Chapter 5: The Beach House
The Malibu house was a postcard brought to life, all bleached wood and glass reflecting the endless blue of the Pacific. Matthew parked his car in the circular drive, the crunch of gravel under his tires sounding obnoxiously loud in the coastal quiet. He gripped the steering wheel for a moment, staring at the imposing modern structure. It was less a house and more a statement about winning at life. Robert had called again that morning, his voice tight with the remnants of their strained conversation, wishing him a generic “have fun.” The words had hung between them, a polite cover for unspoken warnings.
He was the last to arrive. Sara’s minivan was already there, a colorful sticker of a cartoon dinosaur on the bumper clashing with the luxury. Ryan’s sensible SUV was parked neatly beside it. Matthew grabbed his weekend bag—overpacked, as always—and headed inside.
The interior was cool and open, the sound of the surf a constant, breath-like rumble. The others were clustered around the massive kitchen island, where Marie was playing hostess with a pitcher of something pale and frothy.
“Matthew! Finally.” Marie floated over, air-kissing his cheeks. She smelled of expensive sunscreen and coconut. “We’re on mimosa number two. Catch up.”
The atmosphere was already looser, the professional boundaries of the rehearsal studio softened by the setting. Sara, in athleisure wear, was recounting a story about her twins and a tub of glitter. Ryan, leaning against the counter with a beer, laughed at the right moments. His eyes met Matthew’s across the room, and he offered a small, casual smile that did nothing to slow Matthew’s pulse.
The day unfolded in a haze of salt air and forced camaraderie. They attempted a “bonding walk” on the beach, which devolved into Marie complaining about the sand in her designer sandals and Sara hunting for sea glass for her kids. They swam in the infinity pool that seemed to spill into the ocean, the water cold and shocking. Ryan, Matthew noticed, still had the same swimmer’s build, the same way of pushing wet hair from his forehead. He looked away, focusing on the horizon line.
As the sun dipped, painting the sky in violent streaks of orange and purple, Marie declared it time for “the main event.” She herded them into the vast living room, where a state-of-the-art karaoke machine was set up beside a floor-to-ceiling window showcasing the dusk.
“Ground rules,” Marie announced, pouring shots of top-shelf tequila. “No judgments. Only enthusiasm. And we start with the deep cuts.”
It began awkwardly. Sara murdered a Sheryl Crow song with chaotic, joyful energy. Marie delivered a surprisingly decent, torch-song version of a power ballad. Matthew, feeling the tequila’s warm spread, chose an obscure David Bowie track, hiding behind its complexity.
Then it was Ryan’s turn. He scrolled through the machine, a slow grin spreading. The opening synth chords of “Upside Down” filled the room.
A collective, drunken “Ohhh!” went up. Matthew’s stomach tightened.
“Come on, you have to!” Sara squealed, shoving Matthew toward the second microphone.
Ryan just looked at him, his expression challenging, amused. The boyish charm was dialed up to eleven, blurred at the edges by alcohol. The first verse began, the lyrics Matthew had scribbled in a tour bus bunk at twenty, his heart in his throat over the boy tuning a guitar across the aisle. Ryan sang his old part, his soap-opera-trained voice clear and oddly sincere. He kept his eyes on the screen, a faint smile on his lips.
When Matthew’s verse came, his own voice sounded strange in his ears. He was a producer, not a frontman. But the words were etched into his bones. I’m spinning ‘round, my feet off the ground, when you look at me… He couldn’t look at Ryan. He looked at the ocean instead, a black void dotted with the lights of far-off ships.
They reached the chorus, and Sara and Marie joined in, their voices shrieking and off-key, turning the poignant anthem into a riotous, drunken shout-along. The spell was broken, the tension dissolved into something silly and communal. Matthew felt a hysterical laugh bubble up as Marie attempted a harmony that had never existed. He caught Ryan’s eye then, and they both cracked, laughing into their microphones, the song falling apart beautifully.
The tequila kept flowing. The song selections grew louder, worse, more nostalgic. They danced badly on the expensive rug, a tangled, laughing mess of middle-aged limbs remembering younger rhythms. For a few hours, it was easy. It was just four people who shared a strange, specific slice of history, laughing at the ghosts of their former selves.
Exhaustion and alcohol eventually dimmed the frenzy. Sara, curled on a vast sectional, FaceTimed her husband in a slurred, loving monologue before passing out, her phone dropping to the rug. Marie, regal even in defeat, announced she was going to “let the moon recharge her” and vanished onto the deck.
Suddenly, it was quiet. The hum of the sub-zero fridge, the distant crash of waves. Matthew found himself on the deck, the night air cool on his flushed skin. The ocean was a black expanse, the moon laying a wavering silver path across it. He leaned on the railing, the wood still warm from the day’s sun.
The sliding door whispered open and shut. He didn’t need to turn. He knew the footfall.
Ryan came to stand beside him, not too close. He held two glasses of water. He offered one. “Hydration.”
“Thanks.” Their fingers brushed during the exchange. A simple point of contact that sent a current straight up Matthew’s arm. He took a long drink.
For a few minutes, they just listened to the ocean. The silence wasn’t hostile. It was full, heavy with everything they’d shouted into microphones hours before.
“You know,” Ryan said, his voice quiet, roughened by singing and smoke, “I watch you, sometimes.”
Matthew kept looking forward. “On my security cameras? I should change the passwords.”
A soft chuckle. “No. In the industry. The Grammys, the trade magazines. That indie folk artist you produced last year… what was her name? With the haunting voice. You won Album of the Year.”
“Elara Vance.”
“Right. Her.” Ryan took a sip of water. “I watched the ceremony. They cut to you in the audience when they announced it. You looked… startled. Then you just got up and hugged her. No big show. It was classy.”
Matthew didn’t know what to say. The idea of Ryan watching him, from a distance, through a screen, was unsettling.
“I’m proud of you, Matt,” Ryan said, the words simple and devastating. “I know I don’t have the right to be. But I am. You became exactly what you always wanted to be. The real thing. Not this…” He gestured vaguely back toward the house, to the ghost of their pop past.
“It’s just a job,” Matthew murmured, but the denial was weak. His career was his core.
“It’s not. It’s who you are. And you’re brilliant at it.” Ryan turned now, leaning his side against the railing to face him. The moonlight bleached his features, softening them, making him look younger and more vulnerable. “I’ve rooted for you, you know. From my stupid little corner of the world. Every time I saw your name on something, it was like… a little pinch. A good one. Proof that one of us made it out and made it real.”
The raw honesty was a scalpel, deftly opening something Matthew had kept sutured for years. He finally turned his head. “You made it out too. You’re successful.”
“I’m on a soap opera, Matt. I wear a lab coat and misdiagnose amnesia for a living. It’s a job. It’s not a legacy.” He shook his head, a self-deprecating smile touching his lips. “What you have with Robert… it seems real, too. He seems like a good guy. Serious.”
“He is.” The words came out automatically, a defense.
“I’m happy for you,” Ryan said. And he sounded like he meant it. But then he looked back at the ocean, his profile etched in silver. “It’s just… weird, you know? Being here. With you. It makes me think about all the branches. The other paths.”
Matthew’s breath caught. “What branches?”
“The one where I wasn’t a coward.” Ryan’s voice dropped, barely above the sound of the waves. “Where I didn’t let some label exec’s homophobic bullshit scare me into breaking my own heart. Where I stayed.” He finally looked back at Matthew, his eyes dark pools in the moonlight. “I think about that branch a lot. I wonder what our lives would look like on it.”
The air vanished. The vast night shrunk to the space between their bodies, to the heat radiating from Ryan’s arm a few inches from his own. Twenty years of carefully curated forgetting collapsed. Here it was, the unspoken thing, spoken.
“You can’t think like that,” Matthew said, but his voice was a hoarse whisper. “It’s a dead end.”
“Is it?” Ryan asked, so softly it was almost lost. “Because it feels pretty fucking alive right now.”
He didn’t move closer. He didn’t have to. The admission hung there, more intimate than a touch.
Matthew’s mind was a riot of contradictions—Robert’s trusting sleep-softened face on a London morning, the searing pain of Ryan’s goodbye in a Berlin hotel room, the safe, satisfying rhythm of his present life, the terrifying, exhilarating pull in his chest at this moment, on this deck, under this moon.
He didn’t know who moved first. Maybe they both did. One moment they were standing apart; the next, Ryan was turning fully toward him, and Matthew was meeting him halfway. It wasn’t a kiss. It was an embrace.
Ryan’s arms came around him, strong and certain. Matthew sank into it, his face pressing into the familiar curve of Ryan’s neck. He smelled of clean cotton, salt air, and the faint, expensive scent of Marie’s tequila. It was the same, it was utterly different. Ryan held him tightly, one hand splayed against Matthew’s back, the other tangling in the hair at the base of his skull. A shudder ran through Matthew, a release of a tension he hadn’t fully acknowledged he was carrying. He clung back, his fists bunching the fabric of Ryan’s shirt, anchoring himself as the world seemed to tilt.
It was an apology. It was a homecoming. It was a question.
They held on long past the point of a friendly hug. The seconds stretched, measured by the rhythmic crash of the waves. Matthew felt Ryan’s breath hitch against his temple, felt the solid, rapid beat of his heart. His own heart was a wild drum against his ribs. Every nerve ending was awake, singing a forgotten song. He wanted to stay there, in that suspended, painless space, forever.
The sliding door behind them hissed open.
“Okay, who wants coffee—oh.”
Sara’s voice, thick with sleep and surprise, sliced through the moment.
They sprang apart as if electrocuted. Matthew stumbled back a step, his face flooding with heat. Ryan turned away swiftly, running a hand through his hair, his shoulders rigid.
Sara stood framed in the doorway, her phone in one hand, the other still on the door handle. Her eyes were wide, all traces of sleep gone, replaced by sheer, captivated astonishment. She looked from Matthew’s stricken face to Ryan’s turned back, and then a slow, undeniable understanding dawned on her features.
The three of them stood frozen in a triangle of devastating silence, broken only by the indifferent ocean.
“I, uh…” Sara blinked, her influencer’s poise momentarily shattered. “I was just… coffee.” She took a deliberate step backward into the living room. “I’ll just… use the machine in the guest kitchen. Yeah.”
The door slid shut with a soft, definitive click.
The spell was shattered, replaced by a clammy, invasive reality. The cozy darkness of the deck now felt exposing, the moonlight accusatory. Matthew couldn’t look at Ryan. He stared at the wooden planks beneath his feet, his mind a blank, roaring static.
He stared at the wooden planks beneath his feet, his mind a blank, roaring static.
“Well,” Ryan finally said, the word clipped and hollow. “That wasn’t ideal.”
Matthew forced a laugh that sounded like a cough. “She’s half-asleep. She probably didn’t see much.” Even to his own ears, the lie was pathetic.
“Right.” Ryan’s tone suggested they both knew exactly what Sara had seen. He moved toward the sliding door, his movements stiff. “I’m gonna… turn in. Long day.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Matthew didn’t move, needing the space, needing the cold air to scourge the feeling of Ryan’s arms from his skin. Ryan slipped inside without another word, a shadow absorbed by the darker shadows of the house.
Matthew waited, counting ten crashing waves, before he followed. The living room was dark, silent except for Sara’s soft snore from the couch. He moved quietly toward the guest wing, desperate for the sanctuary of his assigned room.
A hand caught his elbow in the dim kitchen hallway. He jumped.
“Nope. Kitchen. Now.” Sara’s whisper was a boozy command. She tugged him past the dark doorway of Ryan’s room and into the vast, cool kitchen illuminated only by the ghostly blue light of the water dispenser on the fridge. She released him and crossed her arms, leaning against the marble island.
“Sara, come on. It’s late.”
“It was a hug, Matthew. A really, really long hug. In the dark.” Her eyes were wide in the low light, gleaming with intoxication and intense curiosity. “You were practically melting into him. I have five kids. I know the difference between a ‘hey, buddy’ and a ‘I’m-holding-the-pieces-of-my-soul-together’ hug.”
Matthew walked to the sink, turning his back to her. He ran the tap, splashed cold water on his face. The droplets felt sharp, clarifying. “We were talking about the past. It got emotional. That’s all.”
“Emotional,” Sara repeated, her voice dripping with affectionate sarcasm. “Sweetie, you two were generating your own gravitational field out there. I felt it from the sofa.” She pushed off the island and came closer, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial slur. “This is it. This is the universe correcting itself. You were always the perfect fit. He was your first, your big one. That doesn't just go away.”
“It does go away,” Matthew insisted, turning to face her. Water dripped from his chin onto his shirt. “It did go away. I have a life, Sara. I have Robert.”
“Who is wonderful! And far away!” She threw her hands up, then swayed slightly, bracing herself on the counter. “Look, I love Robert. He’s sexy and he buys great birthday presents. But he’s a rock star. His life is planes and buses and groupies. Ryan is here. Ryan is real, and he’s looking at you like you invented the moon.”
“He’s also the one who left,” Matthew said, his voice hardening. The old ache, dulled by time, pulsed fresh under Sara’s romantic prodding. “He chose the closet and his career over me. That’s not a foundation. That’s a wound.”
“People change! He’s out now. He’s sorry. He literally just told you he thinks about the branch where he stayed!” She leaned in, her breath sweet with tropical fruit mixers. “Destiny isn’t a straight line, Matt. It’s a… a messy spiral. And it just looped back around.”
Matthew put his hands on her shoulders, steadying her. “You’re drunk, and you’re a hopeless romantic. You see a minivan and think it’s a carriage. I’m putting you to bed.”
“I’m not a carriage,” she giggled, allowing him to guide her out of the kitchen and back toward the living room. She flopped onto the sofa, grabbing a throw blanket. “But I have eyes. And my eyes saw two halves of a whole thing clicking back together. Just… think about the branch, okay?”
“Goodnight, Sara.” He pulled the blanket over her, retrieved her phone from the floor, and placed it on the coffee table. Within seconds, her breathing deepened into sleep.
The house felt heavier now, the silence aware. He couldn’t face his room, the dark ceiling where the conversation would just replay. He wandered back toward the kitchen, drawn by a need for something to occupy his hands, his mind.
A soft light glowed from an open door he hadn’t noticed before, stone steps descending. From below, he heard the delicate clink of glass.
He peered down. Marie stood in a small, climate-controlled wine cellar, rows of bottles glowing under subtle LED strips. She held two enormous Bordeaux glasses and a bottle dustier than the others. She looked up, her flawless face drawn.
“I heard the commotion,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “Sara’s pronouncements travel.” She lifted the bottle. “This is a 1990 Château Margaux. It’s probably wasted on me tonight. But I can’t drink it alone. Don’t make me drink it alone, Matthew.”
He descended the cool stone steps. The air smelled of damp earth and oak. “It’s after three.”
“And the sun is nowhere in sight.” She handed him a glass, already poured. “Consider it medicinal.”
She led him back up to the kitchen, settling at the island. They drank in silence for a moment. The wine was profound, layers of dark fruit and earth, a taste more complicated than he felt capable of appreciating.
“I knew, you know,” Marie said abruptly, staring into the ruby depths of her glass. “Back then. About you and Ryan.”
Matthew froze, the glass halfway to his lips. “How?”
“Please.” She gave a thin, humorless smile. “I shared a tour bus with you for two years. The stolen looks, the ‘working on harmonies’ in empty hotel rooms. The way you’d both go quiet when someone made a gay joke. I wasn’t oblivious. I was just selfish.”
She took a large swallow of wine. “My entire world was me. My vocal strain, my choreography, my camera angle. My future. I saw your heart breaking when he pulled away, and I thought… what a distraction. How messy.” She finally looked at him, her blue eyes glistening. “I should have been a friend. I should have asked if you were okay. I regret that. Profoundly.”
The admission was so stark, so unlike the Marie he thought he knew, that it disarmed him. “It wasn’t your job to manage my personal disasters.”
“It was a friend’s job.” She twirled the stem of her glass. “And we were friends, underneath everything. I’ve always liked you, Matthew. You were the only one who never treated me like just the annoying girl singing the catchy hook.”
He sipped the wine, its complexity unfolding on his tongue. “We were all kids. We were all surviving.”
“Some of us were surviving different things.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “My big secret from the Fusion4 days… it wasn’t a secret fling or a stolen demO tape.” She took a shaky breath, her polished facade crumbling. “I got pregnant. During the first European tour.”
The air left the room. Matthew simply stared.
“The father was a lighting tech. It was meaningless. But the pregnancy wasn’t.” Her words came faster now, poured out with the wine. “The label found out. My manager and two very serious men in suits took me to a clinic in Zurich. They told me it was the baby or the band. That a pregnant teen pop star was a ‘liability’ and a ‘moral breach of contract.’ They said they’d invested too much. They made it clear there was no choice.”
“My god, Marie.”
“I was nineteen.” A single, perfect tear tracked through her powder. She didn’t wipe it away. “I never told anyone. Not my mother, not Sara. Definitely not the guys. How could I? You were all dealing with your own things—your secret, Ryan’s fear, Sara’s family pressure. My tragedy felt like another piece of diva drama.” She finally looked at him, raw and exposed. “So I swallowed it. I performed that night. I smiled. And a part of me just… ossified around it.”
Matthew reached across the island, covering her hand with his. Her skin was cold. “I’m so sorry. That’s… monstrous.”
“It was business.” She said it flatly, a line she’d clearly repeated to herself for two decades. “We were all commodities. Your love was a commodity they couldn’t package. My… potential motherhood was a defect they had to remove.” She squeezed his fingers once, then pulled her hand back, recomposing herself with a visible shudder. “I’m not telling you for pity. I’m telling you so you understand that I see it now. The real cost of things. Your heartbreak was real. And him being back, looking at you like that… it’s not just a reunion storyline. It’s unfinished, living history.”
She finished her wine, the glass meeting the marble with a definitive clink. “I don’t know what you should do. But don’t let anyone else’s idea of the business, or the brand, or the ‘smart choice’ tell you what to feel this time. We’re not kids anymore. We get to choose our regrets.”
She stood, suddenly looking every one of her thirty-eight years, and infinitely more human than the pop star persona she projected. “I’m going to bed before this wine makes me even more maudlin. Don’t leave that bottle unfinished. It’s literally a classic.”
She padded away, leaving him alone in the silent kitchen with the expensive wine and the ghost of her confession. The oceanic rumble was a constant reminder of the vast, dark unknown beyond the house. His own past with Ryan felt both diminished and amplified by Marie’s story—a shared trauma of love and artistry commodified, of personal truth sacrificed on the altar of public appeal.
He poured the last of the Margaux into his glass. The embrace on the deck, Sara’s drunken prophecy, Marie’s shocking secret—it all swirled together, a toxic, clarifying cocktail. He wasn’t a kid. The suit-wielding men weren’t in charge this time. The choice, terrifyingly, was entirely his own.