AllFreeNovel
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Back then, I was a disheveled girl wearing a dress her mom wanted her to wear, while her hair was falling out of a pony tail.
Today?
Today, I was a disheveled woman wearing sweats that were comfortable, with a messy bun that was crooked and looked slept in.
“Whatcha thinking about, Sav?” Ryan asked quietly, his eyes locked on mine in the mirror still. I didn’t know how he did it. How he knew when my mind started to go down the path that could potentially cause a spiral.
I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Instead, I pushed my lips together and out, letting a breath out. “How do you do that?” I finally asked. “Always. For years. How do you know?”
Ryan stepped right up into my back. So close that, I either had to move forward into the counter, or lean back into him.
I chose to lean back into him.
He wrapped his left arm around my upper chest, and I watched in the mirror as he took his right hand, and brought it up to gently touch the corner of my eye. “You get tight right here when you think too hard. When your mind goes somewhere else.” My lips parted and I could feel each breath pass over my lips, drying them. “And here...” He moved his fingers from my eye and instead, brought his thumb to my lower lip. “You suck in right here, right at the corner.”
“I feel like you know a lot more about me than I know about you. And that’s a crazy thought.” I turned in his arms and looked up at him, the man, and not the reflection. “But it’s a thought that makes me feel like a terrible friend.”
“You know me.” His voice was so low, it grumbled through a whisper.
“I know trivial things, like...your jersey number the summer you turned twelve. Or...your mom’s favorite flower, because I’ve had to remind you when it was Mother’s Day.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit.” He lifted my chin, while taking my hand in his other. “You know me. You just fill it with a bunch of other noise, to tell yourself you don’t. Speaking of noise... What were you thinking?”
“It was stupid,” I answered quietly, still looking at him. I couldn’t move my eyes if I tried. He was just so...beautiful.
And I was—
“You’re doing it again.”
I grinned slowly in amazement and shook my head. “You’re crazy.”
“You’re gorgeous,” he responded back. I didn’t know if it was because he knew what I was thinking, or if it was the first thing on the tip of his tongue. “I could spend hours watching you move, watching you dance, watching you...hell, eat. All these years, and I love your company. I love just...being with you. You say you trust me. You say that you want to change where we went wrong a few years ago. But then you close off.”
“A person can have secrets,” I whispered, brokenly. I felt close to tears, but I couldn’t admit to him that I felt less-than when next to him.
“Sure. A person can. But relationships can’t be built on secrets. And if I can tell that you’re holding secrets...this will never work.”
“Do you have secrets?”
“From you? No.”
Well, shoot. Surely, he had something he kept from me!
“Actually, yeah. One.”
I knew it!
I lifted my brows, curious.
“I jerked off using your conditioner this morning.”
And just like that, the mood changed.
No longer did I want to cry because I was being backed in a corner, but I was crying tears of laughter. “You didn’t!”
Ryan let go of me to cross his arms over his broad chest. “What of it?” The smirk on his face told me he wasn’t lying...
And that he truly didn’t care.
