“Baby, talk to me,” I said as I set my unopened water on the coffee table.“I know lunch sucked, but...but I can’t help make it better if you don’t talk to me.”
Rya placed her water next to mine, then turned to face me.“I overheard some girls talking about you when I went to the restroom,” she finally informed me, surprising me.“They were talking about what an embarrassment I was, and that if I really cared about you, then I’d leave you in order to save you from being talked about for dating me.”
“Are you fucking serious?”I asked, my blood getting heated again.
“It’s okay, Koen,” she sighed tiredly.“I mean...it sucked to hear them talking like that, but...but when I spoke with Leandra, she made some very good points-”
“Wait, what?”I had to shake my head a bit.“You...you called Leandra, instead of coming and getting me?”
She gave me a pointed look.“She’s one of my best friends, Koen.I’ve only known you for two weeks.So, in the event of an emotional crisis, my first instinct is to do what I’ve been doing for the past few years, and that’s to call Dalton or Leandra first.”
“While that makes total sense, I still don’t like it,” I told her honestly.
Ignoring that, she said, “Well, you’ll get over it.”
“I might not,” I argued.
“Anyway, she pointed out how people were going to talk about us dating, no matter what,” she went on.“There’s no escaping it.”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied evenly.“People are hateful, and they’re going to talk about us both.”
“You don’t find that exhausting?”she asked.“You don’t think that you’ll get tired of defending our relationship?”
“Fuck no,” I scoffed.“Mainly because I won’t be.People can say whatever they want behind our backs, Rya.It only becomes a problem if they dare say anything to our faces, and at that time, I’ll be more than happy to defend what we have together.”
Then she said the one thing that made me hate the world.“I don’t want to embarrass you, Koen.”
I reached for her, grabbed her hips, then sat her on my lap.“Baby, you’re out of your goddamn mind if you think that I’d ever be embarrassed to call you mine.”
“I’ve got to be honest with you, it’s going to take me a long time to get there, Koen,” she said, dismissing my declaration in favor of transparency.“And I don’t know how fair that is to you.”
“It’s not up to you to decide that, Rya,” I informed her.“If you want to talk about what’s not fair, making decisions for me like I’m not a grown man is what’s not fair.”
After a few seconds of silence she said, “You know, there are times when I’m fine and everything is going well, and then there are times when you scare the hell out of me.”
I pushed her hair back from her shoulders.“Well, you’re a lot better off than I am, because you scare me all the damn time, baby.”
She gave me a sweet smile as she said, “Well, what’s crazier than that is how your hands on my body seem to make it all go away.”
My hands immediately slid from her hips to underneath her shirt.“Oh, yeah?”
Rya nodded.“Yeah.”
“Tell me what else my hands do for you,” I ordered, my fingers dancing across her skin.
“They make me forget about everything but what they’re doing to me,” she whispered.
“And do they make you feel good?”I asked, my dick already hard underneath her ass.
“Everything you do to me makes me feel good,” she replied, and she sounded so serious that it made my heart hurt.
Grabbing Rya by her hips again, I held her tight as I stood up, and being the good girl that she was, she immediately wrapped her legs around my waist, and her arms were secured around my neck as I walked us back to my bedroom.
“If you keep talking like that, I may never let you leave here, baby,” I told her honestly.“We can both find jobs where we can work remote from home, and we’ll work in the bedroom.”
Rya let out a sincere laugh, and the simple sound made it so easy to breathe again, which solved one of the greatest mysteries of all time for me.Growing up, I used to always wonder why my father’s happiness had depended on my mother’s, and now I understood why.Making Rya happy felt more important than anything else that I’d ever done in my life, and if that wasn’t love, then I didn’t know what was, and after only two weeks.
Luckily for me, the door to my bedroom had been left open this morning, so I was able to walk Rya right on in, and as soon as I approached the bed, I laid her on the mattress, and when she smiled up at me, my entire chest felt like it was too tight for whatever I felt for this girl.
