AllFreeNovel
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Man, it really is nice having a ride-or-die friend in my life.
Hopefully after today, I’ll also have a ride-or-die love in my life.
I quickly explain my plan to Melanie as I flip through a sports magazine with a picture of Quinn on the cover, waiting for my turn to check out, knowing it’s a good idea as soon as Melanie says, “It’s official. I hate you. You’re going to havesuchgood sex today, you bitch.”
“You’re still anangel.”
My body jerks in surprise at the sound of Ryan’s soft voice, even though I’ve been standing out here in the garage, staring at the painting I finished last night, anxiously counting down the minutes until he got home. Willing the butterflies in my stomach to calm the hell down, I look back over my shoulder to find him leaning against the doorframe with his hands in the pockets of his khakis, and a perfectly pressed blue polo shirt is tucked into them. He looks handsome, and sweet, and clean, and my heart starts beating faster in anticipation, knowing that in just a few minutes, I’m going to dirty him up a little bit.
“Your tattoo,” Ryan says, pointing to the back of his own neck when I must still be looking at him in confusion, and he repeats his comment. “You’re still an angel.”
My hand comes up to run my fingers over the back of my neck with my hair up in a messy bun as he pushes off the doorframe and takes a step into the garage, remembering the day after I left Chicago when I got the tattooEven angels fallin a fit of rage, as another “fuck you” to my father.
“You didn’t fall anywhere, except right where you belong.” He smiles at me, making my heart flutter in my chest.
I’msupposed to be the one romancinghimright now, but this man oozes romance every time he speaks to me. I feel like I’m out of my league, trying to do something sweet and special for him, and now I’m starting to feel like this idea was really, really cheesy. Even for Ryan, who is a big fan of all things cheese.
He takes another step closer to me and stops. “Did you really leave a trail of rose petals for me from the front door to the garage?”
Cheesy, stupid idea number one, coming right up!
“Yep.” I sigh, rubbing my hands together in front of me to try to get them to stop sweating, as I glance behind Ryan and see all the red petals on the floor of the hallway that leads back into the house, which Ryan carefully walked around and didn’t disturb.
Ryan takes another step and then pauses to slowly look around the garage. “And you lit like a hundred candles all over the place out here, with soft, romantic music playing?”
Cheesy, stupid ideas number two and three, at your service.
“I borrowed them from Shepherd.” I shrug, as “Bloodstream” by Stateless plays softly from my Bluetooth speaker, wiping my still-sweaty hands down the front of my cotton shorts. “That man has a ridiculous amount of candles in his craft room.”
Ryan laughs, but his eyes are bright and wide, and his mouth is dropped open in a little bit of shock, or possibly horror, when they come back to me. “You did all this for me?”
Now he’s whispering, and his face is so sweet and full of disbelief that I just want to blurt out how much I love him, but I keep my mouth closed and let the romance and shit do the talking for me.
Turning away from him for a second, I grab an envelope from the easel I put there when I set everything else up and quickly walk it over to him before I can change my mind and channel Tess to use one of the candles to light it on fire.
Cheesy idea number five, insert huge sigh here.
I turned the main, overhead light of the garage off, and it’s a pretty cloudy day today, so there’s not much natural light coming through the windows. With all the candles I have on the floor, the shelves, and covering every available surface, there’s still plenty of flickering light to see by. And I can see Ryan carefully tearing open the envelope, gently pulling out the card from inside, and reading the absolutely cheesy message on it out loud, but one that made me think about him as soon as I saw it at the store.
“The first time you kissed me, I could swear time stopped…”
Time really does feel like it stops as Ryan slowly opens the card and reads what’s printed inside.
“But maybe it was just my heart. Happy anniversary, to the one who still makes my heart stop.” Ryan stares down at the card in his hand for so long that these butterflies in my stomach try to claw their way out.
“I know it’s silly, but it’s the six-week anniversary of the day we first kissed, and I thought—”
“Six weeks, two hours, seventeen minutes, and—” Ryan looks down at his watch. “—thirty-eight seconds, to be exact.”
My heart feels like it bursts wide open in my chest and starts spraying out rays of sunshine and rainbows that he knows down to the second the exact time we kissed at Giovanni’s.
“It’s not silly. It’s perfect, and I love it. I love… everything. I’ve always wanted someone to give me a card like this, and I’m never throwing it away. You reallyarean angel. A hot, talented, sweet, and sexy angel. I can’t believe you did all this forme.”
There he goes again, being sweet and romantic without even trying, while also still not trusting what I feel for him. It hurts my heart, but that’s why I’m doing this. So he’ll see it, and hear it, and feel it—everything he means to me and everything I feel for him, and that I’ll suffer through all the cheesiness with a smile on my face if it makes him happy. And afterward, he’ll always have a keepsake to remember this moment and what it meant.
Pushing aside the twinge in my heart, I switch gears and focus on the next part of my plan and the fun part of our afternoon. Taking the card out of his hand, I set it down on a nearby table next to some candles.
“Take off your pants.”
