You broke up with Mitch because Danny said so?” Ryan was back on the fence when it came to Josh Andrews, not at all sure what to think of him. He didn’t know what motives Danny might have had for splitting up Josh and Mitch, and he really didn’t know what to think about how easily Josh had dumped Mitch on someone else’s say-so.

“I broke up with him because Danny, in the most humiliating conversation of my fucking life, got me to see what was going on. I thought it was real between us, but it was all a game to him.”

“What makes you think that?” Because either Ryan was missing something here, or Josh was seriously out of whack.

“Danny asked about a bruise in physio one day and I guess I told him stuff I wasn’t supposed to, and he just saw it all.”

Ryan’s breath caught suddenly, and his stomach twisted. “A bruise?” he got out, struggling to keep his voice level, even as his brain told him not to be so stupid. He
knew
Mitch. He’d simply misunderstood what Josh was saying.

“It wasn’t like that, just once or twice when I made him really mad,” Josh said quickly. “He got off more on head games.”

Hot bile rose in Ryan’s throat.
Fuck.
He didn’t know what was worse: the way Josh said it, so matter-of-factly, or the way Ryan had been
this
fucking close to believing Mitch’s good ol’ boy bullshit over Josh’s unclear and rambling account. It was exactly what Mitch must have relied on, and still did, to make sure no one would believe anything Josh said.

“
Jesus
. What sort of a person
does
that?”

Josh looked suddenly small in the hoodie he was wearing, as if he’d shrunk somehow. As if he thought Ryan’s anger was directed at him.

“Josh,” he said helplessly, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Josh looked every bit the vulnerable teenager he’d been back then. “I don’t know what I did wrong, why he hated me so much,” he said, his voice unsteady.

It was crystal clear to Ryan. “Because he was jealous of you, because he hasn’t got an ounce of the talent you have and he wanted to punish you for that. And it was the only way he thought he could win against you.”

“I can’t believe how
stupid
I was,” Josh said through uneven breaths. “I thought I loved him. I
told
him I loved him. I wanted him to love me back so badly that I did anything he wanted me to.” His eyes were closed and he was shaking slightly.

“God, Josh, it wasn’t your fault. None of it. I don’t even have a word bad enough for that piece of shit, treating you that way.”

Ryan took several slow breaths, trying to calm the guilt and anger and nausea that churned inside him.
Jesus.
He’d been so close to writing Josh off, so close to taking up with Mitch. How could anyone
do
what Mitch had? And over fucking tennis, of all things. Though he guessed it wasn’t really about tennis but about money and power and winning. Which meant Josh probably wasn’t his only target. “If this is what he does, how the hell has he gotten away with it?”

“I guess he finds different ways with different people. He doesn’t care if people win, so long as they don’t win against
him,”
Josh said, sounding as if he’d thought about it way too much.

Ryan was thinking about it too and ended up wishing he hadn’t because one thing was suddenly very clear to him. “He’s been using the same tactics on me, the isolating and the prying and the unsettling.” Unsettling tactics including that kiss, the night before their match. His stomach roiled as he remembered how enthusiastically he’d responded.