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I’m not easily distracted, but if I could manifest my perfect distraction, it’d look a lot like her.
“What about your guests?” I ask before we can veer too far off that subject. “Where do you…entertain your guests?”
“What are you asking?”
“I was wondering—”
“Are you asking where I fuck, Blue?”
“Shay, you are the luckiest man alive. Please tell me you’re hitting that.”
“Watch your fucking mouth.”
“Stop looking at her,” I warn. “Go hit the showers or get to the airport or just about anything other than look at her. She’s not available.”
“No, I’m not hitting that. And neither are any of you. Stop looking at her or she’ll be the last thing you ever fucking see.”
“Do you want me to get on my knees and beg or something?”
“Hug me back, Ryan,” she mumbles into my shoulder.
Because trust me, after the night I pinned her to the wall and made her come, there’s no way in hell another man is going near her without me losing my goddamn mind.
“Don’t fucking touch her.”
“Sometimes the quietest love is the loudest,” she continues.
“That man loves you. That right there is quiet love.”
Leaning down to his level, I keep my words hushed but clear. “Unfortunately, Indy’s old friends are your friends. You’ll be around, I get that. But if you ever, and I mean ever make her cry again, I will do everything in my power to make your life a living hell. My face will pop up everywhere you go. You will see me in your goddamn nightmares. I will make myself a daily reminder that you fumbled the best thing you’ll ever have in your fucking life. Got it?”
“Got it?” I repeat.
“Aren’t you supposed to be the good guy of the NBA? I doubt stalking me would be good for your golden boy image.” A condescending laugh escapes me. “Says the guy who camped outside of my place of work to talk to a girl who wants nothing to do with him. But let me make this clear, when it comes to her, I have no issue ruining my reputation. I will burn the world down to protect her and I’ll proudly wave the match, so everyone knows I’m the one who did it.”
“You know that jersey you’ve got with my last name on it? When you see it hanging there in your closet, let it serve as a reminder to you, that soon enough, it’ll be her last name too.”
I guess it is, but I didn’t know the bar was on the floor until Ryan Shay walked into my life and quietly raised it to the fucking moon. “And because I love you and when I tell your dad that, I’ll be the one to say it.”
“Why do you like reading fiction so much?” he asks without a hint of judgment. “How else would you get to live a thousand lives in the span of only one?
The beauty of fiction is that it makes you feel things on a visceral level. You can cry with those characters, laugh with them. It teaches you to look at another’s perspective, to have empathy. In nonfiction, you simply learn about something instead of feeling it.”
“He never left. The guy slept in his car, and honestly, if I were into dudes that right there would have me folding.”
“Tell Rio if he’s gonna fuck up the coffee then he needs to have some delivered for you!”
I’ll have a coffee delivered in less than thirty minutes from the man outside.
