“I thought we agreed on ‘Willow.’”
“Willow. Autumn. My girl. Mrs. Ford. I’ll call you whatever you want.”
I turned in his arms and swatted playfully at his chest. “You’re so full of shit.”
Amusement and tenderness lingered in his eyes. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like the dead.”
He smirked. “We had quite the workout yesterday.”
My laughter matched his, like tittering school children sharing whispered secrets. “I’ve never actually spent an entire day naked before.”
Ryan stroked his chin. “I think we need to go for round two then. See how many days in a row we can go.”
“I think people might start to wonder if we’re MIA for more than eighteen hours.”
“Then let them wonder,” he said as he wrapped his arms around me, holding me tightly to his chest as he gently rubbed my back. “How are you feeling today?”
“Like I need to use the bathroom, but I’m not entirely sure my legs work.”
His hum was rich and resonant. “Let me carry you.”
“I can walk. Your dick is good, but you didn’t break my pussy.”
“Damn. I’ll try harder next time,” he teased. Ryan’s eyes went soft as he craned his neck to stare down at me. “You always look so pretty in the morning.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t give me that book boyfriend bullshit.”
He laughed. “What? It’s true.”
“It’s not. My hair is a mess, my breath could knock a grown man out cold, and I probably have creases on my face from sleeping like the dead.”
Instead of arguing with me, Ryan flopped his arm over toward his nightstand and grabbed his phone. I stayed curled into his side as he opened the camera and snapped a picture.
“Ry,” I groaned.
“Hold on,” he said as he tapped through the prompts to store the photo in a digital album he had named “FW.” “Don’t worry. I’m not posting it.”
That hadn’t even crossed my mind. Frankly, social media didn’t make me feel good, so I ignored it most of the time. Itwas a necessary evil for my line of work, so I used a third-party program to schedule out the content that I needed to share, and then I logged off.
Ryan was much more involved—always talking to his followers and interacting on posts.
I chewed on my lip as he fiddled with the lighting on the photo, bringing the brightness up until we were glowing in the rays of sunshine that leaked in from the windows.
Ryan went back to the original image, where I was nestled in the crook of his chest and shoulder with the blankets pulled up to my chin. The lighting was terrible and there were shadows everywhere. “That’s what you see.” He flipped to the brightened image where my hair and complexion glowed in pinks and gold. “That’s what I get to see. All the time.”
Curiosity was an annoying little gnat that kept coming back no matter how much I swatted it away.
I grabbed my phone and tapped into Instagram. I ignored the notifications and unread messages and pulled up Ryan’s profile.
Most of the content that he posted was for sponsorships or to promote his businesses, but that wasn’t what the curiosity gnat told me to look at.
The last personal photo he had posted was of the day we attempted to make chocolate chip cookies after our bakery crawl. My hand was in the corner of the picture as I measured chocolate chips. Flour was sprayed across the counter, and eggshells sat right outside the bowl.
The caption read, “There are good days, and then there are days you’ll never forget.”
“Those cookies were terrible,” Ryan said as he kissed the top of my head.
