B E L L A

Three years after the breakup, Ryder called her.

At that time, it had been a few weeks since the last time Bella heard anything about Ryder. It was okay. She knew that her best-friend had a habit of not giving updates about himself.

Still, as understanding as she was, she couldn't help yelling at him for being MIA for almost a month.

"I thought you got killed!" she said. "Those people beat you up good the last time!"

His tone was somehow level, calm. So unlike him. "Me, too. I thought I'd never pick up the phone and tell you this, Bella."

And when he told her that, she fumed. She fumed, because her best-friend had been an idiot. She fumed, because as much as she wanted her bestfriend's idiocy to come back, she had to scurry him back to the reality.

Because her best-friend's idiocy would be detrimental to Bella's new bestfriend April Hale.

"It's not fair for you to come back now, Ryder," she couldn't believe herself for saying that. She had been saying the exact opposite thing just a year ago. "She's just... she's just recovering."

The silence on the other side was very loud. Bella had almost thought that Ryder hung up on her, right before his words came in a careful drawl. "Has she found someone?"

Bella bit her lip, wondering if she should report the sightings that she had seen. April and Alex had grown considerably closer these days. So close that even casual bystander would have thought of them as more as friends. Bella knew for sure that April still hadn't figured out her own feelings toward the blonde billionaire.

But she had a hundred percent certainty that Alex wanted her.

She was just confused as to why he hadn't made a move. Alex had made a move to everyone. Well, not everyone everyone, but girls he were attracted to. Hell, Alex made a move to her that time!

But Bella could feel the sense of dread coming from her phone, even though the receiver was far away from her. She shook her head and said, "Well, no."

"Then why can't I come back, Bella?"

"Because, Ryder, you idiotic buffoon," Bella sharply inhaled. "Once you're involved with those kind of people, you never really get out."

Bella hoped, though, at the bottom of her heart, that none of her speculations would come true.

Her words were enough to keep Ryder away. For now. She knew that time would come in which he would try to come back to April again. She knew her bestfriend. She knew how determined he could be.

But she also truly knew how very self-sacrificing he could also be.

Ryder would probably be okay with hurting himself, if he knew that it was the best option for the other party. He had done that before. Countless times. To people that he loved. His grandmother, his ex Linda, his friends, even Bella herself. Ryder kept sacrificing and sacrificing a little bit of his happiness, a bit of his comfort, and they were all the people who benefited from this.

The next time Ryder asked her opinion whether he should find his way back to April or not, Bella knew that she would answer 'fuck yeah' with a lot of enthusiasm.

-

2.30: Black. The name's Ryder Black.

A name said a lot of things.

A name contained histories of other people with the same names. A name contained hopes and dreams from its givers. A good name could make the person associated with it flourish. A bad name could squander all the potentials of a person associated with it.

In this case, however, I personally thought that the name of my Housemate wasn't doing anything particularly good. For me.

Because those two words had filled up my brain in harsh torrents.

I stepped out of Alex's car.

Ryder Black.

I took one step forward to His house.

Ryder Black.

I inhaled deeply to reclaim my peace.

Ryder Black.

His name still invaded me.

Every step I took, every oxygen I inhaled, every tick-tick that I heard from my watch, each of them spelled His name.

And I was shuddering with an amalgamation of fear, and excitement, combined with a Sauron lot of anxiety.

It had been a while since I had let him invaded my mind. Okay, that was an overstatement, and I had sworn an oath along with Harry Potter that I would not lie. It had been a few hours since I let my mind without any trace of memory about Him. But this new realization, coupled with my own confession about my state of feeling about him, amplified the effect of his name towards me.

I clutched at my chest, prostrating just before the front door because this overwhelming feeling felt like being eaten from inside out. So this was very probably why a lot of bookish nerds write science fiction: they feel things too much and creating a monster was the only safe way out of their own torturing minds.

As I was still in the middle of collecting my own thoughts, I saw the front door open.

"April?" his voice came.

Oh no.

"April, what were you doing on the floor?" the concern in his voice was palpable, and just a split second later, my heart was doing somersaults.

Housemate's face appeared and he was jogging towards my direction.

I held up my hand. "W-Wait."

"Did you get hurt? Shit, how could Alex leave you like this? What happened?" questions after questions flew like bullets as he paced around me. I liked that he didn't just go ahead and put a hand on my back or something, I would have combusted.

"April?"

"Please give me a minute,' I managed to breathe out the words, despite the great difficulty. "And don't talk."

Because hearing his voice, looking at his face, knowing that he was just within an arm's reach, it all felt too much for me. His name was now popping up inside my head in a milisecond basis, and I was flooding with feelings that I had left untreated for months.

Fortunately, Housemate conceded to my request, and kept himself quiet. I counted my breathing, thought a lot about Arwen and the serene way she carried herself, before I could finally prop myself up.

I still, however, tried my best to avoid his face.

After my oxygen intake and carbon dioxide outtake resembled a normal human respiratory system, I walked back to the house. To my gratitude, I could see my duffel bag that I had forgotten on the club sitting on the sofa. I searched for my thermos and drank my mushroom soup straight until my stomach couldn't take it anymore.

"Wow," Housemate commented. "You're acting like me when I was frustrated. Quietly drinking your poison of choosing straight from the metal flask. Only your poison is soup."

"Mushroom soup," I corrected him, because the minor detail was important.

"Should I be worried? Because I'm inclined to open my own metal flask and drink some brandy."

I nodded at him. "Sure."

He drank his own poison of choice, which I knew would be something totally different than my soup. I watched him, I watched the way his dark hair fell all over his eyes, I watched his movements, the way his body seemed so familiar yet alien at the same time. When I closed my eyes, I could trace my memories back to a place where it felt normal for me to touch him, and for him to touch me, even without announcement.

The way he looked at me now, he made me feel as if we had never even left from that place.

I tried to shake away the thought, but to no avail. Apparently, even being around him made me develop superpowers that would heighten all five of my senses. Because everytime he shifted, I could feel it, everytime he breathed, I could hear it, and when he chose to sit next to me, I almost jumped.

He was igniting fire, electricity, and ice within me, and he didn't even realize it. Whenever I was around him, I felt like an Avatar or something.

We sat in silence side by side for a considerable amount of time. I wish my body would help me and seep some sleepiness towards me, but my prayers had gone unanswered. Instead, I felt as awake as ever.

"Will you tell me what happened when you were with Alex earlier?"

I gulped. His question came without any warning. I could feel his eyes were all over me, but I couldn't bear to look back at him. I could never lie to him, or even say something that would make him feel bad; I had already seen enough sadness in his eyes and general demeanor already.

"No..." I croaked. "You could probably ask me again and I'd tell you. But I really prefer if you didn't do that."

I saw him chewing on his bottom lip, he must had seriously considered it. In the end, though, he dropped that subject entirely.

"I know that it's not the right time for me to say this..." he began. "I'm sorry that I left you that night."

We both knew what 'night' he was referring to. The night when I finally stopped eating ice-cream.

I smiled at the one good thing that came out from that incident. "Well. Statistically speaking, ice-cream is bad for your overall health and body, anyway. It's not that much of a sacrifice."

"I shouldn't have done that," he was still looking at me so intently that I felt as if I were naked. "But I wouldn't have done it any other way. It was right for us to part that night."

Something inside me snapped.

It was the last thread that I had never known had been there. The last piece of string that connected my conscience with the part of me that was broken.

And now it was being obliterated.

I stood, and when I spoke, I felt like there was fire on my throat. "But I would. I would have done it any other way that's different."

He looked at me with a newfound confusion. It was really hard for me to get angry. I could feel sadness and happiness and I could tell apart a few other feelings. But anger was new to me. Anger felt out of reach. And now anger became me.

"There are a lot-" I was bubbling with red-hot blind anger. "You never knew-" they were all jumbling out at the same time. "It was so hard-"

He gave me his flask, the one filled with alcohol and not soup, and I drank it.

"Thank you, but that didn't diminish any of my urge to yell at you," I said.

"Please."

"Wait a second." I was still disoriented and the biting taste of his brandy didn't help in the very least. Soon, however, my muscles started to relax, and the words that were flooding my throat had died down to something that I could string into a coherent sentence.

"You were wrong. In what universe was it better for both of us if we parted that day? Certainly not in this universe we're living right now."

He looked at me, his eyes were fixated towards mine so intently I would have thought that he would come forward and kiss me. In the place where we had been fine and had never parted, that would have been his reaction. In the place where we were never broken, I didn't even need to think about it.

"You took away a lot. We could have been a lot of things. We could have been better than this. Right now, I look at you and there are millions and millions of layers that I can't pass," I touched the side of his neck, trembling a bit when our skins met. "I can't reach you."

He moved a little bit so that my palm could touch him more. He closed his eyes, an obvious sign of exhilaration crossed over his face. "I'm willing to work as hard as I needed to, to scrape away those layers."

"But now?" I looked around his apartment and the hurt came rushing back. "After you've gotten everything you've left me for?"

"You don't understand, April. I tried to come back."

"I know. I read your emails to Bella," I said. "Still."

The next words remain unspoken. Still, you didn't come back.

"I just..." he started.

"Wanted to protect me," I finished.

"How much do you actually know?"

It hurt my chest to say those, but I said it anyway. "That you tried to come back but Alex said no. You tried the second time, and Grandma said no. You tried the third time, and Bella said no." I looked up and met his eyes. "Bella had already said sorry so I forgave her, though."

"It's just..." he heaved loudly, "April, it's just..."

"I admit... that I don't know the full reasoning behind your leaving," I looked at my lap. "But wouldn't it be nicer if you had given me a chance to stand by you when you need it the most?"

The next few minutes were filled with even more silence. My head was throbbing left and right, probably the undocumented scientific effect of excessive soup combined with brandy. I strode around the apartment, taking in every furniture, every paintings, every bits display of his newfound wealth.

"You haven't said my name ever since we met," he mentioned.

"Believe me, your name is all I can think about," I responded in a tone I hoped would tip him off about how annoyed I was with this fact. "I tried thinking about other characters on TV a lot, but I still couldn't get your name out of my mind."

"Then why you never say it?"

"Because if I do that. If I lose control and actually call you," I smiled at the irony of it. Just a few hours ago, I thought that I'd heard the exact same reasoning from Alex. "I would have wanted to do more than saying your name. And I'm not supposed to want more."

He was standing now. His eyes were widening, and his lips parted as he reacted to this information.

"I'm supposed to be mad at you, you see," I was still smiling, even though the hot tears were making my eyes all blurry. "I'm supposed to never let you in anymore. It was hard the first time around, to lose someone so precious. I didn't know if I can-"

I never finished that sentence, because the next thing I knew, Ryder Black was kissing me.

This was such a far cry from the first time we kissed. There was no announcement this time. No time to think, no time to even consider it. One moment he was on the other side of the room, the next moment he was pushing me back to the walls.

And I let him.

The kiss managed to be chaste, but only for one second. The moment he realized I wasn't going to punch him away, he deepened the kiss. His tongue was licking my lips, and it slid inside, claiming me.

And I let him.

His hands touched me all over, from my neck, down to my shoulders, down to my waist. It was like a four years worth of touching, and it felt like one, too. Everytime he touched, I felt my body liquified, and I was not a solid matter anymore.

"I missed you," he breathed onto my mouth. "I missed you. I missed you so much."

I would have answered him if my brain didn't betray me and decided to forget how to conjure words. I only ever managed to moan into his mouth. I didn't even know if I wanted to waste seconds into talking, because this felt so much better. So much better.

Because for a moment I forgot everything. The waiting, the tears, the pain. I forgot all those sleepless nights and the feeling of helplessness. His dissapearance almost didn't matter anymore, and I was surprised at my own capability to forgive someone, just because of a single kiss.

I felt stupid, but apparently, that was a common occurrence whenever I was in the same room with the one Ryder Black. Ever since years ago

We only pulled apart from each other when my breath started wheezing and I started showing signs of fainting because of the lack of oxygen. He was smiling as he rested his forehead onto mine.

"So you didn't get together with Alex, then?" he asked me.

I shook my head no.

He inhaled in relief, but when he spoke again, I could practically feel the fear on his words. "Did you kiss him?"

"No."

The smile that appeared on his lips was contagious, because I could feel myself smiling, too.

"April..."

"You were... really really sorry," I said, commenting at our previous kiss. "I could feel it. When we... kissed." The last words came so quietly that even I couldn't hear it.

He smiled again. "Say my name."

I looked up to him, to his sea of chocolate eyes. We were both so close to each other so that even the slightest move would make us kiss again.

The hurt seeped into my heart once more. The pain, the loneliness, the years of darkness.

But Ryder shifted his head and he kissed the tears that came streaming down my cheeks. I kept crying, and he kept kissing me lightly on my cheeks, neck, shoulders, everywhere my tears streaked.

All the while whispering 'sorry, sorry, I'm sorry'.

I brought my hands to wipe my eyes, but he gently held it and intertwined our fingers. This made me cry even harder, for reasons I couldn't even begin to fathom. I really was becoming stupider by the minute.

"I hate you," I managed to say in between the sobs.

My words seemed to hurt him, as his eyebrows were taut as he listened to me. He kept kissing my neck, though, and he clasped both of my hands to the wall behind me.

"I understand," he whispered. "I'd hate me, too."

"I hate you so much," I said. "I've never hated anyone so much before."

He nodded slightly, but his grip towards my hands were weakening. Slowly, he pulled back from me. As his body inched away from me, I could feel the cold wind hitting me with full force. Instantly, I was reminded by all the cold and the agony of the last four years. Instantly, I felt like this was the right decision for me.

But when I saw his wet cheek, I abandoned all of my logical reasoning.

Right before he pulled away completely, I reached out for his face, and then pulled him towards me. I kissed his eyes.

"But I also love you, Ryder Black."

When he smiled again, I was positive that this was the right thing to be done.

-

-

Ryder followed me back to my bedroom. Technically, though, tonight it was our bedroom.

The notion made my cheeks hot, because as much as I knew that this would happen (I half anticipated it, after all), I was still nervous as Sith.

Sensing my hesitation, he kissed away all those negating feelings. Slowly, we backed until we reached the bed, and he positioned me on my back.

"Do you really-" he breathed. "You really think this is a good idea?"

"If I think about this, then I will back down," I said honestly. "Unless-"

He didn't let me finish the sentence, as he lunged for my neck. I let his kisses affect me in ways I never wished to be affected. When he undressed me, I undressed him back and caressed my fingers against his skin. He felt different, yet the same. All this time, I had thought that I was the only one tormented, but looking at him, I realized at how very wrong I was.

His mouth moved slowly downwards. The kiss felt different more, more dominating, more hungry. I had seen this kind of desperation before, but this felt more final.

Because right now I was ready.

-

-

-

HELLOOO 

SO! 

I just went went back from this,

and this

...you can safely say that i couldn't move my legs the next day...

BECAUSE WEDDINGS ARE DAMN TIRING!

Anyway, that aside, updates will resume to normal. the next chapter will be KIND OF adult-y, so you have to be 18 and FOLLOWING ME to view the PRIVATE CHAPTER. it's not going to really affect the plot (just cutesy stuff) so don't get too bummed out if you can't view it (or you know, just wait until you're 18 before you view it haha altho i never do that when i was younger). 

until the next chapter, my lovely readers! 

i'll be slowly reply to all messages. i've gone for two weeks so messages have been PILING UP like CRAZY!! MORE UPDATES:

1. I'm also updating on radish tonight (chapter's almost finished) and 

2. i'll update on radish twice a week like my schedule before :) I'm also considering a more romance adult book after I finish April Hale, who's with me???

3. update on april hale the comic will come in the end of this week (I GOT AN ILLUSTRATOR CHECK OUT HOW SHE DRAWS, IT'S SO CUTE)

-

THANK YOU FOR STAYING WITH ME, SINCE I WAS SINGLE, THEN GOT TOGETHER WITH MY THEN-HUSBAND, THEN WHEN I WAS ENGAGED, AND NOW I GOT MARRIED. one constant thing that's been here during the 'before' and the 'after' is that i'm writing on wattpad and i have readers from all over the world <3