a/n: first fic of 2026!!! yeah so I watched ‘Him' again this week, and felt *inspired*...like #needthat, real bad lol. and tyriq wasn't under my tree so I worked on a fic instead. I have some longer fic/series ideas swirling around in my head…but a one shot shall do for now. This one is just pure smut, utter filth starring loverboy cam. Hope y’all enjoyyy😗🫶🏾
wc: 2.9k
If anyone was ever looking for Cameron, there were only three places he could be. In the gym or out on the football field, constantly (and at times a bit obsessively) wanting to improve his game. In the library, because contrary to popular belief, the football team’s star athlete actually did care about keeping his grades up. Or, he was with you—more like trying to either crawl into your skin, test your patience, or pry your thighs apart. And in true Cam fashion, all three were permanently on his to-do list.
After paying almost no attention to the lecture you were both in earlier in the day, you invited him over to your apartment to hang out while you got as many assignments as possible done before the weekend. Between the home game he was playing in and the festivities following, the last thing you wanted to worry about was a psych paper due at 11:59 pm.
Before his coach could even call the end of practice, Cameron was already sprinting to the locker room. Practice ended at 8:30, and he was knocking at your door by 9. When you open the door, you’re met with the pleasant sight of your boyfriend—who despite leaning against the doorframe, still towered over you, a dopey smile stretched across his face. You two shamelessly took each other in, his eyes stopping right where his hoodie stopped at the tops of your thighs, your eyes getting stuck somewhere between his green eyes and sharp jawline.
“Got it all in, or should I spin for you?” Cam quips, his grin becoming more of a smirk.
“Now I ain’t say all that, pretty boy,” you hit back, stepping aside to let him in. Once the lock on the door clicks, Cameron sweeps you up by the waist and into his arms, a small shout slipping from your mouth at the sudden movement. Holding you tight against his solid front, the familiar mix of Cam’s cologne and body wash invades your senses as he gets a better look at you.
“You the prettiest to ever pretty, pretty girl,” your boyfriend confidently corrects. Your cheeks instantly heat up at his words, and your lips go straight to his.
“Hi,” you whisper to him, swiping your thumb underneath his lower lip to get rid of your transferred lip gloss.
“Hi, baby,” he whispers back, matching your smile and giving you another kiss, placing you back down on the floor. Cameron then kicks off his sneakers and leaves them by the door. He shrugs the bag holding any and everything school-related higher onto his shoulder and leaves the much larger practice duffel behind.
“These are for you,” your boyfriend offers, holding out a small shopping bag filled with some of your favorite study snacks.
“Thanks,” you softly smile back at him, trying your hardest to ignore the heat rushing back to your cheeks. He knew you well; a bit too well. Refusing to give him anymore of a reaction, you grab his much larger hand and pull him with you to your bedroom. And even though the journey wasn’t even 30 steps, Cam still managed to deliver a quick swat to your ass in the process. He just couldn’t help himself.
You took the bed, nestling right back into the heaping pile of pillows and throw blankets you’d left earlier, while Cam sat at the desk. And surprisingly enough, you two were able to go a whole hour before the books were abandoned. Thankfully, you were able to get some work done before he arrived.
“Have you finished the psych paper yet?” you ask, eyes still locked in on the half-written paper in front of you.
“Yeah, had to get that shit done early,” he huffs, smoothing his hand across the top of his head. He turns away from the desk to fully face you, giving up on the assignment he was working on.
“And you didn’t offer to write mine?” You gasp, feigning hurt at the revelation. Your attention is fully his now, giving your eyes a break from the words that were beginning to run together.
“Little Miss Dean’s List asking me for help?” Cam shoots back, mimicking your reaction—ironic considering he made Dean’s List right alongside you last semester.
“Don’t piss me off,” you mutter, sending a pointed look in his direction. But you couldn’t hold up the irritated facade for long. Not when you could see an almost mischievous smile spreading across your boyfriend’s face, all 32 of his teeth on display as he finds delight in your frustration.
“You know I can make it up to you, though,” he hums, that stupidly hot grin still plastered across his face.
Ignoring the fact that he was sitting in your fuzzy baby pink office chair (which he put together for you), you can’t help but stare at him, leaned back with his legs spread unnecessarily wide, bottom lip between his teeth.
“Oh, I’m sure you can,” you reply, playfully rolling your eyes at him before turning back to your unfinished paper on the screen.
Without saying anything further, Cameron stands up from your desk, closing the already small distance between you. Kneeling onto the bed beside you, he gently closes your laptop, sliding it onto your bedside table.
“What if I didn’t save that?” you test, making no moves to stop him.
“You always gotta have an answer for everything, don’t you?” He scoffs, shaking his head at your antics. He not so secretly liked it when you were a little bratty.
“Absolutely,” you confidently return, already knowing his next move.
“Girl, c’mere,” he chuckles, grabbing you by your hips and pulling you down from your upright position so that you’re lying flat against the bed. Cam ducks his head down and kisses you.
Instantly, you’re smiling into it, wrapping your arms around his shoulders to pull him down closer. Your ears fill with the soft smacks of your kisses mixed with Cameron’s airy groans and your own content sighs. His lips dance perfectly with yours, gently taking control over the kiss as you follow his lead.
But even though you let him take control, he was still at your mercy. When your tongue slides against his, softly licking into his mouth, you feel him relax into you, his lips parting for more. Your nails softly drag through the buzzed hair at the nape of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine and straight into his pants.
He slots one leg in between yours, nudging his knee up just enough to send a jolt through your core. Your lips are clasped around his lower one when a small whimper leaves your lips at the feeling, your hips instinctively bucking upward in search of more.
“You gon’ let me have a taste, baby?” Cam murmurs, voice low, desperate for a taste of the honey pot between your legs. You could feel one of his large calloused hands trailing up your stomach beneath your hoodie. His palm brushes over your pebbled nipples, the roughness of his skin sending shocks through your body. His hand continues upward, stopping at the column of your throat, fingers curling lightly around the area. He could feel your breath hitch, getting more riled up by the second.
“Mhm,” you whimper in response, too engulfed in the flames he’d lit inside you. Your panties were ruined by now, completely drenched in your arousal. And it was only made worse when you could feel your boyfriend’s hold on your throat tighten ever so slightly.
“Uh uh. You know you can speak up any other time. Imma need you to use your words, pretty girl,” he instructs lowly, his green eyes piercing into yours. “Now imma ask you again, am I gonna get a taste of that sweet pussy?”
“Yes! Baby, please,” you sigh, bucking your hips up against his knee for some relief. Like clockwork, his filthy mouth sent shockwaves through your body. A small smirk spreads across his lips, having heard exactly what he wanted from you.
In no time, his fingers are hooked beneath your panties and sleep shorts, tugging them down your thighs and out of sight. He effortlessly pushes you higher onto the bed, claiming his desired spot between your thighs. Before you can even think of a word, his hands are pushing your thighs up and toward your chest. And his mouth is latching right onto you.
“Wait, baby wa-,” you gasp, his tongue already giving you indescribable pleasure. You try to lightly push his head back, unable to keep your moans at bay while you try to pry him away.
“You good?” He asks, his grip on your thighs softening, a little concerned by your sudden switch-up.
“Just wanna try something,” you breathe out, pulling your plump bottom lip between your teeth at the thought.
“Where you want me, mama?” He questions, licking his lips to taste whatever was left of you on them, and his eyes glimmer with curiosity as to what you could possibly want to do.
“I need you up here,” you direct, swinging your leg over him to climb off the bed. “And you can’t keep all them clothes on in my bed,” you pointedly add, sending him into a slight frenzy as he sheds his clothes before lying where you wanted him.
You took a moment to savor the specimen that was lying in your bed, excitedly waiting for your next move. He had on nothing but a gold chain around his neck that never came off, a body that was practically carved by god himself, and a heavy dick resting on his happy trail that made your mouth water. And between your legs, you could feel your slick arousal practically dripping down your thighs. Following your own no-clothes rule, you pull Cam’s stolen hoodie off your body and drop it with the rest of the discarded clothes.
“Shit…you finer than a muhfucka,” Cameron gawks, taking in your completely bare body. The necklace he’d gifted you for your birthday was shining against your chest, right above your milky tits. They sat so full and soft, your darker pebbled nipples just begging to be in his mouth. Every curve of your perfectly soft body is on display. Your body was immediately swarmed with butterflies from his words. Even though he could get quite crude at times, Cam was never afraid to voice his attraction, love, and borderline obsession with you.
Using his muscular thighs for support, you straddle his body reverse cowgirl, spreading your thighs across his chest. As if it were instinctual, Cam delivers a heavy swat to your ass.
“Fat as hell,” he grumbles, in awe, his big hands palming at the plump flesh. “Shake it f’me,” he directs, hands sliding down your thighs to rest on your calves, eagerly anticipating the show. You don’t hesitate to give him a little something. Effortlessly making your ass sway back and forth like it was water. Cam was, without a doubt, enjoying the view. In fact, he was enjoying it so much that you caught his dick jump a bit in response. Between your ass and pussy that was spread and on full display, giving him a perfect view of how drenched you were for him—not to mention, the scent of your arousal clouded him—how could Cam not be excited?
Needing to get his fill, Cam yanks you even closer—you were practically sitting on his face—before diving right into your gooey center. His thick arms wrap around your hips to keep you from running. His tongue skillfully explores you, flattening his tongue against your clit before dragging it up your pussy, stopping halfway to dip inside and prod at your gummy entrance. The most sinful moans spill from your lips. You were so wrapped up in the way his tongue was working you over that you hadn’t even started working on him.
Your cheek rested against his chiseled V-lines with a hand wrapped around his throbbing shaft. For Cam, eating you out was a pleasurable experience in and of itself. Reciprocation was never a requirement. Despite this, though, you couldn’t shake the idea of having your mouth on him while his mouth stayed on you. The only problem was that you slightly underestimated just how good his skills were. You weren’t expecting to have to work up the strength to give him a blowjob. But eventually, you did.
You drag your tongue down his happy trail and through the trimmed hairs at his base, continuing all the way up his shaft until you reach the head, slick with precum. When you give his slit the smallest kitten licks, his arms tighten around you, and a string of deep groans vibrates through your center. Pursing your lips around the swollen head, you hollow your cheeks, and you suckle on him. Slowly, you take him into your mouth—inch by inch. Cam had a vivid image of you in his head, practically unhinging your jaw to take his dick. You had a big mouth—just not for his dick, apparently.
Warm and wet. Those were the only two words floating around in his head. Both apply to your pussy and mouth. You manage to take all of him inside, his thick head hitting the back of your throat, causing a wet gag to leave your throat. At this, Cam's fingers dig into the flesh of your ass, clawing at you right along the stretch marks across your skin.
“Fuck!” He groans into your inner thigh. You come up for air, immediately using both hands to tug at his slick shaft, squeezing around the head every time. He practically loses his mind when you spit on him. “That’s it, baby, wet that dick,” he praises, licking at your arousal-stained thigh. You soaked him so good that he could hear the wetness in your hands and could feel your spit trailing down his balls, his thighs tightening at the sensation.
Keeping your ass in one hand, Cam brings a hand down to your pussy, dragging it through your sopping folds, getting them nice and wet before plunging two into your tight entrance.
“Mmm, shit,” you sigh, feeling the stretch of his thick fingers as he pushes deeper. You liked the slight sting that came along with him being inside of you. So much so that you started pushing back against his hand while you stroked his dick with his throbbing head nestled against your tongue.
“You like when I play wit’ this pretty pussy mama?” He chuckles, letting your hips do the work. Before you could even get an answer out, Cam spits onto your buzzing clit, massaging it in with his thumb. At this, your moans get even louder—even with your mouth being full of him.
As his curved fingers ram into your spot over and over, you push his dick down your throat, gagging a little every time. You knew he liked it when you got sloppy. Together, you and Cam’s moans, along with the slick, drenched sounds of your pleasure, filled the air.
When your walls start fighting his fingers and his hips start bucking up into your throat, you both know the other is close to coming.
Keeping his fingers inside, he replaces his thumb on your clit with his mouth. He sucks at the tingling bundle of nerves as he continues fucking into you. Instantly, you’re clenching even tighter around him, and your thighs are even beginning to shake. You start to suck harder around the head of his cock, hands wrapped around his shaft tightening too. Keeping your mouth wrapped around him, you unwrap your hands from around his shaft. One is planted on his thigh, and the other falls a little lower, taking his heavy and slick balls into your hands. That’s when he loses it. Cam’s hips start bucking up into your mouth, chasing a release. And you let him fuck your mouth, all while massaging his balls in the palm of your hand. Your muffled whimpers getting stronger as you, too, are so close to letting go.
His hips begin to stutter. And with one final jerk, Cam is flooding your mouth with his warm load. As he lets go, his mouth never leaves your clit. When he feels your throat contracting around him as you swallow his nut, he only sucks harder. Satisfied groans shooting right through you. Coupled with his unrelenting mouth on your clit, what sends you over the edge is when he removes a finger from your pussy, dragging it a bit higher to rub your slick into your much tighter entrance. When you feel him push the tip of his finger past your entrance, you’re gone.
Completely gushing on his mouth and fingers. Your thighs were fully quivering from the pleasure, and your moans were uncontrollable. When he feels you rest your head against his thigh, he releases your puffy clit and slowly pulls his remaining finger from your pussy. And without any hesitation, Cam sucks both into his mouth to get a taste of your release. Warm, sticky, and sweet.
The two of you lie there together, not even attempting to move out of the position you were in. After a while, Cam lightly grips your thighs, moving you over to get out from underneath you. Standing up from the bed, your boyfriend scoops you up into his arms and lays you down at the top of the bed in your cloud of pillows. He pulls the comforter over your tired body and joins you underneath, immediately cuddling into his side. Cam wraps an arm around you, holding you nice and tight against him.
Cam knew that you were going to need a little recovery nap, so to pass the time, he opened your laptop to start reading through your paper. That was the least he could do.
⋆.ೃ࿔EVERYTHING IS YOURS ᝰ
Valentine’s Day in the Withers house is supposed to be simple: married, new baby, takeout on the couch. Instead, Nala is spiralling about capitalism, dead romance and the terrifying size of the love she carries for the man she’s been painting, writing and lowkey worshipping since college. What she doesn’t know is that Tyriq has spent just as long quietly turning his own body into a love letter to her—ink, cameras, mirrors and all.
pairing : Tyriq Withers x oc! (Nalani 'Nala' Joan Withers )
warnings : they doing some grown folk shit
also me soft launching bae @mamasturn in the way writers do
Yearning was a sickness, a full-body plague masquerading as romance, and anyone who tried to dress it up as something pretty had clearly never felt it sit in their lungs like smoke; it wasn’t some harmless little pastime that visited when she was bored, something to twirl between her fingers like idle thought—no, it was relentless, obsessive, a quiet kind of madness that turned seconds into hours and hours into an endless loop of him. It was waking up with his name already tightening in her chest before her eyes had even opened, feeling her ribcage ache at the smallest reminder—a song he liked, a hoodie he left, the ghost of his cologne clinging to a pillowcase—and knowing there was no antidote she could take that didn’t begin and end with him. Yearning, she’d decided, was letting one person colonise your mind so completely that everything else faded to background noise; it was the cruelty of having your tormentor and your saviour be the same set of hands, the same mouth, the same boy who could ruin your day with a single silence and then soothe it with a single look. It was the way he haunted the edges of her every thought, slipping into lectures and grocery lists and quiet showers, and yet, when she finally had him near—when his laugh bounced off the walls or his fingers brushed the inside of her wrist—he became the only thing that eased the burn he’d lit inside her in the first place.
Nala was convinced she was going insane—properly, clinically losing it—because yes, she loved Tyriq, she’d made peace with that a long time ago, but whatever this was sat somewhere far beyond love, in a place that felt more volatile, more unhinged, like something Aphrodite and Cupid would have unleashed on their worst enemies when they were feeling particularly cruel; it was the kind of feeling that made her look up at the ceiling in the dark and ask God, the universe, anyone listening what the hell she had done to deserve being plagued like this, to have one man stitched so thoroughly into the fabric of her being that everything she made, everything she touched, seemed to circle back to him.
He wasn’t just someone she loved—he’d slipped into that terrifying position of muse, the reason the rhythm stayed steady in her chest when the world went quiet, the reason her hands moved when she thought she’d forgotten how, conjuring melodies out of thin air that always, always came back to his laugh, his voice, the way he said her name like it was a song he’d heard before he was born. He was the reason she could sit for hours and pour out sonnet after sonnet, page after page, ink bleeding into metaphors until the paper smelled like him in her mind; the reason her paintbrushes moved in those familiar, unthinking strokes, as if her muscles had learned the shape of him by heart—jawline, shoulders, the slope of his back—long before she admitted it to herself.
Tyriq was haunting her—not in the dramatic, cinematic way, but in the quiet, suffocating way a thought returns every time you think you’ve finally outrun it—and she was certain there wasn’t a word big enough, ancient enough, cruel enough to describe what it felt like to be this consumed by someone who was still very much alive and breathing, walking around in the same world as her, completely unaware that somewhere, in the spaces only she could see, he’d become the axis everything inside her spun around.
She looked down at their daughter—their daughter—sweet, soft Honey, their honeybee, bundled against her chest like something spun out of sunlight and sleep, and for a moment Nala swore the air left her lungs entirely; the baby’s lashes rested against cheeks that were all Tyriq, her tiny face already carrying his features like a prophecy fulfilled—the bright blue eyes that would undo people one day, the familiar slope of his nose, that faint little crinkle at the corners of her eyes when she dreamed, and it was like looking at a smaller, purer version of the man who’d ruined her life in the gentlest way possible.
Her chest tightened again, that same old ache blooming under her ribs—too big for the small body she lived in—as her gaze slipped from Honey’s sleeping face to her own hands. They were steady, but stained, fingers smudged with dried streaks of ochre and umber and blue, her wedding ring sitting heavy and certain on her finger, gleaming dully beneath the paint like a promise she’d dipped in colour and worn into the bone. There was something almost obscene, she thought, about how casual it had become to move through the day with a whole life on her left hand—a man, a vow, a future—pressed against the same fingers she used to hold brushes, wipe tears, rock their child to sleep.
When she finally turned back toward the easel, the canvas waited for her in the quiet like a mirror she hadn’t meant to look into.
It wasn’t his face she’d painted this time.
It was worse.
His hands stared back at her from the linen—stunning in their ordinariness, rendered with the kind of detail that only came from obsession. She’d painted the faint scars she knew by touch before sight, the small pale line near his thumb from when he’d cut himself opening a box in their first apartment, the barely-there mark on his knuckle from a high school game he never talked about. She’d painted the subtle rise and fall of veins beneath warm brown skin, the tiny follicles of hair along his wrist, the way his fingers seemed both capable and gentle even in stillness—hands that had taped her pads together after birth, hands that had caught Honey’s slippery body when she came screaming into the world, hands that had learned her curves before they ever picked up a football properly.
And there, just above where she’d shaded in the slope of his wrist, she’d painted it—the tattoo.
Her name.
Nalani.
Written in her own handwriting, inked in real life on his actual skin, now painstakingly replicated on the canvas, small but unmistakable, like a whispered secret in the middle of a shout. The tiny curl of the “N,” the slight lean of the letters, the way the last “i” always tilted a little too far right because she’d been nervous when she wrote it for the artist—all of it stared back at her, an accusation and a confession in one.
And standing there, with Honey’s warm weight against her shoulder and the painted version of his hands—those same hands that had built a life with her—reaching out from the canvas, Nala felt it crash over her all at once:
this was what it meant to love him.
To raise his daughter with his face.
To wear his ring on paint-stained fingers.
To spend her days trying, and failing, to stop her art from becoming a shrine to the man who had somehow become the rhythm, the subject, and the signature of every beautiful thing she made.
Nala felt that familiar, awful tightening in her chest as she climbed the stairs of their home in Atlanta, each step heavier than the last, like her heart had picked up weight and decided to sit squarely behind her ribs; she moved on autopilot—into Honey’s room, into the soft, dim hush that always smelled faintly of baby lotion and milk—laying their daughter down in her crib with the kind of care that bordered on reverence. For a moment she just stood there, bent over the rail, pressing a lingering kiss to the warm curve of Honey’s head, breathing in the comfort of her, the steady rise and fall of that tiny chest soothing something shallow while something deeper inside her still roared. She checked the baby monitor twice, because that’s what she did when her thoughts were loud—double-checked, triple-checked, clinging to routine like it could quiet the storm in her, then eased the door shut until only a thin slice of hallway light remained and finally vanished.
Out in the corridor, the house felt too big and too quiet at the same time, all those walls they’d worked so hard to earn suddenly echoing with the sound of her own breathing. Her fingers were still stained with paint, ring catching the light as she pulled her phone from her pocket like a lifeline and scrolled, not because she didn’t know the number by heart, but because it gave her hands something to do while her pulse tried to climb out of her throat. There was only one person she ever called when her love started to feel like this—too loud, too wild, too much for her body to hold, like it was spilling out of her seams and flooding the floor. Restless in it. Drowning in it. Loving Tyriq so much it almost felt like an allergic reaction.
She pressed the call button and lifted the phone to her ear, pacing a slow, shaky line down the hallway as it rang once, twice, and the second she heard the click on the other end, the breath she’d been holding tumbled out of her in a rush.
Nala didn’t even bother with hello.
She had Honey’s baby monitor tucked under one arm, her phone pressed so hard to her ear it might’ve fused there, and dried paint flaking off her fingers as she paced the length of the upstairs hallway like it was a trench.
“Selah,” she exhaled, voice already frayed, “something’s wrong with me.”
On the other end, there was a soft rustle, the faint click of a TV being turned down, then that sigh—warm, familiar, the kind you let out when you’re already sitting up to catch somebody mid-fall.
“What’s goin’ on, baby?” Selah asked, voice low, as if she’d already put her glasses on and planted her feet. “Start from the top. Don’t rush it.”
Nala slid her back down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, knees bent, ringed hand tangled in the hem of her tank top. Across from her, a framed picture of her and Tyriq at twenty—mid-laugh, eyes already hooked on each other—hung just the slightest bit crooked.
“It’s Valentine’s Day,” she said finally.
Selah hummed. “Okay…”
“And I think I’m insane.”
“There it is,” Selah murmured. “Go on.”
“I’m telling you, Selah,” Nala started, the words tripping over themselves now that the door was open, “Valentine’s Day is literally one big money grab, a whole Hallmark-ass scheme created by white people to take even more of our money and convince us that if we don’t drop a bag on flowers and prix fixe menus, we somehow love each other less.”
The rant was familiar; she clung to it like a floatation device.
She got back up without realising it, pacing again, the empty wine glass in one hand, Honey’s bottle in the other, the red lace she’d bought on a whim earlier draped over her wrist like a joke that didn’t quite land. The formula sloshed faintly. The wine stains at the bottom of the glass caught the hallway light.
“It’s consciousness over cock, dedication over dick, principle over penis—” she declared, words sharp and rolling off her tongue like a sermon she’d had chambered all afternoon.
“Nala—” Selah cut in, voice crackling through with that familiar mix of exasperation and fondness. The tone that said: baby, I hear you, but you are not allowed to give a TED Talk on radical pussy politics while this worked up.
“Facts over fornication,” Nala finished anyway, like she was stamping a seal onto it, then tipped the last bitter drops of wine back in one swallow. It burned. It didn’t help.
“So what I’m hearing,” Selah said dryly, “is that capitalism is evil, white people are to blame, and penis is on the bench. What does that have to do with you being broken?”
Nala let herself drop onto the upstairs landing, back to the wall again, head hitting drywall with a soft thud. “Because,” she muttered, staring at the ceiling, “under all that, I’m still sat here in my house, in my little red lace, mad as hell that it’s Valentine’s Day and my husband ain’t asked me what I’m doin’ tonight.”
Selah went quiet. Not the distracted kind of quiet—Nala knew better by now. This was the kind where you could almost hear her adjusting herself, settling in because this wasn’t going to be quick.
“Say that part again,” Selah said gently.
Nala groaned, covering her face with her paint-stained hand. “He kissed me this morning,” she admitted. “Kissed me, kissed Honey, said he’d be back later. That was it. No ‘be ready at seven,’ no stupid little smirk he gets when he’s lying because he’s planning something. Just… regular. And it’s our first Valentine’s as husband and wife, first as Honey’s parents, and the day feels like any other day.” Her voice thinned. “What if that part’s gone, Sel? What if the… intentional part? The chase, the extra, the butterflies? What if we used it all up?”
Selah hummed, low and thoughtful. “Okay,” she said. “So now we’re at the real problem. You’re not mad at capitalism. You’re scared.”
Nala’s throat tightened. “I just don’t wanna wake up one day and realise we burned through all the fireworks in the early years, and now it’s just routine and diapers and ‘don’t forget the wipes’ and we love each other, yeah, but we’re bored. I don’t want us to be bored. I don’t want him to not be pressed about me anymore.”
“And where does ‘something’s wrong with me’ come in?” Selah asked, voice softer.
Nala looked down at her own hand for a second—the paint under her nails, the ring catching the light, the faint tremor in her fingers. “I put Honey down,” she said, quieter now. “Looked at her face. It’s his, Sel. His eyes, his stupid little frown, even that line between her brows she got from him bein’ dramatic in the womb. And my heart did that cracking thing again. That one where it feels like it’s too small for what’s inside it.” She pressed her palm flat over her sternum, as if to demonstrate. “Then I went to my studio, swearing I was just painting hands—just hands, anybody’s—and I look up and it’s him. It’s always him. His knuckles, his veins, that stupid box-cutter scar, the ‘Nalani’ he got on his wrist like he didn’t have sense.”
Her voice wobbled on her own name.
“I can’t even paint a body part without it turning into a shrine,” she whispered. “I write, and it’s him. I go to the grocery store, see sunflowers, it’s him. I hear a whistle that’s off-key, my brain corrects it to the way he used to do it at practice. I smell detergent, I’m back in college with his hoodies on my dorm bed. It’s like… like he’s a watermark. The page looks blank, but you hold it up to the light and he’s just—there. Everywhere. All the time.”
Selah didn’t laugh. Didn’t tease. Just breathed with her.
“In my head,” Nala went on, staring at the crooked photo on the wall, “it feels like a hallway. Every door open. And he’s standin’ in all of them. Past, future, the ‘what if we never met’ one, the ‘what if something happens to him’ one. I cannot walk a corridor in my own mind without bumpin’ into him.” She let out a half-choked laugh. “Even in the scenarios where he’s gone, he’s still there. I think about my career and it’s, ‘How will this affect him, his schedule, his peace?’ I think about how I mother and it’s, ‘Would he be proud? Did he see that?’ I write a song and I already know which line he’d run back in the car. My soul made room and just kept building.”
She swallowed hard.
“That’s why I called you,” she confessed. “Because on top of all that, it’s Valentine’s, and I’m… aching because he didn’t ask me out like he used to. And then I’m mad at myself for aching, ‘cause I’m like, girl, you’re married. You have his baby. Grow up. And then I get mad at him for makin’ me feel like this, and it’s just—” she gestured helplessly, even though Selah couldn’t see “—too much. It feels like worship, Sel. Like full-blown idolatry. And I don’t know if that’s… allowed.”
There it was. Soft and small and terrified.
Selah was quiet long enough that Nala could hear the faint tick of the hallway clock, the distant hum of the AC, Honey’s little static on the monitor behind her.
“You want the truth,” Selah said finally, “or you want me to pat your hair and tell you you’re being dramatic?”
“I’m always dramatic,” Nala muttered. “Tell me the truth.”
“The truth?” Selah said. “You love that man like he’s a religion. And every time you realise it again, you call me like I’m your pastor to see if you just committed some new kind of sin.”
Nala laughed, wet and weak. “Am I wrong, though?”
Selah let out a soft, knowing sound. “You wanna know what I see? I see a girl who survived enough emptiness to know she never wants to feel hollow again. So when love came, she didn’t sip it. She drowned in it. Bathed in it. Painted with it. Turned it into albums and galleries and a baby with his face. You were always gonna love something too big, Nala. If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been your art, or your work, or some cause. The universe handed you a person instead.”
Nala pressed her fingers harder to her sternum. “It hurts,” she admitted, voice small. “Loving him like this. My heart actually hurts. I get mad sometimes, genuinely mad, just looking at him—for existing. For… walking in the room in a hoodie and makin’ my stomach drop like we’re still nineteen. Why can’t I just love him normal? Why do my hands shake because I decided to paint his hands again? Why does my whole nervous system light up over his ears? His stupid ears.”
“You always did have a thing for his ears,” Selah said, smiling in her voice.
“They’re so cute,” Nala groaned, covering her face. “And he doesn’t even know. He just walks around bein’ considerate and leavin’ his shoes by the door and makin’ me tea when I didn’t ask and every one of those little things is another brick on this pile in my chest. I feel like a hoarder. But with feelings.”
“Okay,” Selah said. “So you’re hoarding love. Congratulations, you’re rich in the only way that matters.”
“That’s not funny,” Nala sniffed.
“It’s a little funny,” Selah countered gently. “Listen. You’re scared that your love is too big to be healthy. That you’ve turned this man into a god. That one day you’ll wake up and realise you built an altar he didn’t deserve, and you’ll have to pack it all up and pretend it was never that deep.” She paused. “And on top of that, you are spiralling because he didn’t say ‘be ready at seven’ on February fourteenth.”
Nala let out a miserable little laugh. “When you say it like that…”
“It’s still valid,” Selah said quickly. “Don’t do that thing where you beat yourself up for wanting anything. You don’t care about Valentine’s itself. You care about proof. That’s all.”
Nala’s eyes stung again. “Is that so crazy?” she whispered. “That after eight years, one baby, one marriage, I still wanna feel… picked? On purpose?”
“It’s not crazy,” Selah said. “It’s human. You don’t want hearts and teddy bears. You want him to say, ‘Out of every version of my life, I still choose this one, with you in it.’ And you’re scared that because today looked a little regular, maybe he’s not pressed anymore.” She exhaled. “Nala, that man is pressed over you like a fresh suit. Y’all could be seventy on oxygen and he’d still be tryin’ to slide his hand up your thigh at breakfast.”
Despite herself, Nala smiled, cheeks wet.
“What you’re scared of,” Selah went on, “isn’t boredom. It’s invisibility. You’re scared he don’t see you as a woman right now ‘cause you also a wife, also a mother, also tired as hell. You’re scared he sees the bonnet and the baby monitor and not the girl in the red lace.”
Nala’s gaze dropped to the lingerie where it pooled beside her on the floor, the fabric a small, accusing puddle of red at her knee. Her chest pinched.
“Maybe,” she murmured.
“And I’m telling you,” Selah said, “you can’t declare romance dead on a day when your hormones are still wildin’, your sleep is fractured, and Instagram is yelling at you about luxury roses. That is not clean data.”
A watery laugh slipped out of Nala.
“As for you being broken,” Selah continued, voice softening again, “you’re not. You’re just… full. Your heart got stretched, that’s all. Muscles ache when they grow. Doesn’t mean you stop using ‘em.”
Nala watched a flake of blue paint crumble off her thumb and fall onto her leggings. “What if it’s suffocating?” she whispered. “For him. For me.”
“If it was suffocating him,” Selah said, “he’d be gasping. He’d be pulling away. Instead, he’s out here learnin’ how to make postpartum pads from YouTube and installing cameras so he can yell at you from across town when you stand on the counter.” She paused. “He is not suffocatin’. He’s participatin’.”
“And for me?” Nala asked.
“For you,” Selah said, “it’s gonna sting sometimes. Because you weren’t taught how to hold something this big without panicking. So your brain goes, we are in danger, and starts pathologizing what is, actually, a very intense blessing.” She let out a little laugh. “Clinically speaking? You’re crazy in love. The rest of us are just trying not to be jealous.”
Nala snorted, wiping at her cheeks. “So there’s nothing wrong with me?” she asked, tentative.
“There is absolutely something wrong with you,” Selah said. “You’re a menace. But not because you love your husband too loudly. Say it.”
Nala rolled her eyes, but obeyed. “There’s… nothing wrong with me,” she said slowly. “I just… love him big.”
“Bigger than most,” Selah corrected. “That’s his cross to bear.”
A real laugh shook out of Nala then, loosening something in her chest.
“You don’t hate Valentine’s,” Selah added, gentler. “You just don’t trust it. You can trust him, though. Maybe not with capitalism. But with you? Yeah. You can.”
Nala let her head tip back against the wall again, the hallway light buzzing softly above. Downstairs, the house hummed. Somewhere far off, a car passed. In the room behind her, Honey sighed in her sleep, the baby monitor letting out a little static crackle like applause.
“Okay,” Nala said at last. “So what do I do?”
“You handle your side,” Selah said. “Clean the damn kitchen. Wash your hands. Shower. If you wanna wear that red lace, wear it. If you wanna greet him in sweats, do that. But whatever you do, stop punishing yourself for how your heart reacts when he walks through that door. Let it jump. Let it ache. You can tell him about it if you want. Or you can paint about it and send me the picture instead. Just… stop telling yourself you’re broken for loving the man you chose and the man who chose you back.”
Nala’s eyes burned again, but the tears this time felt… easier. Warmer. Less like something was splitting open and more like something was finally overflowing the way it was supposed to.
“I love you,” she murmured.
“I know,” Selah replied. “Now go wash that paint off before you get it on Honey’s cheeks again. And send me that painting when you’re ready to admit it’s about his hands.”
“It’s not—” Nala started on reflex.
“Nalani.”
She sighed. “Okay. It is.”
“I know,” Selah said, and Nala could hear the smile. “Love you, menace.”
“Love you more,” Nala breathed, and hung up.
For a second, the hallway was very quiet.
Then she pushed herself up, scooped the red lace off the floor, and headed for the bathroom—heart still aching, still too big for her chest, but no longer something she was trying to cure.
If anything, she thought, wiping at her eyes as she turned on the tap, it might just be the healthiest thing about her.
For a moment she just sat there in the hush that followed, phone in her lap, paint on her fingers, ring gleaming on her hand. Her heart still ached—it probably always would—but the ache had shifted, softened, like a bruise pressed by a familiar hand that knew exactly how much pressure it could take.
She drew in a long breath, let it out slow, then pushed herself up from the floor and headed back toward her studio, where the canvas with his hands waited for her like it knew she was coming back.
Because of course she was.
There were worse things, she decided, than spending your life loving one person so much it leaked out of you in color and sound.
And if yearning was a disease, then maybe—just maybe—Tyriq was the only cure she ever wanted.
Because she wanted to immortalise him. That was the root of it, the quiet, stubborn truth under every brushstroke and every bar of music—Nala wanted to cheat time on his behalf, to take this one man the universe had handed her and pin him to the page, to the canvas, to the staff, so that if the world ever dared to forget him, it would have to step over the evidence of her devotion first.
That was why she painted: not just faces and hands and broad shoulders, but him—the way his mouth curled when he was trying not to smile, the furrow in his brow when he was concentrating, the specific tilt of his head when he listened to her talk like the rest of the room had fallen away. It was why she wrote songs for him she didn’t have the courage to sing herself, songs too raw and too honest to let out of her own throat, so she slipped them into other people’s voices instead, handed them to strangers who didn’t know that every harmony they floated into the world was stitched with his name. It was why she sat up at three in the morning pulling strings of melody together, stacking chords and weaving harmonies like she was braiding his DNA into sound, building little cathedrals of music where his spirit could live long after his body was gone.
Somewhere—she knew, because the contracts said so—in a museum he would never visit, under an alias no one would ever trace back to him, there was a painting of his profile hanging on a white wall, catalogued and insured, his likeness frozen in oil and light; somewhere in a curriculum, in a unit about modern impressionism or Black Southern portraiture, a professor said the name of a piece that was really just him in disguise, and a roomful of students squinted at the projected image, analysing brushwork and colour theory, never knowing they were studying the love of her life repackaged as academia.
She did all of this because she truly did not believe there was a logical reason for his existence. There couldn’t be. There was no equation that accounted for him, no neat little paragraph in any of her old science textbooks that could explain why a boy from Florida with eyes like summer sky and hands built for both catching footballs and holding her together had ended up in her orbit and never left. Loving Tyriq made her bump up against the limits of everything she thought she knew; it made her a believer in something bigger, because in her mind there was simply no rational explanation for the fact that someone like him existed at all—no mechanism, no pathway, no evolutionary advantage to that much gentleness wrapped in that much strength.
So when the logic ran out, when the diagrams and lectures and data failed to tell her why her heart beat different when he walked into a room, she did the only thing that made sense: she turned to scripture. She perused the thin, whispering pages of the holy book the way she’d once flipped through lab manuals, looking for a mention, a metaphor, some ancient footnote that would make it add up—some verse that could explain why a God she’d side-eyed for years had gone and made Tyriq Withers with such unnecessary care.
And when she couldn’t find him in the text, she did what she’d always done.
She wrote her own.
She sighed as she closed the books—scripture and sketchpads and dog-eared journals stacked together in a little altar of their own—palms smoothing over the covers like she was tucking her questions in for the night, then reached for the canvas and lifted it off the easel with the care of someone carrying a relic instead of a rectangle of stretched linen. The hallway to her studio felt longer than usual, the soft Atlanta light slanting in through the windows and catching on the wet strokes of his painted hands, making the veins and scars gleam like something living; she nudged the studio door open with her hip and stepped into the room where the rest of him lived—hundreds of canvases leaning against the walls, stacked in quiet, reverent rows, each one a different version of the same man, her private gallery of devotions that would sit there and gather dust until the day she forced herself to put a price on the pieces of her heart.
She’d just propped the newest one against the others when she heard it: the low, familiar rumble of his car pulling into the driveway, that specific engine note her body recognised faster than her ears. The sound moved through her like a switch being flipped—her pulse jumping, breath stuttering, that ridiculous swarm of butterflies erupting in her chest on cue, as if her cells hadn’t yet learned they were married now and didn’t need to react like he was still the boy she was sneaking around to see. She wiped her paint-stained hands on the thighs of her leggings as she stepped out of the studio, heart beating louder with each stair she descended, and through the front window she caught the first glimpse of him: Tyriq, climbing out of the car with the biggest bouquet of lilies she’d ever seen cradled in his arm, pale petals spilling everywhere like someone had uprooted a piece of heaven just for her.
When the call finally dropped, the apartment felt too quiet.
The “Call ended” notice vanished, and for a second Nala just sat there on the couch, phone slack in her hand, heart doing that uneven stutter like it couldn’t decide whether to sink or sprint. Honey’s monitor hummed softly on the side table, the clock in the kitchen kept ticking, and the red lace lay across her thigh like evidence—of wanting, of hoping, of being softer than she liked to admit.
She stared at it, at the tiny, sinful scrap of fabric bunched in her fist, then blew out a breath.
“Alright,” she muttered, pushing herself upright. “Let’s see what you got, Mr ‘I’ll be back later.’”
The kitchen was still a small disaster.
Bottles crowding the drying rack, a crusty burp cloth draped over the back of a chair, mail scattered across the island, a lone baby sock curled in the fruit bowl like it paid rent there. Formula dusted the counter; Honey’s pacifier lay face-down by the sink, judging.
It was their life—raw, sticky, too bright in places, too loud in others.
Nala dropped the red lace over a barstool like a promise and set about undoing the chaos. She rinsed her wine glass, loaded it into the dishwasher, scooped Honey’s things into a basket, stacked the mail into a single, semi-respectable pile, wiped down counters until the granite shifted from tacky to gleaming. Each swipe of the cloth felt a little like exorcism, a little like preparation. Making space for something she’d convinced herself wasn’t coming.
The whole time, her mind buzzed, full of Selah’s voice and her own worst-case scenarios.
If he really didn’t plan anything? Then what? Then you talk to him like a grown woman, that’s what.
She made herself shower—steam and hot water peeling the day off her: milk, sweat, the faint metallic tang of dried tears. She took a little longer with lotion, massaging coconut-scented circles into the new softness of her hips, the unfamiliar give of her stomach, blessing those places instead of cursing them. When she pulled the red lace on, it sat against her skin like a secret. When she tugged his old FSU T-shirt over it—the one he’d tossed at her freshman year with, “If you gon’ be in my dorm this much, you might as well wear the colors”—it fell to mid-thigh, lived-in cotton hiding something more deliberate.
In the mirror, she looked like exactly what she was: a tired, pretty woman with Sunday-afternoon eyes and stretch marks, someone’s wife, someone’s mother, still somebody’s fantasy if she tilted her head right. The contradiction made her chest ache.
“You still got it,” she told her reflection quietly.
The woman in the glass lifted her chin like she halfway believed it.
Honey was down, monitor light steady and green. The apartment slid into that particular kind of stillness that only happens when babies are sleeping and nobody’s moving too fast.
Then: the low growl of an engine outside, the slam of a car door, footsteps on the path.
Her heart reacted before her brain could scold it, leaping into her throat. She padded to the front door, intending to be casual, totally normal, absolutely not the girl who had just almost cried on the phone about capitalism because her husband hadn’t organised a prix fixe menu.
She reached for the handle just as his key turned on the other side. The door cracked, and she caught sight of him through the narrow gap first: tall frame backlit by the Atlanta evening, one arm cradling a ridiculous spray of lilies, the other hanging loose at his side.
Her chest squeezed.
Of course it was lilies. Her mother’s favourite. Her own quiet weakness by inheritance. Cream petals edged in blush, stems wrapped in brown paper and twine like they were too holy for cellophane. The smell ghosted in before he did—sharp, clean, almost overwhelming.
The happy flutter in her chest twisted a little when her gaze dropped and snagged on the faint bandage wrapped around his left wrist, stark white against his brown skin.
The door swung wider.
For a second, she just stood there on the threshold and watched him come up the path like she hadn’t watched him walk toward her a thousand times already—like they were back on that FSU sidewalk and she was just some girl with a backpack and a plan, pretending she hadn’t timed her route to “accidentally” cross his.
“Hey, baby,” he called, grin tugging at his mouth, that easy, familiar one that always made the world feel like background noise until he stepped into frame.
“Hey,” she managed, softer than she meant it.
Up close, the lilies were absurd—in the way only love makes things absurd. Too many stems, too many open flowers, too much fragrance, like he’d told the florist, I want it to smell like you could drown in them.
He stopped in front of her, eyes skimming over her face, her messy bun, his old T-shirt drowning her frame. The corner of his mouth lifted like he’d clocked the soft shorts underneath and chosen not to say anything yet.
“For you,” he said unnecessarily, holding the lilies out.
She took them, fingers brushing his; the small contact sent that stupid lurch through her chest again. The flowers rustled in her arms, shifting just enough for the bandage on his wrist to catch the light.
“Riq,” she frowned, the crease between her brows deepening. “What happened?”
He followed her gaze, then huffed a small laugh, the kind that said I knew you’d notice that first. “Relax,” he murmured, leaning in to brush a kiss against her temple as he nudged her back inside with his shoulder. “I’m fine. It’s nothin’ crazy.”
“You’re bandaged,” she countered, because stating the obvious felt safer than admitting the flash of panic she’d felt seeing it. “That’s not ‘nothing’.”
He shut the door behind them with a soft click; the house swallowed them, the sigh of the AC kicking on overhead. He set his keys on the console, then turned back to her and held out his left arm, palm up, like an offering.
“Come on,” he said, eyes warm. “You wanna do the honours?”
She set the lilies carefully on the entry table, like they might bruise if she moved too fast, and stepped closer, her heartbeat climbing into her throat. Up close, she could see the edges of the bandage weren’t perfectly straight—like he’d tried to adjust it himself in the car. There was a faint halo of pink around the gauze. And—if she squinted—a hint of fresh ink bleeding through near the edge.
Her stomach flipped.
“Tyriq,” she whispered, looking from his wrist up to his face, “what did you do?”
He gave her that small, crooked half-smile he only wore when he was nervous and trying not to show it. “Just… evened the score a little,” he said. “You out here puttin’ me in museums and curriculums. Figured I should add to the gallery.”
Her breath stuttered.
“Take it off,” he murmured, not commanding so much as offering. “Please.”
Her fingers shook as she found the edge of the tape, paint-stained nails careful not to tug at his skin. She peeled the bandage back slowly, centimetre by centimetre, like she was unwrapping something breakable.
First came irritated skin, flushed and tender. Then the shine of black ink, lines still raised and angry. When the gauze finally came free, she had to blink to focus.
It was her.
Not her name—he already had “Nalani” on his other wrist, curved in her handwriting like a promise. Not just her words—her “Choose me, even when I’m hard to love” running down his bicep in the same script, wrapping his muscle like a vow. Not the fine-line outline over his heart—the tiny profile only she and the tattoo artist knew was supposed to be her.
This was different.
On the inside of his wrist, opposite the old box-cutter scar and just above the fan of veins, was a small, detailed tattoo of a finger—her ring finger, slim and delicate, inked with the exact wedding band and engagement ring she wore right now. Around the base of the finger, tiny script curved like a second ring:
till my last breath.
Her throat closed up so fast she made a helpless little sound.
“Riq,” she breathed. It was all she could manage.
He watched her stare at it, watched the ripple of emotion move across her face, and his own softened, gaze going almost shy. “You always talk about immortalizin’ me,” he said quietly. “Canvas, songs you too scared to sing yourself, all that. And I love it. You know I do. But I needed you to know it’s not one-sided. I been puttin’ you on my body since I had two dollars to my name, ‘cause even if nobody ever saw you in a gallery or heard you in a chorus, I was gon’ make sure you were written somewhere permanent.”
“You already had three,” she managed, voice cracking. “Your wrist. Your chest. Your arm. How much more permanent do you want me to be?”
He gave a breath of a laugh, but there was nothing light in his eyes. “As much as I can get,” he said simply. “You got whole rooms filled with my face, baby. Whole sketchbooks. There’s a college student right now writin’ a paper about my hands and don’t even know it’s me. I got… this—” he flexed his fingers carefully “—and I’m still behind.”
“It’s not a competition,” she whispered, even though the protest was thin.
“Maybe not for you,” he said. “For me, I’m tryin’ to keep up.” He lifted the wrist again, closer to her face. “You think you’re the only one who can’t find a logical reason why the other exists?” His mouth trembled at the corner. “I look at you and Honey in this house we prayed for and there is not a single equation in my head that makes it make sense that I get to come home here. To you. So I do what I can.” He held his arm between them like evidence. “I make altars outta skin.”
Tears spilled over before she could stop them.
“This hurts,” she whispered.
He instantly frowned. “It shouldn’t—did it look infected? The artist said—”
“No,” she shook her head hard, letting out a wet laugh. “Not your wrist. My… heart.”
His face shifted, concern giving way to something softer, deeper. “Why?”
“Because I spent all day thinkin’ I was the crazy one,” she said, words tripping over themselves now. “The one who loved too big, who turned you into a god in my head, who paints your damn hands and calls it ‘study’ when it’s really worship.” Her voice went thinner. “And then you walk through the door with this, and lilies, and that look on your face, and I realise you’ve been doin’ the same thing. Just quieter. On your body instead of my walls.”
He stepped in until the lilies brushed her hip and his free hand could cup her jaw, thumb catching a tear before it slid down.
“Of course I have,” he murmured. “You think you cornered the market on devotion? Nala, I got you on my wrists so every time I lace up, every time I catch a ball, every time I sign my name, I see you. I got you over my heart so even when a jersey covers it, I know what’s underneath. I got your words on my arm so if I ever forget what I promised, I can read what you told me to be.” His thumb stroked her cheek. “And now I got the symbol of you choosin’ me on the hand I use for everything. So even when my mind is loud or the world is wild, my body remembers who I belong to.”
“You belong to me?” she asked, almost like she needed to hear him say it out loud.
“More than you belong to me,” he said, steady. “You think you’re the devout one in this story, but I’ve been buildin’ churches around your name since I was nineteen and too dumb to call it what it was.”
Her chest clenched so hard she had to lean into him, forehead pressing into his collarbone, lilies wedged awkwardly between them like a third heart.
“I’ve been sittin’ in this house all afternoon,” she mumbled into his hoodie, voice muffled and thick, “tryin’ to figure out what’s wrong with me ‘cause I can’t stop paintin’ you, writin’ you, hearin’ you in everything. Selah said I love you like a religion and I’ve been scared that’s… bad. Wrong. Too much. And you were literally somewhere gettin’ ‘till my last breath’ carved into you like a—like a pilgrim.”
He laughed quietly, his hand sliding into her hair, fingers finding the paint-stiff curls at her nape. “Maybe we’re both sick,” he said. “Same disease. Same cure.”
She exhaled, shaky, and then pulled back a little, wiping at her face with the heel of her palm. “Why lilies?” she asked, voice small.
He looked down at the bouquet, then back at her. “Because they’re your mama’s favourite,” he said first. “And because you take after her more than you admit. You act like you’re all thorns and wild roses, but you’re really lilies—soft, and strong, and still standin’ when everybody thought the frost would kill you.” His mouth curved. “And… they’re funeral flowers, sometimes. I wanted you to know that if I gotta let some version of me die to keep lovin’ you right—young, selfish parts of me that don’t know how to show up—I’m good with that. I’ll bury all of ‘em if it means I get to keep comin’ home to this.”
Her breath stuttered.
“You always think you’re the one doin’ the most,” he added, thumb tracing slow circles along her jaw. “But between you and me? I’m worse. You immortalise me on canvas where the world can see. I’m over here turnin’ my own body into a love letter nobody ever has to read but you.”
The house felt very small and very full around them—monitor hum, AC whisper, the soft rustle of lily petals every time she shifted.
She swallowed, sniffed, and let out a little laugh that was mostly a sob. “I thought there was no word for it,” she admitted. “For what I feel for you.”
“There probably isn’t,” he said. “Not one big enough anyway. So we… do this.” He tipped his bandaged wrist toward her, then nodded down the hallway. “Between your paint and my ink, maybe we get close.”
Emotion burned behind her sternum like a slow match.
“Come here,” he said suddenly, voice gentler. “I got somethin’ else to show you.”
She blinked. “There’s more?”
He smiled, nerves flickering at the edges again. “Don’t yell at me ‘til you see it.”
He grabbed the lilies in one hand, laced his inked fingers through her free hand with the other, and led her toward the kitchen.
She’d left the lights on.
Now, as they stepped through the doorway, she realised they weren’t.
He must’ve flicked them off when he came in.
The room was bathed in low, flickering light—battery candles lined up along the island, casting soft halos on the granite like tiny moons. In the centre of the island sat a cheap plastic vase stuffed full of wildflowers—daisies, scraggly purple blooms, a couple of dandelions that had no business looking that pretty—all jammed in together like they’d been grabbed straight out of the ground.
On the floor, between the island and lower cabinets, he’d spread an old, massive FSU blanket, its logo faded from too many washes. Their blanket. The one from the field. The one that had seen more versions of them than any other piece of fabric alive.
Takeout containers from their old spot—wings, fries, lemon pepper everything—lined the counter by the stove, steam still curling from the vents in the lids. A bottle of cheap red wine sat uncorked beside two mismatched plastic cups, the exact kind she used to “borrow” from the dining hall. From the speaker in the corner, their old FSU playlist played low and crackly, the opening bars of some song from sophomore year that refused to die.
And then the part that undid her completely:
A faded campus grocery receipt taped to the edge of the island, her name barely legible where it had once printed “NALANI.” A scuffed spare key lying beside it—his old off-campus spare. And propped against the candles in a crooked drugstore frame, a photo: nineteen-year-old them sprawled on that blanket in the actual field, her head thrown back in laughter, his forearm over his eyes, mouth open mid-sentence, stadium lights behind them like a halo.
Her hand flew to her mouth.
“Tyriq,” she whispered.
He stood near the island, hands back in his pockets now that the lilies were set down, shoulders a touch too straight like he was bracing for whatever verdict she might hand down. His eyes, though, were soft and locked on her.
“What is this?” she managed, her voice thin.
He nodded at the scene, a small shrug of one shoulder. “You said you don’t fuck with capitalism,” he said lightly, though his tone shook just enough to betray nerves, “so I figured I’d give you a Valentine’s they can’t sell on a billboard.”
Her eyes burned, tears threatening again.
“Riq…”
“First Valentine’s married, first with Honey,” he said, the joking falling away, voice going deeper. “I knew takin’ you somewhere with a dress code and tiny plates wasn’t gon’ feel like us. So I thought… let me remind her who we are. Where we started. Before the premieres and the diapers and the cameras in the house. Just blankets and bad wine and big-ass dreams.”
“You kept that picture,” she croaked, nodding toward the frame.
He gave her a look, part offended, part fond. “Of course I kept it. That was the night I knew I wasn’t gettin’ rid of you even if I tried.”
“Knew what?” she pushed, needing the words.
He took a slow step toward her, then another, until there was only one small breath of space between them. His bandaged wrist brushed the back of her hand.
“That I wasn’t gon’ find this with anybody else,” he said simply. “That all that soulmate shit you talk about? You were right. We were dumb, we were broke, we were layin’ on a blanket talkin’ about futures we had no business wantin’, and I still knew. Whatever life looked like later? I wanted you in it. Every version.”
Emotion clawed up her throat.
“We had sex on that field,” she blurted, because her brain was rude in emergencies.
His mouth curved into that slow, dangerous grin. “We did,” he agreed. “Terrible idea. Grass everywhere. I pulled a leaf out your hair like three days later.”
“Shut up,” she laughed, tears spilling over.
“I’m serious,” he chuckled. “Ground was hard. Wine was cheap. I was damn near convinced campus security was gon’ hit us with a spotlight. But you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t the luckiest man alive layin’ there with you, listenin’ to you talk about Paris like it was already booked.”
The memory flickered up—her on her back, hands gesturing wildly at the sky while she plotted trips she couldn’t afford yet, him half-listening, half-staring.
“And when my first movie premiered?” he added, voice roughening with another memory. “You remember that hood?”
Heat shot up her neck. “Why would you bring that up?” she groaned.
“Because it all belongs here,” he said. “The field, the hood, the stupid car alarm that almost went off while we were conceivin’ Honey.” His eyes sparkled. “Don’t act like you don’t know that girl was sittin’ in your womb with her arms crossed like, y’all nasty.”
She laughed so hard she snorted, hand swiping at her eyes. “You’re sick.”
“And you married me,” he reminded her. “Multiple times, technically. So.”
Her laughter faded into something softer as she looked around the kitchen again—the blanket, the wildflowers, the receipts, the playlist, the wings, the way the candles made all of it look more sacred than it had any right to be.
“I really thought you forgot,” she admitted quietly. “All day, I’ve been walkin’ around here like maybe that part of us—” she gestured helplessly “—is over. That maybe we used up all the surprises and now it’s just… bills and wipes and Netflix.”
“And TED Talks about revolutionary pussy politics,” he added, lips twitching.
“Oh my God,” she groaned. “You heard that.”
He nodded, grin widening. “You were on speaker when I came up the stairs. ‘Consciousness over cock’ almost made me drop the flowers.”
She covered her face with both hands.
He laughed, stepping in to gently pull her hands away so he could see her again. His thumb swept fresh tracks under her eyes.
“You’re not wrong about the capitalism,” he said softly. “But I’m not lettin’ a perfectly good excuse to show you off emotionally pass me by.” He nodded toward the blanket. “Those kids on that field? They didn’t know if life would give them more than scraps. But they loved each other like they’d already won. I wanted tonight to be a thank-you to them. For bettin’ on us.”
Her heart throbbed.
“I get scared too,” he added, more quietly. “Scared I’m gon’ fuck it up. Scared you’ll wake up and realise you could’ve had somebody easier. Scared life’s gon’ throw somethin’ we can’t fix.” He squeezed her hand. “But I don’t get scared that we ‘used it up’. Love like this don’t burn out, Nala. It just… changes shape.”
He led her gently onto the blanket; they sank down together, knees touching, shoulders brushing. The FSU logo crinkled under them, familiar and worn. It felt both like sitting in a kitchen and sitting inside a memory.
He handed her a wing; she took a bite, sauce hitting the corner of her mouth. He wiped it off with his thumb, exaggerated, just to make her roll her eyes.
“This is illegal,” she mumbled around the food. “Full circle like this.”
“It’s us,” he said. “I don’t think we know how to do legal.”
The music swelled softly behind them. Somewhere down the hall, Honey shifted in her crib with a little sigh.
“Do you ever get scared we’ll turn into… roommates?” she asked after a while, voice small. “Co-parents. Not…”
“Not soulmates?” he finished.
She nodded.
He set his food down, wiped his fingers on a napkin, then took her hand again, threading their fingers together. The fresh tattoo on his wrist brushed the metal of her rings.
“I’m scared of a lot of things,” he said honestly. “But I’m not scared of that. ‘Cause even on the days when we feel like co-managers of Chaos Withers LLC, I still want you. You walk past me in sweats and my brain short-circuits. You paint my hands for the fiftieth time and I feel like I’m bein’ seen by God. I installed cameras so I could yell at you when you’re being reckless. I did a stakeout in Target so you wouldn’t walk into your birth mom. I let a man carve till my last breath under your ring. I am not built for ‘roommate’ with you.”
Her eyes filled all over again.
“I was so busy bein’ scared of what we lost,” she whispered, “I didn’t see what we gained.”
He leaned in until his forehead rested against hers, their joined hands anchored between them.
“Look at us,” he murmured. “We went from sneakin’ out to a field with a blanket, to makin’ a baby on a car hood, to sittin’ in our kitchen, in our house, on the same blanket, with our actual dream snorin’ down the hall.” His thumb stroked across her knuckles. “If this is ‘borin’,’ I wanna be bored forever—with you.”
She laughed, a broken little sound, and then kissed him—slow, deep, tasting lemon pepper and cheap wine and eight years of every kind of day. He kissed her back like he always did when he remembered all at once that she was here, now, real, and his—careful and greedy at the same time.
When they finally parted, noses still touching, his inked wrist curled over her thigh, the little tattoo of her ring finger brushing warm skin.
“Nalani,” he murmured, and somehow the name didn’t sound like four syllables so much as a whole liturgy, a prayer he’d been saying under his breath since nineteen that had only grown heavier, more sacred, now that she’d given him a daughter and turned all their stupid dorm-room prophecies into a crib down the hall and a mortgage and a life.
Her full name sat low and warm in his chest, pressed to the corner of her mouth like he was tasting it again for the first time, like he was reminding himself that the girl he’d met on FSU grass and kissed on car hoods was the same woman currently breathing against his skin, wearing his hoodie and their ring and the proof of Honey around her waist.
“Look at me,” he said—soft, but threaded with something that felt like necessity, like if you never listen to another thing I say, listen to this.
She lifted her face from the hollow of his shoulder and sat up a little straighter in his lap, thighs bracketing his hips on the old FSU blanket, the faded logo wrinkling under her knees. The kitchen light was off; only the cheap battery candles on the island and the faint green clock on the stove glowed, turning laminate and stainless-steel into something unexpectedly tender, almost altar-like, and for a moment he just… looked.
Not politely. Not quickly.
Looked the way men in old paintings looked at goddesses they weren’t meant to touch—the way Sappho had once written about some man “seeming equal to the gods” just because he got to sit and listen to a woman laugh; only here, somehow, he was both the man and the one made divine.
Her lashes were still damp and clumped from crying, the tip of her nose a soft pink, her mouth slick from wing sauce and his kiss. Her hair, half gathered and half escaping, framed her face in frizzy little tendrils that caught the candlelight like climbing ivy catching the last of the sun on temple stone. His FSU hoodie swallowed her, hanging loose over a body he knew in all its editions—the taut freshman-year version, the soft-around-the-edges touring version, this newest one bearing the faint silver of their daughter’s arrival like scripture written in stretch marks—and in his eyes, every version was just a different stanza of the same poem.
“You know you’re… unreal, right?” he said finally, the words long and dragging and a little clumsy because they were coming from somewhere under his ribs rather than his head. “Like actually, physically implausible; I keep lookin’ at you and thinkin’ there’s no way God didn’t use a cheat code when He made you, like He broke His own system and then just… let me walk around with the evidence.”
She huffed a little, trying to look away, as if the force of his gaze physically warmed her skin. “I look a mess,” she muttered, not really convincing even herself.
“Not to me,” he said, instantly, like the idea offended him on principle. “Never to me—not on your worst day, not bleeding, not swollen, not with baby spit on your shirt, not with paint on your fingers, not with your bonnet bent to hell, not now.”
His thumb shaped the curve of her jaw, slow, reverent, like his hand was tracing a coastline he’d shipwrecked himself on a thousand times and planned to keep crashing into until the end of the world; the simple, steady contact grounded him in her warmth, kept him from floating all the way up into the strange, terrifying gratitude that sat above his heart whenever he thought too hard about the fact that she was his.
“You know what you look like to me?” he went on, voice lowering, the edges smoothing as he found his rhythm. “You look like one of them old stories—the good ones, the ones that lasted—not the mess where Zeus couldn’t keep it in his pants, but the ones they built whole cities and temples around; the ones sailors carved into the sides of their boats ‘cause they thought if they kept a goddess’s face close, the sea might spare ‘em.”
She gave a wet, incredulous laugh, eyes darting back to his. “Please don’t compare me to anyone Zeus was messin’ with,” she said. “I’m beggin’ you.”
“I’m not,” he replied, a smile passing across his mouth but never touching the intensity in his eyes. “I’m talkin’ about the ones they painted on ceilings ‘cause regular walls weren’t big enough. The ones people pilgrimaged for, just to leave flowers and whisper please under their breath. The ones that made men write whole epics just tryin’ to describe what it felt like to stand near ‘em and not combust.”
The wildflowers in the plastic vase on the island—daisies, a few scraggly purple things he’d torn from some poor Atlanta verge, a dandelion stem too long—cast tiny, uneven shadows on the counter as if listening, as if nodding along.
“You gave me a whole daughter,” he said then, leaning enough that their foreheads nearly brushed, so close he could feel her breath pause at the words. “You turned your own body into a doorway and pulled a person through, and then you stayed; you lived when I watched you bleed and shake and go somewhere I couldn’t follow, and then you came back to me—with her. You really think I can watch that, live in the same house as the woman who did that, and see anything less than divine?”
Her inhale shuddered right against his lips, her fingers gathering uselessly in the fabric of his hoodie like she needed something to hold onto besides what he was saying.
“Riq—”
“I’m serious,” he cut in, thumb slipping from her jaw to rest against the pulse at the side of her neck, feeling the little rabbit-fast jump there under his skin like proof of life. “Back at FSU, I thought you were the sun—loud and bright and everywhere, all that heat and life radiatin’ off you, and me just… turnin’ toward you every time you walked in a room like some dumb flower that don’t know anything but light. Now?” He exhaled, a slow, uneven release. “Now I know you’re more than that. You’re a constellation—one of those old ones we used to pretend we knew the names of. A whole story written in stars, and I’m the idiot standin’ underneath, neck hurtin’, thinkin’ how is this even allowed.”
Her eyes shone at that, and he could feel the way the words brushed up against the tender, anxious thought that had been gnawing at her all day: what if motherhood made me invisible to him; what if the girl he wanted disappeared while I wasn’t looking.
His hand left her neck and travelled, slow, over the slope of her shoulder, fingers catching in a wrinkle of hoodie, smoothing it down again; his knuckles traced the fine line of her collarbone, pausing there like a comma before following the trail of fabric as it fell, until the hoodie hit her bare thighs and the blanket rose up, soft and familiar and utterly unromantic beneath the most romantic thing he’d ever seen.
“I watched your body change for Honey,” he said, eyes following the path of his own hand, voice gone quieter but thicker, like there was too much in it now. “Watched you stretch and swell and try to move like you weren’t carryin’ a whole universe balanced on your hip bone. Watched you split yourself open and then spend weeks tryin’ to gather yourself back up, piece by piece, even when you were too tired to remember your own middle name.” His palm settled over the soft of her belly, wide and gentle, fingers spreading like he wanted to cover every insecurity at once. “You keep callin’ this routine, callin’ yourself ‘a mess,’ talkin’ about what you lost. I call this proof. Proof you went to the edge of death for us and walked back in your own shaky little shoes.”
Her hand flew to his, pressing it harder into that softness like she was trying to make him feel the weight of all of it—the changed skin, the lingering ache, the fact she was still here, still his.
“I feel… different,” she whispered, the honesty raw. “Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t recognise myself. Like I’m made outta scraps of all the girls I used to be, taped together, and none of them sit right anymore.”
He nodded slowly, as if she’d said something he’d already rehearsed his answer to. “You are different,” he agreed. “And you’re still you. The girl in the field with cheap wine and impossible dreams; the woman on the hood of that rental car while the city lights blinked at us like they knew a secret; the bride at the altar with her hands shakin’ but her eyes steady; the mama in that hospital bed while they said words I don’t even wanna remember.” His gaze locked onto hers again, steady and unblinking. “They’re all right here, sittin’ in my lap on this ugly-ass blanket. And I want all of ‘em. There is not a version of you—past, present or future—that I don’t want the honour of lovin’.”
His hand slid from her belly to her waist, thumb tracing the new dip there in slow, reverent strokes that made her chest ache worse than any overt grab ever could; then his fingers dipped lower, wrapping around the outer curve of her thigh where the hoodie bunched, careful and sure, like he was holding the neck of something priceless and fragile.
Heat coiled low in her, but it didn’t feel like lust in isolation—it felt like recognition, like oh, there you are, I remember this layered on top of all the other ways they’d learned each other since.
He tugged, just a little, guiding her until she was sitting fully astride him, knees pressing deeper into the faded FSU logo. Her fingers dug into his shoulders to steady herself, and his breath caught, quick and sharp, like the simple act of her weight settling over his hips was enough to tilt his whole axis another degree.
“Riq,” she murmured, half warning, half warning herself.
He looked up at her, and the way he did it made her feel, for a split second, like the kitchen had fallen away and it was just them in some old fresco, some myth that would get told and retold until nobody remembered where it started—just that there had once been a woman and a man who looked at her like this.
“You know how those old Greek stories talk about the gods lovin’ somebody so hard the world had to rearrange itself to make room?” he asked, hands resting warm and firm on her thighs now, his thumbs drawing slow arcs on her skin that made it hard to breathe evenly. “Floods, famines, ten-year wars… all behind one person bein’ loved too loud.” He huffed a small, disbelieving laugh. “Every time you look at me like this, I swear somethin’ shifts. Not in some corny little quote-post way—for real. I thought I was a solid thing, you know? A man with his own centre of gravity. Then you came along and every compass in me swung your direction and stayed there.”
He slid one hand up, over her hip, over the worn cotton draped across her ribs, feeling the lace and skin and new curves beneath; his fingers found the side of her neck again, tilting her face down to his, keeping her close but not trapping—always giving her the angle and the exit.
“I don’t know how to love you halfway,” he admitted, the words a bare confession between them. “I don’t know how to touch you like you’re regular. There is no version of my future where you’re not the point of it. You are the map and the destination, and I’m just… movin’ around you, tryin’ to be worthy of it.”
Her breath stuttered; she could feel his, too, rough against her mouth.
“I don’t care how many diapers we change,” he went on, each word slower now, heavier, “how many late nights, how many school runs, how many times we sit right here and argue about bins and bills and calendars. Every timeline I can imagine still comes back to this—me, somewhere on a piece of fabric with you on my lap, stuck between wantin’ to pray to you and wantin’ to worship you with my hands until you forget every reason you ever doubted yourself.”
A half-laugh, half sob escaped her, and she dropped her forehead to his, fingers clutching at his hoodie like she needed something to anchor herself to.
“Tyriq,” she breathed, the name a little broken.
“Yeah, baby.” His thumbs pressed into the soft hollows of her hips, as if he could pour steadiness into her through bone and muscle.
She shifted—barely—but they both felt it, that old familiar spark catching under the skin, threading through this newer, heavier love like a live wire laid on top of deep roots. His jaw tensed; his eyes shut for a second, like he was bracing himself against a wave he’d willingly drown in.
When he opened them, there was heat there, yes, but beyond that there was that same stunned, almost frightened reverence—the look of a man who had found his god very much alive and realised, belatedly, that he would gladly die for the privilege of standing this close.
“I used to think the peak of my life would be people screamin’ my name in stadiums or seein’ it in big letters on screens,” he said, his thumb brushing along the soft curve of her bottom lip as if he was trying to wipe the old dream away. “All that loud, shiny stuff they train boys to chase. But none of that ever rewired me the way you did. None of that fed me when my soul was hungry. The holiest thing I ever did was kiss you that first night on this blanket and not run when I realised what it meant—that I was never gon’ be able to live small again, not with you in my line of sight.”
He kissed her then—slowly, without urgency, the way you’d cup water in your hands when you’re dying of thirst and still too careful not to spill any. She softened into it on instinct because her body knew this as well as it knew walking or breathing; his lips shaped themselves to her like scripture finding its proper cadence.
When they broke apart, their breaths uneven but shared, he stayed close, noses brushing, his hands still at her hips like he was afraid if he let go gravity might fail and she’d float away.
“You feel that?” he asked, voice hoarse but steady. “That’s not romance dyin’. That’s not the fire goin’ out. That’s the same thing that had us in that damn field with cheap wine and grass stains, only now it’s learned how to pay bills and boil bottles and still make room for this. This is not smaller, Nala. It’s deeper.”
She pressed her forehead to his and laughed, wet and shaky. “You really think I’m a goddess?” she asked, half joking, half desperate. “Like this? In your hoodie, with my hair lookin’ crazy and my stomach doin’ the most?”
He leaned back just enough to drag his gaze over her with unhurried attention, from her hairline to her lashes to her mouth, down the column of her throat to the hoodie that had been washed thin and soft, over the curve of her chest, the softness of her belly, the way her thighs held his hips like they had been carved to fit exactly there; then back up again, meeting her eyes with something that made her want to look away and lean in all at once.
“I think you’re the closest thing to a god I’m ever gon’ be allowed to touch,” he said quietly. “And I think if any of them old poets had met you, they’d have thrown half their stories in the fire and started over. Achilles would’ve traded his little war glory for an evening on this kitchen floor with you. Patroclus would’ve wrote essays about the way you frown when you’re concentratin’. Sappho would’ve run outta metaphors tryin’ to describe how my whole body acts up when you walk in a room.”
Her laugh fractured halfway, tears spilling over. “You’re ridiculous,” she said, voice cracking right down the middle.
He kissed the tear as it slid, lips gentle at the corner of her eye, then another at the hollow just beneath, the way you kiss the edge of a wound you can’t fully heal.
“Maybe,” he allowed. “But I’m yours. That’s the only thing I’m tryin’ to be consistent at. Ridiculous, obsessed, sentenced to you for life. You think you’re the one who loves too much, who turns me into myths and melodies and museum pieces—meanwhile I’m over here quietly buildin’ a whole religion around your name and prayin’ I don’t scare you with it.”
She looked at him—at the fresh bandage on his wrist hiding yet another piece of her carved into his skin, at the wildflowers he’d jammed into a plastic vase because meaning mattered more than aesthetics, at the dilapidated blanket on the floor that he’d turned into sacred ground just by dragging it out again, at the way his hands kept circling back to her like no matter where they started they already knew the route home—and something in her that had been braced all day finally, quietly, unclenched.
She believed him.
Believed that somehow, impossibly, for all the songs and paintings and shrines she’d made out of him, his devotion might still outpace hers in sheer, stubborn volume.
Her palm cradled his cheek, thumb stroking along the prickle of his beard, and the candles flickered, and their old FSU playlist mumbled some distant hook about forever, and Honey murmured once in her sleep down the hall and went still again.
“Then stay crazy about me,” she whispered, the words so soft and so serious they almost hurt. “Don’t get tired. Don’t… get used to me like habit. I can’t… I don’t wanna be something you step over on your way to the next thing. I want to be—”
“You are the thing,” he cut in, the interruption gentle but absolute. “There is no ‘next’ beyond you. There’s you, and all the different ways our life branches off from lovin’ you. That’s it. That’s the whole map.”
Her mouth trembled.
“And if you ever feel like it’s too much,” he added, voice softer now but carrying that same fierce thread she recognised from huddled conversations with coaches and agents—only here, aimed fully at her, “you tell me. Not so I can love you less.” His hand slid from her hip to the centre of her back, rubbing slow circles into the muscle there like he was already soothing a future ache. “So I can love you better. Love you in ways that feel like breath instead of flood. Because I’m not here to drown you, Nala. I’m here to do what that Book talk about—love you like Christ loved the church, like lay-myself-down, wash-your-feet even when you’re annoyin’ me, hold-you-up when you’re tired, learn-your-body-and-your-heart like it’s my favourite scripture. I’m here to worship you in a way that gives you room to live.”
Her eyes flooded again; she laughed anyway, a little broken bubble of sound.
“For tonight,” she managed, leaning in so her lips brushed his jaw, words warm against his skin, “I’ll let you.”
“Let me what?” he asked, even though every nerve in him already knew.
“Love me heavy,” she said. “Like consequence. Like gravity. Like one of them myths they carved into stone and still got wrong. Love me like I’m your purpose. ‘Cause I know I am.”
His eyes closed for a moment, like the words hit somewhere vital, somewhere deep.
“Yes, ma’am,” he breathed.
He didn’t yank the hoodie off her or scramble for the lights or try to turn the moment into something performative; he just sat there on that ugly old blanket and kissed her like a man who had finally, fully accepted that his vocation in this lifetime was not fame or record books but this—this woman, this body, this soul, this kitchen on a Thursday night that happened to be Valentine’s Day, with wildflowers leaning in and cheap wine in stolen cups.
His hands moved over her slowly, mapping out the new terrain, relearning the old familiar landmarks, touching the places the world told her to hide with a tenderness that made the back of her eyes burn; each brush of his thumb, each press of his palm, said I see you, and I am staying, and she let herself receive it, let herself feel the way his shoulders curved instinctively around her, the way his chest rose and fell under her palms, the way his heartbeat knocked hard and uneven at his ribs like it was still surprised to find itself in the same room as her.
Later, the candles would burn low and sputter out. They’d tiptoe down the hall to check on Honey, and argue quietly about whose turn it was to do the 3 a.m. feed, and laugh in whispers when their daughter punched the air in her sleep.
But right then, on their old FSU blanket in their grown-up kitchen, surrounded by wildflowers in a plastic vase and lilies on the counter and the ghosts of their nineteen-year-old selves stretched out somewhere just under the fabric, Nala sat in her husband’s lap and finally, finally believed what had been true all along:
that in whatever strange pantheon of love they’d stumbled into—where Greek words for love overlapped (eros in their kisses, agape in their sacrifice, philia in their friendship, storge in the easy way they co-parented), where biblical verses about two becoming one flesh made a terrifying kind of sense, where Sappho’s jealousy and Patroclus’s loyalty and every psalm about devotion lived in the same house—
she might be the deity in Tyriq’s story,
but he was the man who had built his whole life on his knees, absolutely certain that the holiest thing he could ever do was stand back up every morning and choose, again, to spend another day at her altar.
For a while they just breathed together, sitting there in the middle of their little temple of linoleum and wildflowers—her perched on his lap, his hands moving slow and steady over the same paths they’d been memorising for almost a decade—and he could’ve let the night rest like that, let the quiet stand as proof.
But there was something else sitting in his chest, something hotter and heavier and older than the candles, and he knew if he didn’t let it out now it would sit there and rot.
His fingers slid up from her waist to her face again, framing it gently, thumbs pressing into the soft hollows beneath her cheekbones, angling her so she was looking at him and only him.
“Nalani,” he said again, a little rougher, like the name was catching on something on its way out. “I need you to hear this part.”
Her brows pulled together, that familiar, tiny crease; her hands, already resting on his shoulders, tightened just a fraction.
“I joke about worship,” he said, voice low and steady now, like he was reading aloud from some text he’d written in his blood, “about altars and temples and you bein’ a goddess and me the fool at your feet. But I need you to understand—underneath the jokes? That’s just the honest state of things. You own me.”
Her breath stuttered; his thumbs stroked across her skin, calming and exposing at once.
“I don’t mean that in the cute, possessive caption way,” he went on, every word lengthened by the weight behind it. “I mean—you have me. All of me. My head, my hands, my future, my breath. You think I don’t know how much power you got over me? I feel it every time I walk in this house and check your face before I check anything else. My whole nervous system takes roll call on you first.”
Her eyes flickered, shiny, but she didn’t look away.
“You think I don’t want to be better?” he asked, the question raw enough to sting. “You think I don’t lay awake sometimes and think about the man you believed in before I even knew how to spell ‘husband’? You were votin’ for me before there was even a ballot. You thought I could be somethin’ steady, somethin’ honorable, long before the league or the movies or any of that. I wake up every day tryin’ to grow into the version of me you saw. Not my coach. Not fans. You.”
The way he said it—like her belief had been the original campaign and everything else was just a recount—made her chest squeeze.
“I love you,” he said, the words too small for how they landed, so he pushed further. “I’m in love with you. You are the love of my life, and I don’t mean that lightly. I mean: there will not be another. There will not be a part two, a rewrite, a ‘what if.’ If there’s breath in my body and sense in my mind, it’s you.”
He swallowed, throat bobbing, eyes never leaving hers.
“My every feelin’,” he admitted, “is tethered to you. You frown? My whole day caves in. You laugh? My lungs remember how to work. I walk into a room and check the weather on your face before I decide what season I’m in. It’s stupid. It’s dangerous. And I would not trade it. I don’t sleep right when you’re not on my chest. I don’t breathe right when you’re mad at me. I wait for you in every space I’m in, even when you’re not there. I watch doors like you might walk through ‘em.”
The admission cracked something open in him; he let it.
“I exist for you,” he said simply. “Not in the ‘I don’t have my own identity’ way, but in the ‘all my purposes pass through your hands first’ way. Whatever else I do—whatever ball I catch, whatever role I play, whatever cheque I cash—it is only holy to me if I can lay it at your feet and our kids’ feet and say, ‘Here. This serves us.’ Without you?” He shook his head slightly, the smallest, helpless gesture. “Without you, it’s noise. It’s stadium echoes and empty hotel rooms and merch with my name on it that don’t mean nothin’.”
Her hands slid up, fingers curling carefully around his wrists, holding on to him holding on to her.
“If I could,” he said, softer now, “I’d drop all of it. The cameras, the calls, the people sayin’ my name like they know me. I’d walk out, right now, barefoot, and not look back, if that’s what it took to keep this blanket and this kitchen and your head on my shoulder. There is no version of my life that outranks the one where I get to be the man you come home to.”
The room seemed to narrow around his words, the little fake candles throwing their halos wider, as if trying to make space.
“There’s no one else in this,” he added, voice almost a whisper now. “No other name in the margin. No old crush I’m still writin’ poems about. There’s you. Me. The child we made. The ones we ain’t even met yet. That’s it. That’s the whole cast list. You’re not a side story; you’re not a woman I trip over between chapters. You are the book.”
Her chin wobbled; he reached up, one hand leaving her face only long enough to swipe a tear away before it fell, then cupped her cheek again, his palm spanning the side of her head like he could hold her together by will.
“You drive me crazy,” he said, a half-laugh breaking through, though there was nothing light about the way his gaze clung to her. “You know that, right? You are the thorn and the balm. The thing that makes my chest hurt and the only thing that makes it stop. I swear to God, sometimes I think you were designed specifically to ruin my peace and then be the only person who knows how to fix it again.”
Her laugh came out wet, strangled. “So I’m your curse and your cure,” she managed.
“You are the irritation and the cure-all,” he agreed, a shaky smile tugging at his mouth. “Every nerve I got has learned your name. You are the problem I would rather have for the rest of my life than anybody else’s solution.”
He shifted under her, just a little, enough that she felt the way his body responded to her even as his words kept deepening.
“I have loved you,” he said, and something in his tone changed—took on that old, storytelling cadence he’d use when he drove home from late practices, recounting plays and near-misses, only now the subject was them, “from stupid little moments you probably don’t even remember. From the way you beat me to that bus that first week and turned around like you’d won the Olympics. From the way you filled whole hallways with your voice, complainin’ about professors and still somehow talkin’ like the world was gonna be yours anyway. From the night we lay on this same blanket on that field and you talked about Paris like your mama already had her bags packed, and I realised I wanted a lifetime of watchin’ you point at the horizon and dare it to move.”
He drew in a slow breath, like he was paging through all the versions of her he’d loved and trying to pick just a few.
“I loved you every time I watched you walk across campus and pretended I wasn’t adjustin’ my route to bump into you. I loved you every time you fell asleep sittin’ upright with a textbook on your chest and your highlighter on your cheek. I loved you on the nights I was mad at you and the days you were mad at me. I loved you when we were broke and eatin’ noodles out the same pot, and I love you now when there’s more food than we can eat and the plates match.” He huffed a breath that might’ve been a laugh. “I have loved you in every room we shared and every room I had to sleep in alone because of flights or shoots or road games—and I swear, half the time it was worse to be apart ‘cause I kept feelin’ like some part of me had been left in your hands for safekeeping.”
Her eyes overflowed; he let them.
“Together,” he said, leaning in to touch his forehead to hers again, letting the word rest between them, “we are… not perfect. Not clean. Not easy.” His lips quirked. “We’re loud and stubborn and dramatic and so in love people probably get tired of hearin’ about it.”
Her wet laugh puffed against his mouth.
“But together,” he went on, quieter now, “we are whole. Whatever pieces were missin’ from me before you showed up—they’re here now, sittin’ on this floor, in this hoodie, in this body I get to hold. Whatever cracks you got from before me—whatever gaps and ghosts—you know I’m spendin’ my whole life pourin’ myself into ‘em ‘til the light comes through instead of the draft.”
He pulled back just enough that he could see all of her face again, candlelight painting her in gold.
“I read that verse for our vows,” he said softly, “and I don’t think I really understood it then. I just liked how it sounded.” His thumb stroked the line of her lower lip as he spoke, almost as if he was writing the words there. “‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death…’”
His voice caught; he swallowed and kept going, eyes never leaving hers.
“That’s what this feels like to me,” he said. “Like you pressed your name into my chest and my skin when I was too dumb and young to know what you were doin’, and now it’s just there, permanent, like a brand and a blessing both. Love as strong as death. That’s what us is. Not fragile, not fickle—somethin’ that stands there, unmovin’, while everything else changes clothes.”
One of her hands slid down from his shoulder to his heartbeat, palm flattening over the thud that picked up at his words, as if to test them.
“You say you’re scared of lovin’ me too much,” he said, his voice gone almost tender with the ache of it. “Baby, I wake up every day terrified that I will never be able to prove to you how much I love you. That I will live to be old and grey and still be sittin’ somewhere, rockin’ in a chair, thinkin’, I should’ve said it more. I should’ve shown her more. I should’ve found another way to make sure she knew.”
Her mouth trembled. “I know,” she tried, but the words came out thin.
“Not like I know it,” he said, gentle but firm. “I know it in my bones. In my knees. In the way my body aches when I have to walk away from you to go to work. In the way I check that monitor twice before I close my eyes ‘cause our daughter bein’ okay is part of lovin’ you right. In the way every plan I make has your name scribbled across the margin, even if nobody else can see it.”
He let out a breath that sounded like surrender.
“You are the sentence God wrote,” he finished, voice barely above a whisper now, “and then—somehow—let me walk around bein’ the man in the margins. You are the story, Nala. I’m just the one blessed enough to be written next to you.”
Her face crumpled at that, in that way he knew meant he’d hit the softest part, the one she hid even from herself. She leaned forward, collapsing the small space left between them, pressing her mouth to his like it was the only way to answer, like whatever words she had would fall apart if she tried to say them.
He caught her, hands big and steady at her back, letting her pour the tremor out through the kiss, letting her cling as tight as she needed to. When they broke apart, both of them breathing hard, tears on both faces now, she rested her forehead against his, eyes closed, fingers dug into the back of his neck.
“Tyriq,” she breathed, his name stretched thin.
“Yeah, baby,” he answered, hands steady on her like he was keeping her from floating away.
Her hips shifted without her meaning them to, a small, unconscious movement that made them both inhale, the contact a slow flicker of remembered want layered on top of the newer, deeper thing that had grown between them since Honey.
His jaw clenched, eyes squeezing shut for a second like he was bracing himself against the wave of it. When he looked at her again, there was heat there, yes, but there was something else too—something almost devout.
When they broke apart, both of them breathing harder, her forehead still resting against his, he smiled, a small, crooked thing that made her chest squeeze.
Her hands slid down, over his chest, feeling the steady thump of his heart through the worn cotton, the rise and fall of his breathing. It hit her then, in a way it hadn’t on the couch, hadn’t in her rant, hadn’t even on the phone with Selah—that this wasn’t a man who’d forgotten her. This was a man who had built his whole internal compass around her and was now, patiently, insistently, turning it back into her hands.
“You really think I’m a goddess?” she asked, voice bending around the question like she already knew the answer and still needed to hear it anyway, half-teasing because that was easier, half-serious because that was the part that hurt.
He didn’t even hesitate.
“I think you’re everything,” he whispered, like the word itself was a kind of surrender, his eyes steady on hers, candlelight caught in the wet at the corner of them. “Everything I prayed for before I even knew your name. Everything I was scared to ask for ‘cause it felt greedy. You’re gonna be the death of me, Nala.”
Her heart lurched at that—the way he said it so matter-of-fact, like it was both a prophecy and a promise—and something in her went tight with fear. She tearily looked him in the eye and shook her head hard, fingers tightening on his shoulders like she could anchor him to the future by grip alone.
“Don’t say that,” she choked, the words coming out small and fierce, half plea, half command. “You’re gonna live a long life with me, you hear me? You’re gonna be an old man and still complainin’ about your knees while you yell at our great-grandbabies to get off your lawn. We are not speakin’ death over you.”
His mouth curved, but it wasn’t really a smile; it was that soft, heartbreaking expression he got when she said something that proved she didn’t quite grasp how deep she’d settled into him.
“I don’t mean it like that,” he murmured, voice roughing out around the edges as he lifted one hand to cup the back of her head, cradling her like something holy and breakable all at once. “I don’t mean coffins and funerals and the end of days. I mean—love as strong as death, remember?” His thumb stroked the damp track under her eye, gentle. “That verse you like. ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart… for love is as strong as death.’ That kind of death. The kind you don’t come back from ‘cause you don’t want to. The before-you and the after-you.”
She swallowed, breathing through her nose like she was trying to hold herself together molecule by molecule.
“I’m sayin’,” he went on, slow, careful, “that there was a version of me that existed before you, and he’s gone. Buried. No resurrection. That boy died in a dorm room somewhere the first time you laughed so hard you choked on your drink and let me see you ugly-cry over some stupid show. The man that’s left? He’s yours. Built around you. If anything ever takes you away from me, that’s the part that won’t survive. That’s the ‘death’ I’m talkin’ about.”
Her face crumpled a little at that, but for once it wasn’t fear alone—it was that sharp, almost painful tenderness that came from being loved in a language your body had always secretly spoken and never heard out loud.
“But you’re not leavin’,” he added quickly, like he could see the shadow crossing her thoughts. He pressed his forehead to hers again, their noses brushing, his hand at her nape, firm and warm. “You hear me? You just told me I’m livin’ a long life with you; I’m holdin’ you to that. I’m gonna be old and grey and still tryna pull you in my lap on some ragged-ass blanket while our grandkids roll they eyes in the next room.”
That dragged a wet little laugh out of her, broken but real.
“So yeah,” he said, the words coming quieter now, like a vow slipping loose from somewhere deep, “you’re gon’ be the death of the boy I was without you. You already killed him. Thank God. But as for me?” His hand slid down, palm spreading over her ribcage, feeling the stubborn, steady rise and fall there. “I’m stayin’ alive as long as I can, just to keep provin’ to you that every prayer I ever whispered got answered when you said yes.”
She blinked hard, tears spilling anyway.
“You really think I’m everything?” she whispered, needing to hear it again, smaller this time, like the words might split her open if he said them too loud.
He nodded once, slow and sure, eyes never leaving hers. “I think you’re my before and after,” he said. “I think you’re the seal on my heart and the handwriting on my skin. I think if Patroclus could follow Achilles into the dark, I would follow you into parent-teacher conferences and midnight fevers and every mundane thing this life throws at us ‘cause anywhere you are, that’s where my story makes sense. I think Sappho was writin’ about you without knowin’ your name—callin’ somebody ‘more golden than gold,’ talkin’ about her tongue breakin’, her ears ringin’ when the one she loves walks in—that’s how I feel every time you cross a room I already live in.”
Her lips parted, breath catching.
“And as for God?” he added, a small, stunned laugh escaping him, “if He set you as a seal on me, then I’m not arguin’. I’m wearin’ it. On my heart, on my arm, on my wrist, on my whole damn life. ‘Cause that’s what you are to me, Nalani Joan—with every child you’ve carried and every one we’ll meet, with every song you write and every canvas you ruin with my face—you’re the mark that says, this one is spoken for.”
She made a soft, wordless sound then, somewhere between a sob and a sigh, and leaned in, pressing her mouth to his like she had no other way to hold all of it. His hands came up, closing around her back, around the whole curve of her, drawing her in like he was sheltering something sacred.
When they finally broke for air, foreheads touching, both of them damp-faced and breathless, she whispered, “Then don’t you dare die before me, Tyriq Withers. You hear me? Not in any way that means I gotta learn how to live without you.”
He smiled, wrecked and tender. “Baby,” he murmured, voice low and certain, “if love is as strong as death, then ours is stubborn enough to outlive both. I’ll stay as long as I’m allowed. Long enough to see every version of you, to be the man standing beside you in every painting you don’t show nobody and every song you pretend ain’t about me.”
His thumbs swept away the fresh tears on her cheeks like a benediction.
“And when we old,” he added, a little hoarse, “and the kids grown, and this blanket finally gives up on us? I’ll still be right here. Watchin’ your face, waiting on your laugh, existin’ for you. ‘Cause that’s the only purpose that ever made sense to me.”
Her heart clenched, then loosened, then did that aching, expanding thing it always did around him, like it was trying to make more room.
“Okay,” she whispered, nodding once, sealing it. “Then we stay. Long life. Long love. No dying early, no givin’ up.”
“Long life,” he echoed, lifting her hand to his mouth and kissing her ring, then the inside of her wrist where her pulse fluttered. “Long love.”
He kissed her once more—slow and deep and devastatingly gentle—and the kitchen around them blurred into soft light and familiar shadows: wildflowers leaning in their little plastic vase, wings going lukewarm on the counter, the FSU blanket cradling the weight of two people who had already died to every life that didn’t include the other and chosen, stubbornly, joy in this one.
If love was as strong as death, then whatever sat between Nala and Tyriq on that floor felt, for a moment, like the proof . Her eyes flooded again, the laugh that left her tangled up in a sob. “You’re ridiculous,” she said, but her voice broke right down the middle of it.
He kissed the new tear that slipped down, lips gentle at the corner of her eye, then another at the hollow just beneath it, moving slow like he had all the time in the world.
…
Tyriq lifted the glass slowly, the amber liquid, the familiar burn of the liquid waking him up as it caught the low light of the room. The scotch spread across his tongue, sharp earthy and bitter, blooming across his tongue as he watches her through his hooded gaze, stripping out of her t shirt to reveal the red lace underneath, hundreds of dollars done intricately, with such care that almost made him feel bad for how it was foing to lay on the floor in fragments in a few moments.
She peeled his old shirt off in one smooth, deliberate motion and tossed it aside, the gesture lazy and confident, before tugging at the knot of her silk bonnet. The satin slid away, and her long, thick curls spilt down over her shoulders and back in a dark, heavy cascade, catching the low light as she bit her lip and looked at him from under her lashes. Tyriq leaned back in the lounge chair in their bedroom, the floor-to-ceiling mirror catching the two of them in the same frame—him, stretched out like some king at rest; her, all soft lines and quiet power, standing in front of him like something he’d conjured.
He tipped his head to one side, tongue flicking over his bottom lip as his gaze travelled slowly, unhurriedly, over every inch of her, hunger and awe braided together in his eyes. One hand lifted, fingers curling in a lazy beckon as he nodded for her to turn around—not rushed, not shy—so he could take her in properly, the way a sculptor might circle their finest work, studying each curve and plane with a reverence that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with devotion.
He took in the faint silver of her stretch marks, the way her body had settled and thickened in the months since she’d carried their daughter—their miracle, their Honey. It grated on him every time she talked down on that body, like she hadn’t torn herself open to bring life into the world and was somehow supposed to snap back like nothing had happened. He couldn’t understand it, couldn’t reconcile the woman he saw—soft and strong and impossibly beautiful—with the doubt in her voice. How could someone who had done something so holy look at herself and not see what he saw: living proof of a miracle.
He watched her curvy body, the new thickness added gave her the grown woman body he’d heard about, her breasts were fuller and sat naturally, her nipples hardened through the thin lacey material, making him briefly think back to when she was pregnant, his lips had attached to that nipple as he brought her to orgasm, again and again and again…like a believer drinking honey from the gods themselves he was insatiable, never satisfied.
She lifted her head, teeth sinking into her bottom lip, and there was nothing soft or uncertain in her gaze now—only unbridled, unfiltered want, sitting heavy and bright in her eyes as they locked with his, like a dare wrapped in devotion. She looked at him the way a goddess might look at a worshipper who’d been talking about altars and offerings all night: come prove it. It was almost unnerving how in sync they were—how she always seemed to know the shape of his thoughts before he’d formed them, how her slow, knowing smirk curved at the exact same moment his did.
On the wall, the small red light of the mounted camera blinked to life, catching the lines of their bodies in its unblinking eye, turning flesh and shadow into something that could be replayed later, remembered, studied. The rest of the world thinned out at the edges, sounds softening, time loosening its grip, until it felt like there was only this: the charged air between them, the mirrored flicker of want in their eyes, two people suspended in the same relentless longing and quietly, stubbornly delighted to be trapped there together.
He’d seen this body, worshipped it beneath his hands for eight years, known every soft curve and sharp breath by touch and by memory; he had eight years of them archived in pixels, an entire private history of the moments they’d let desire take the wheel—from the clumsy, breathless first time to the practiced reverence of now—and still, somehow, nothing touched this. Nothing compared to the way it felt in this exact heartbeat, their wedding bands catching the soft light as they devoured each other with their eyes like two people seeing their favourite miracle for the very first time and yet he still felt unprepared, his dick heavy along his right thigh, a tight throat and a heavy chest.
“Damn,” he whispered as he unzipped his trousers.
He couldn’t think straight, no, all he could think about was sipping at her sweet nectar and having his dick touch her womb as her thick thighs spread around him because heaven knows he wasn’t done getting her pregnant.
“Come to me.”
She sauntered toward him, slow and deliberate, plucking his glass from his hand without breaking eye contact; she tipped it to her mouth and took a sip from the exact place his lips had just been, tongue catching the rim like she was tasting him as much as the drink, and by the time he rose to his full 6'5 and towered over her, it meant nothing to the 5'8 woman looking up at him like height was irrelevant, like in this room, in this moment, he was the one standing on holy ground.
His hands reached behind her and cupped her ass with two hands, pressing them together as the familiar flutters came alive in her womb. She gently rested her hands on his forearms as he pulled them flush against each other. As his mouth met hers, she sucked on his tongue, almost as if she was starved, starved of her lover, as if they hadn’t made love that very morning before he left their home.
His hand descended into her panties as he gently cupped her, dragging one of his thick fingers through her folds, teasing as she ground her hips on his hand, moaning into his mouth from the sheer pleasure of contact, almost as if just this could get her off… and from Tyriq’s expertise on all things Nala… it could.
“You gon’ take care of me, baby?” she whispered against his lips as she reached down and wrapped her much smaller hand around him, gently stroking him in perfect rhythm, applying pressure to the area right below his tip and flicking her wrist just right.
He didn’t bother answering; his response lived in the way his hand slid up, long fingers wrapping around her throat with a careful, possessive gentleness, thumb resting right where her pulse kicked hard against his skin. He gave the faintest squeeze—more reminder than restraint—as he dragged her in and pressed his mouth to hers again, not interested in the neat choreography of a pretty kiss, not tonight. He wanted it messy and breath-stealing, wanted to taste every doubt off her tongue, to take from her the way she took from him, until there was nothing left between them but the shared, airless truth that she had his lungs, his heartbeat, his whole life cupped in the palm of her hand.
“You gon’ take this dick like a good girl, Nalani, none of that running shit you hear me?”
“I hear you,” she whispered as she sank to her knees, letting him go as he watched her through a hooded gaze as he stroked himself, from base to tip.
“I love you,” she whispered as she looked up at him.
“I love you,” he whispered back as he gently tapped himself against her bottom lip.
His crown was throbbing as he gently eased himself into the warmth that was her mouth, as she welcomed him down her throat easily, her hand gently smacking his away to wrap around what she couldn’t fit in her mouth. She bobbed her head down, the vibration made him twitch in her mouth as she wrapped a secondary hand around him, and twisted her hands in different directions, spreading her saliva as he groaned louder, an incentive for her to go deeper as pride swelled in her chest at the mere fact that she was his undoing, she got him like this, only she knew him well enough to know he liked it messy.
“Fuckk Nala,” Tyriq whimpered as he felt his toes curl as all the blood rushed south, she wasn’t doing it from a place of duty, no she pulled all the tips and tricks she’d gathered from all the years they had together, from the first time when she used too much teeth to the first time she had her head hanging off the bed and he told her how to breathe through it, she did it because she lived for this shit, wrote songs about this, painted pictures about his.
“You’re gonna make me go crazy, baby, fuck, I taught you all this ain’t I?” he moaned as she hummed around him abd soon enough his crown touched her uvula as she deepthroated him and she ket out the smallest gag., he gently held her head down a second longer as she relaxed ther throat for him and breathed through her nose, gently closing her right hand into a fist by her sid as he began thrusting his hips toward her mouth, drawing her back and pulling her in rhythmically.
His body surged with love and adoration as he watched her, their eyes met and he felt it, all the years they had together, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, he reached for the hand that held her ring finger with his own ringed hand and entangled them as she hollowed her cheeks and as he pushed her head to the base her tongue gently darted out to lick his balls as she couldn’t bear to leave any bit of flesh untouched by her as she wanted him, all of him down her throat, in her insides as soon as possible.
She felt herself dampen the lace of her panties as she let go of his hand and began to relieve some of her own arousal as her co ordination faltered, he watched with hooded eyes as he felt his release nearing, and with one, two three more thrusts he released down her throat and she suckled on his tip as she dutifully swallowed, a smile on her lips as she pulled off, letting a bit of his release land on her breasts as she tapped his tip on her tongue and swallowed.
He heaved as he gently pulled himself out of her mouth and took a minute to shut his eyes and gather his surroundings; as she went to put him back in her mouth, he gently shook his head.
“On the bed, if you wanna keep ‘em, take your panties off and face the mirror,” he ordered as she giggled and rose to her feet with a drunken smile and pressed her lips to his, swiping her tongue against his lips so he too could have a bit of the love he’d given her as she turned to do as she was told and took off her panties, bending over on her hands and knees into a perfect arch as she faced the mirror.
He gently eased her forward so she could be on camera, and she wiggled her ass for him seductively, almost like a snake entrancing its prey.
He gently shook his head as he man handled her onto her knees and laid down and brought her over his face, “Changed my mind,” he raspily told her as he darted his tongue out and licked up all of her juices, a content humleaving his lips as Nala’s face instantly screwed up in pure ecstasy “O-Oh baby,” she whimpered as she looked down at him.
She could barely get more than two words out at a time as he ate her like a starved man, her juices dripping into his mouth like raindrops off a leaf, he shook his head against her slightly, getting into every nook and crevice as he held her down against his mouth, and she gently shook her head, “B-baby w-wait,” she cried and she felt everything else around her muffle as she screwed her eyes shut and ground her hips into his mouth, the mirrors around the bed catching the evidence of their love as the mirror above their bed caught Nala's face as she threw her head back.
Tyriw gently smacked her ass and her eyes fluttered open to meet his again and she whimpered as she felt the hotpressure build up in her lower stomach as she grabbed what she could of hus buzzed hair and dragged her face across his lips, “Eat it daddy, don’t fucking stop, don’t- oh you’re so good, so perfect,” she rambled as she ground dow harder onto him.
“I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, Tyriq, I love you so so much baby,” she whimpered as her body shook and she released on his tongue and he lapped at her greedily; she whimpered as he gently lowered her and rose to press his lips to hers and she moaned in ecstasy.
He gently reached down to grab himself and rubbed his dick up and down her entrance, once, twice, thrice, before letting his head catch on her entrance, distracting her with their lip lock as he pushed in, in one single thrust as she let out the whinist “Fuck,” against his lips and he grunted in return.
She could feel him in the deepest parts of her stomach, as her eyes fluttered as her head fell back against the pillow and she looked up at them in the mirror, watching his back muscles contract as her toes curled by his head and she whimpered as he gently licked from the ball of her foot to the tips of her toes and enveloped her manicured toe into his moth as he began thrusting into her making her eyes roll, to the back of her head.
“Pretty ass pussy, pretty ass feet,” he mumbled as he drew his attention to her other foot.
“You like tha’ baby?” she whimpered, eager for his praise as her body came alight.
“Love that shit, baby, you know I love that shit,” he told her as he pounded into her harder, bringing his hand down to rub at her clit, and she screamed. He gently smacked her thigh and landed a thick glob of spit at her clit, watching it mix with their juices
“Don’t be waking up my damn daughter Nalani,” he grunted as he rubbed tihhter harsher circles into her, knowing damn well he’d gotten their room soundproofed when they moved in; Nala had always been a loud, she couldn’t help it, not as she felt the familiar yet maddening stretch of him. It had been eight years of this, eight years and she’d still never get used to it, despite the fact that he’d never missed a day to fold her up and pump his love into her, somehow it felt different each and every single time, each and every snap of his limbs against hers always filled her up with a different form of love, each and every time.
“‘M sorry, ‘m sorry daddy, don’t stop, please please don’t stop, I’ll be quiet, I-I swear baby.” Nala whimpered as she looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears at the thought of him pulling away from her, as if the mere thought of it broke her heart.
He looked down at her and felt a spark of amusement as he gently pulled out and heard her whines as he gently turned her to her side, facing her toward a mirror, as he lifted her leg and eased himself back inside her, and as he propped himself up on his elbow to ensure she watched them in the mirror.
“How that dick feel?” he grunted, his voice raspy as the light blue of his eyes was gone, replaced by the familiar dark blue she looked into whenever he got this devoted to her pleasure, her eyes filled with tears; she knew what he was doing, trying to get her louder and she shook her head as she bit down on her lip, drawing blood slightly and he shook his head as he watched and gently pinched her nipple to get her attention and his hand went to slap her pussy as she screamed out once more.
"You don't fuckin' hear me?"
“S-so good baby, so fuckin’ good, wanna stay like this forever,” she whimpered as she watched them through the mirror; he met her eyes as he watched her arch her back into him, trying to meet her thrusts with her own, her attempt at fucking him back.
“I ever hear you talking shit about the body that made my daughter you and I finna have a problem do you understand me Nalani?” he grunted as he grabbed her throat, ensuring she looked at the mirror his thrusts quickening as their combined pre release dripped down his balls and onto the silk sheets below them.
“Lost your damn mind, thinking I’d get bored of you, stupidest shit i’ve ever heard you say, i’ll never ever get bored of you, you hear me? Never ever get bored of your pretty ass self, of this pretty ass pussy,” he told her as he locked eyes with her in the mirror and she nodded, rambling agreement, anything she had to say for him to get her there she would say, as she the coil build up again in her belly as she looked at him through the mirror, growing hyperfixated at how his cock dissapeared into her and reappeared, slicker, thicker.
Tyriq shook his head as he ground into her, "Nah, say that shit, look in the mirror and tell me how fucking beautiful you are, or imma pull out and put my nut on the sheets."
Nala's high-pitched whine left her lips as she dragged her eyes up to the mirror, watching him go in and out of her, watching the thick ring of their release at his base thicken more with every thrust up into her. She'd die if he pulled out, she felt like she'd die.
"I'm b-beautiful, s-so fuckin' pretty."
“Say it like you believe it,” he murmured.
She dragged in a shaky breath. “The sexiest body that carried our baby,” she repeated, clearer this time, like a prayer she was finally letting herself mean.
He nodded, just once, like that was right. “Good. Now tell me what this body did.”
Her eyes glossed again, but she didn’t look away. “This body carried our daughter. Kept her safe. Fed her. Held her.”
He leaned in, his mouth a breath from hers, his hand still firm at her throat, thumb stroking slowly like a metronome. “And what do I think of it?”
Her lips trembled. “You… you think I’m the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“Mm.” He hummed, approval clear but still pushing as he pulled her leg, higher, getting in deeper as he watched her through the mirror. “Try: You worship this body. Every new mark. Every soft place. Every stretch and scar.”
Her breath hitched. “You worship this body,” she echoed, tears clinging to her lashes, “every new mark, every soft place, every stretch and scar.”
“Now say,” he murmured, “I am not an afterthought. I am not a phase. I am the centre.”
Her throat bobbed. “I’m… I’m not an afterthought,” she breathed. “I’m not a phase. I’m… the centre.”
“Of?”
“Of your life,” she whispered. “Of your plans. Of your prayers.”
His eyes went glassy as he watched her eyes flutter shut as pleasure ran through her veins, but he still wasn’t done.
"I love you, Nalani, you hear me?"
"I-I hear you."
“W-want another baby,” she whimpered as her ringed hand met his that eagerly rubbed her clit.
“Please daddy, let me have your baby again,” she begged as her eyes brimmed with tears, as he felt his release build up within him.
“Yeah? You want another baby? You want daddy to give you another one?” he asked her as his thrusts grew harsher and harsher, the slapping noisesin the room growing more frequent as Tyriq felt any and all restraint slipping.
"Wanna carry you, please Tyriq, let me have your baby again," she whispered as she reached back for his hand and put it on her stomach, right where her womb was, where Honey was.
“You gon’ have to give me that nut though, gotta do that for me first, can you do that, ma?”
Taking that as permission she sobbed as she felt her release sear through her body, the earth shattering orgasm rushed through her body and took total control; it was as if every cell in her body sung in symphony that made her feel deeply wildly in love as she savoured the sensation of her lover fucking her through it Their tongues danced as he thrusted once, twice thrice and he grunted into her mouth as he flooded her womb with his semen. Her body jerked a bit at the sheer volume and speed at which his cum filled her senses, and a slow smile spread across her lips as she watched him shut his eyes for a moment. As he thrust into her once, twice, thrice before emptying inside of her and fucking them through it.
The sound of his and her pants sounded through the room as he looked down at her, bringing her up to meet his lips in a softer kiss that she struggled to return as his hand squeezed her breast, his ringed hand cupping the supple flesh as his eyes darted to the red blinking light and back to the mirror as he licked up the sweat that had gathered on her neck and gently turned her head to face him.
"Open."
With that, he landed a glob of spit into her mouth, immediately making her clench around him as she let out a moan.
"Thank you daddy," she whispered as she looked up at him, meeting his shallow thrusts into her.
“Happy Valentine's Day, Wifey."
She gently rolled him onto his back, ignoring the overstimulation as she sank down on him once more, grinding, so she could feel him harden inside her once more as the feeling of their mixed release dripped out of her and ran down his balls. He rose up and wrapped his lips around her nipple, suckling on the ambrosia that secreted from her chest as he groped and fondled with the other one.
“Happy Valentine's Day, My Heart.”
@mamasturn @sheinaskirt @authentic-girl03 @k0niiii-blog @trustmymood @glizzymcguirex @ms-mosley-ifunastyyy @blackfemreaderr @blckblossom @trustmymood @unicoo @yourleogf @uniqueoutlierblog @og-goddesstrill @determinednot2fall @melaninhawtie @xoadaraox @thatssokarii @kirayuki22 @the1miscief @plan3tch1ld @daliscrim @szatears @that-one-anxious-mango( lmk if you wanna be added or removed!)
Your knee bounced as you watched over the bay window to the raging ocean. The lavish home wasn't enough to calm the anger that crawled up your skin. You had been through everything with Cam. When he got drafted, you were there. When he got injured right before leaving, you were there. All the outbursts, the healing, you were there.
Cam had been smelling himself since he got into this shit. Your intuition wasn't wrong when it came to him. You knew about the girl, you knew all about her. You knew about her when you found lipstick in his car on date night. You wanted to watch him choke as you sat across him smiling.
He met her at one of those business parties. His manager insisted he go but when you sent him you didn't expect him to bring something back. You came as his plus one but you already knew when you saw his tail wag as he spoke to her. She had his head so far up her ass it made you sick. You didn't mind he wandered off occasionally but the real prize was yours.
His earnings.
You didn't do all this work just for him to not get here. You didn't do all this to get nothing out of it. You did this, you lifted him up, you drove him to practice when he wasn't allowed to. All of it was you but now he was testing your patience. He was trying to take that away from you.
Cam started taking her out and putting her onto things that you put him onto. You knew it wasn't long before he found new eye candy. That's usually what happened to the key players in sports. You just didn't think he'd jeopardize your life like this. He was fucking with your money by spending it all on her.
You could tell when she would flaunt it in front of you. Whenever there was a game he would have her sit up there with the families. She'd wear the expensive shit you knew she couldn't afford on her own. She'd smile in your face like she wasn't sleeping with your husband.
She would post up riding in his Rolls and wearing his chain. If she thought she was getting anything that you taught him, she was sorely mistaken. Cam would come home smelling just like her. He didn't care if you knew he just wanted you on his arm like a trophy. He thought he could have his cake and eat it too.
You got into it with him about the pair of lace red underwear you found in the Rolls. He denied it, kept waving you off but you knew you didn't give him none in the back of no Rolls. You gave a pathetic laugh as your tongue rolled in your cheek. He thought you were fucking stupid. You were going to strangle him with this thong.
"So you're telling me you didn't have that bitch in my car?" You barked as you pointed to him with your eyes narrowed.
"Why would I?" Was the only thing he said.
You could feel your blood boil as your hands slammed down on the table. You could flip this bitch in his face right now. He thought this shit was a game when it wasn't. That nonchalant look on his face was enough for you to smack some sense into him. If he thought you were going to let her take everything from you, he was wrong.
"You're really blowin' me right now." You said in a low, menacing tone.
"She didn't earn this shit—I did! She didn't give you a glance until she found out who you were." Your index finger harshly tapped on the table.
You stared at him menacingly as he stared back at you. He didn't say a word but you knew he understood you. He knew you were telling the truth but he wouldn't admit that to you. He hated when you were right and you were always right. Even now he knows but he won't give you the satisfaction.
"You think she'll be with you when you're down and out? She won't be." Your face scrunched as you spoke.
You let out a breathless laugh. "But you wanna play? Let's play." With that you walked away your heels clicking against the marble floors.
Cam continued to take her out and flaunt her around. You would sit silently at home with a glass of wine as the tabloids talked about them. He was in for a hell of a surprise because you had a trick so vile up your sleeve, it would leave everyone stunned. Your nails rhythmically tapped on the table as you looked at the numerous photos. All of it was evidence.
Two weeks later after a hard practice, Cam came home. He was worn out and having a new toy on his side was draining him every weekend. The house was silent as he dropped his stuff at the door. He couldn't wait to see you. He needed to decompress.
However, when he did see you, you were sitting on the bed happily chatting away on the phone. When your eyes met, your smile dropped. You were secretly surprised that he came home. Those pockets must be tired from all that spending. Your face held contempt but you couldn't be too mad you knew he was a dog.
"I'm surprised you're home." He commented as he slowly made his way over to you.
"In my house?" You emphasized because where else would you be.
"You usually aren't here when I am." He corrected himself causing you to scoff.
You shook your head slightly. "I have other things to do than to wait on you hand and foot."
Cam knew he deserved that for how he neglected you. He knew he was embarrassing you too but what would him admitting it do now? You waited for him to say anything—anything at all. He acted like all this time didn't happen but you weren't falling for it—not this time.
"Why're you acting like that—" You abruptly handed him an orange envelope.
Cam’s eyes stare at it before his eyes shift back up to yours. You tilted your head at him as if to challenge him. He could try to run away from this but he will be served, best believe that. You refused to be treated like thanksgiving leftovers because he wants something new on his arm. He would learn you aren't that easy to get rid of.
Cam snatched it out of your hand as you chuckled lowly. When he ripped it open the first thing he read was 'DIVORCE' in big, bold, black letters. Cam’s heart dropped to his ass, there was no way you were planning to leave him. He swallowed the lump in his throat as he continued to pull out the paperwork. You hoped he signed it without reading it because this would go smoother than you thought.
"What the fuck is this?" His voice dangerously low.
You didn't care. "A divorce. Sign it." Your voice tight and stern.
You were sick of his games. Sick of being an embarrassment out in public. He only cared for his image but not shit about your own. If he wanted freedom, you would give it to him—at a price. You didn't stick with him for no reason, the love there was long gone. This was your shit, not his.
"I'm not signing this shit." He throws the papers at your feet as you run your tongue over your teeth.
"Why not? You're fucking a whole new woman and I'm supposed to sit here and do what?" You questioned as you put one wrist over the other.
Your tongue rolled in your cheek as your eyes squinted at him. You wanted him to say something stupid to you. It might incline you to smack some sense into him. Maybe he'll see then how fucked up he has you. Maybe that'll tighten him up.
"That doesn't mean I don't want you—" Your head cocked back as your eyes widened.
"Excuse me?" You laughed in disbelief. "That's exactly what the fuck it means."
"Sign this. I won't repeat myself." You challenged him as you leaned forward—waiting.
"You wanna switch up? Fine." He patted his pockets looking for a pen.
You handed him one from next to you. You wiggled it at him like a treat to a dog. He snatched it from you before picking up one of the loose papers from the bedroom floor. What caught his eye? The price tags.
"What is this shit?" He asked as he read it over.
You snickered evilly. "Our agreement that you came up with by the way."
His eyes glance over the same sentence repeatedly as your ankle bounced. He forgot all about it honestly. He thought you were there to support him through anything but he was wrong. You would have all those years ago but now it was your turn to embarrass him. You weren't walking away with nothing.
"What was it that you said? I'll never go without?" You smiled at him. "You're right, I won't."
"This is majority of my salary." You gave him faux puppy dog eyes, pouting your lip for dramatic effect.
"And I spent majority of my life building you up. It's only fair." Your tone sarcastic and mocking.
He sighed, running a hand down his face before looking back at you. "What do I gotta do man?"
"Sign the paperwork. Are you dumb?" You questioned him as you blinked quickly in his direction.
"Except that." Now he was speaking your language.
"You gon' stop embarrassing me. You also gonna stop threatening my position." Your voice low and threatening.
"You out here telling this bitch, who knows you're married by the way, that you're gonna marry her." You shook your head slowly. "Not on my watch."
"I already gave her one thing." Your eyes trained on him. "I'm not giving her everything."
He just stared at you, seeing this side of you he's never seen before. It's his own fault really. "You think you own me?"
"I don't think, I know." Your pointer finger going from your temple to him. "I made you what you are. I pushed you, Cameron."
Your tone was menacing and your eyes set to match. "She wouldn't know what to do with you on an off day—injured one. She's young and stupid."
Cam knew you were right, he just wouldn't admit it. Something he's almost always done, never admit to shit. The sweet boy you knew in high school was long gone. You wanted to smack the shit out of whoever stood in front of you right now. This wasn't your man and you don't think he ever would be.
"All she sees you as is a way to the top. The higher you go, she goes." You informed him before laughing. "But what do I know, right?"
"You think you know everything." He finally spoke.
You shrugged nonchalantly. "Oh I don't think it's true. I know it is."
"Now I'm not forcing you to stay with me but I will be taking my shit one way or another." You whispered before dragging your index finger from him to the paperwork. "Sign it."
"I'll figure something out." He replied as you stared at him.
After that you didn't see him til the next day. In the end, he broke it off with her—at least that's what he told you. In a fit of rage she did tell the whole internet that she was with him for his money. You could only snicker at the hot water he was in. You had him on a tight leash after that.
The original ending was going to be you going ham and setting shit on fire but I guess this fits the song more
I was also going to make you grovel but I was like why tf should you grovel it’s his fucking fault—anyway, yeah!
“Everybody knows I want your love. Why you playing, baby boy, what’s up?
You’re no good for his rising image—at least, that’s what his management thinks.
These are the formative years of Cameron Cade: the projected first pick in the NFL draft, the supposed second coming of Isaiah. He can’t afford to jeopardize anything, not even for you. It doesn't matter if you have already met half of his immediate family or have spent a few holidays together. He's building a reputation for himself and won't taint it—he’s willing to sacrifice everything for his dream.
So he keeps you close, but never close enough—no promises, no real commitment, just enough affection to keep you tethered.
And you’re sick of wanting more. There are plenty of guys who would proudly sweep you off your feet, no secrecy required.
Sure, Cam is a good man, but he can’t really expect you to sit around, waiting for every ounce of his affection like some sad, obedient dog. So you’ve made up your mind: starting tonight, you’re done entertaining him. Enough of the half-formed boundaries he insisted were "something": the rushed and hidden kisses, the text threads he deleted the second he sent them, showing up to events separately—like strangers—just to keep rumors quiet.
It was strange behavior for a college athlete; everyone else flaunted whoever they were seeing, "loved" them out loud, even if they changed weekly.
Now, you sit at the small desk in your dorm, adding the final touches to your makeup. You and a few friends decided to hit a party tonight—celebration after the football team’s big win. Once your lips are pretty and pink, you stand to check your reflection in the mirror.
Bootcut jeans that hug the curve of your hips. A sheer, maroon top that leaves just enough to the imagination. You look good, you feel good.
Your friends meet you downstairs in the lobby, and the three of you pile into an Uber. When your driver pulls up, the party is already alive: couples pressed against car doors, stoners passing blunts in loose circles, laughter spilling into the night air. Music booms through the walls of the house, hitting you before you even step inside.
Inside, the air is thicker, warm from the influx of bodies. You peer around, scanning the room, though deep down you already know who you’re looking for—and you hate that your mind goes there. You check the time on your phone. The party started an hour ago. The football players, if any, usually show up two hours late. You know this from the many nights you’ve had to coordinate departure times with Cam. That thought alone makes you roll your eyes.
You trail away from your friends to grab a drink. It’s ritual at this point, something to blur the edges of your mind. And, truth be told, you need this drink more than ever right now. As you’re about to leave the makeshift bar, someone bumps into you. You look up—it’s some guy from your morning lecture. His smile is apologetic as he mumbles a quick sorry. And another person pushes past, he instinctively reaches out, steadying the drink in your hand before it spills.
“Shit, my bad—everyone and their mama here tonight,” he says, hand hovering.
“It’s all good.”
“You’re in Dr. Schuyler’s 9 a.m., right?”
He scooches closer so you can hear him over the loud music, breath sweet and boozy.
You’d be a fool not to acknowledge that he’s handsome. He has been trying to get your attention for weeks, and maybe tonight’s the night you allow it. Still, your thoughts wander back to Cam. You shake the thought away, surely Cam has entertained other girls. What's stopping you from having your fun?
“Yeah. I think I’ve seen you a few times,” you confirm, taking a quick sip of your drink, hiding your forming smile.
You fall into an easy conversation, almost like a table-read.
He’d hate this—the way this guy is looking at you, the way you’re letting him.
At some point, you find yourselves dancing together—the bass thudding roughly, his hands guarding the soft curve of your hips. You move with the music, swaying against him, two drinks in and feeling all the buzz. It is nice to finally have someone to dance with that wasn't one of your girlfriends. Still, you can't help wishing it were Cam instead.
And for a second, your mind goes there. Eyes closed, his hands become Cam’s, and warmth surges through your body. You press harder into the body behind you. The scene feels raunchy. You want to blame it on the alcohol, but you know better.
When the song ends, you feel it—a stare cutting through the noise.
Reluctantly, you turn, and sure enough, Cam’s eyes find yours from across the room. His blue gaze is low, rimmed red as he leans back in his chair. A few of his teammates linger nearby, red solos in hand. He nods once, barely there, before his eyes drop to his cup. He says something under his breath, but you don’t need to hear it to know what it means.
The DJ spins a new track, bodies brush past, and suddenly you’re over it. You’ve been at the party for a few hours, and you’re ready to leave. You slip away from your classmate-turned-dance-partner and weave through the crowd in search for your friends.
The once-invigorating thump of the music was starting to grate on you. It felt suffocating inside—your skin hot, sticky with sweat. Unable to find your friends, you step out onto the porch and decide to just text them instead.
But when you unlock your phone, there’s already a message waiting—from Cam.
Cam
So that’s how we moving now??
You
no idea what you’re talking abt
Cam
You and ol boy?
You
can’t dance with ppl now?
Cam
That’s what you calling it? 😂
You
that’s what it is tf?
i’m not finna sit here and go back n forth with you cam
Cam
Bet.
You stare at the thread of messages, hoping this is the last of it. You know you’re being petty, but you’re tired of being the one who lets things slide. It’s unfair. Still, guilt creeps in, stubborn and familiar.
The door creaks open behind you, the bass from inside spilling out for a moment before the night swallows it again. Heavy footsteps approach. You look up. Cam stands there, gaze fixed on the horizon, hands in his jacket pockets. For a moment, neither of you speak.
“C’mon,” he says finally, voice low. “Let’s walk.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Didn’t ask. C’mon.”
You lazily fall into step behind him; the cool air nips at your exposed skin—you shiver.
“Where are we even going?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His jaw works, tight enough that the muscles flex beneath the streetlight. He takes a left down the sidewalk, into an alley, hidden from the crowd.
“I ain’t like that…you know that.”
He stops, and you almost run into him. When he turns, his eyes are on you—bloodshot, but beaten by something heavier.
You huff. “And? I’m supposed to care because…?”
“I know you care,” he says. “Quit playing.”
He’s right. You hate that he knows it—that he uses it.
“Cam, you don’t control me,” you cross your arms tighter.
He steps closer, the air shifting.
“I know I can’t. But that doesn’t mean that shit don’t bother me.”
“It shouldn’t bother you. That’s the whole point of…whatever this is.” You motion between you, tone sharp.
He looks down at that, breath fogging the chilled air.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what? It’s the truth.”
“Like this some kind of joke.”
He closes the last sliver of distance, voice dropping low enough that you can feel it. His large, cold hand rests on your cheek, thumb tracing hearts.
“Cam,” you warn. This is exactly why he’s dangerous.
“We’re not ending shit, y/n.”
“You can’t decide that.”
“I’m not trying to decide anything, I just—” he runs a hand over his head. “I don’t wanna see you with other people. I don’t like that, shit’s stupid.”
“Then fucking do something about it.”
He clicks his tongue, every fiber of his being is hesitant.
“I can’t.”
The sentence snaps everything in half. Laughter from a group of drunks echoes through the alley. Their joy is mocking. You bite your lip.
“See? This is what I’m talking about.”
You turn to leave, but his fingers wrap around your wrist, stopping you.
“Cam,” you urge, “let go.”
The words hang between you, sticky and uncertain—meant for him or for you, you can’t tell.
“Shit ain’t fair.” His hands drop into his pockets.
“You think it’s been fair for me?”
Silence. You scoff.
“Exactly.”
“You act like this shit’s easy—it ain’t simple for me either.”
“It’s literally that simple. You choose your image and whatever bullshit your publicist feeds you over me. Every single time.”
He shakes his head. “You know what you signed up for. This is deadass the most important year of my life.”
“Whatever, Cameron.”
“Nah. Ain’t no ‘whatever.’ This ain’t some regular ass season. This is everything I’ve wanted since I was a kid. One wrong move…shit’s over.”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
He flinches.
“Do you hear yourself?” he parrots back.
“What’d you even make me come out here for? We’re talking in literal circles.”
“I’m trying to have a real conversation. None of that petty shit.”
“Then talk.”
“I don’t know how to do this shit, y/n.”
“Do what?”
“Not fuck this up. Look…everything in my life is planned out. Scripted. Every interview, every photo, every post. This—whatever this is—is the only organic thing in my life, and that scares the hell out of me.”
You nod, his confession disorientating. You want to understand, but you can’t help being selfish.
“Life is scary, Cam. But you can’t expect me to wait patiently, like a fucking dog, just because you’re unwilling to commit.”
“It’s not that.” He steps closer. “I’m crazy about you, I just—fuck…I can’t right now.”
“I won’t beg you,” you shrug and walk away.
He stands there, static, swallowed by the night. Eventually—whether it’s been a few seconds or several minutes, he isn’t sure—he pulls out a joint and lights it after a few tries, fighting against the night’s chilled air.
You stare at the half-empty drawer in your dorm room, the one that used to be crammed with his socks and random chargers, now just a sad echo of tangled wires and forgotten receipts. The door’s propped open with a textbook, and Cam’s there, shoving his stuff into a duffel bag like it’s no big deal, his jaw set in that way that screams he’s pissed but trying to play it cool. He’s wearing that faded black hoodie you always stole, the one that smells like his cologne mixed with whatever energy drink he chugged that day. “Come on,” he mutters, not looking at you, “this is bullshit. We can fix this.”
But you’re done. You’ve been done since you saw those messages pop up on his phone—late-night talks with her, the kind that twist your gut because they’re not just friendly, they’re the emotional crap that chips away at what you had. Not cheating, he swore up and down, but close enough that it shattered everything. You cross your arms, leaning against the desk, your voice flat. “Just take your shit and go, Cam. I’m not doing this again.”
He straightens up, tossing a pair of sneakers into the bag with more force than necessary, his eyes finally meeting yours—dark, intense, that cocky glint dimmed but not gone. “You’re really gonna throw away everything over some texts? We were in high school together, survived all that drama, and now what? One slip-up and you’re out?” He steps closer, his voice dropping, aggressive in that way that’s half plea, half demand. “Talk to me. Yell at me. Hit me if you want. But don’t just stand there like I’m some stranger.”
You shake your head, the ache in your chest sharp but familiar now, after weeks of trying to patch things up while he danced around the truth. “I tried talking. You didn’t listen. Go be emotionally involved with whoever the hell she is. I’m tired.” The words come out colder than you feel, but it’s the only way to keep from crumbling. He reaches out, his hand hovering like he wants to grab your arm, pull you in like he always did when things got heated, but he drops it, cursing under his breath. “Fine. Fuck this.” He zips the bag, slings it over his shoulder, and storms out, the door slamming behind him hard enough to rattle the picture frames on your wall.
That was three months ago. Now, you’re at this off-campus party, the kind where the music’s too loud and the air smells like cheap beer and whatever’s burning in the kitchen. Your friends dragged you here—same crew as always, the ones who awkwardly navigated the breakup by pretending it didn’t happen. You’re nursing a solo cup of something watered down, laughing at some dumb story Jake’s telling about his failed chem lab, when you feel it: that prickle on the back of your neck. Cam’s here. Of course he is.
You spot him across the room, leaning against the counter, chatting up a group with that smirk plastered on his face, the one that says he’s owning the space without even trying. He’s got a beer in hand, his free arm draped casually over some guy’s shoulder—probably one of the frat dudes—but his eyes flick to you every few seconds. It’s annoying how he does that, like he’s checking if you’re watching. You turn away, focusing on your friends, but the what-ifs start creeping in. What if you’d listened that day he packed up? What if he’d admitted it sooner, before it festered? What if you hadn’t let high school nostalgia blind you to the cracks?
From Cam’s side of the room, he’s pretending to listen to whatever bullshit story this guy’s spinning, but his mind’s elsewhere. You look good tonight—annoyingly good, in that effortless way that always got under his skin. He regrets it, the whole mess with her. It wasn’t even real, just stupid late-night venting when things with you felt too heavy, too real after jumping from high school straight into college chaos. But he fucked up, and now you’re over there, laughing like he doesn’t exist. He takes a swig of his beer, the bitterness matching the knot in his stomach. Part of him wants to march over, grab you by the waist like old times, and say screw it, let’s fix this. The other part—the cocky asshole part—thinks you should come to him first.
Hours blur by in that hazy party way—more laughs, a spilled drink that has everyone slipping on the floor, and you avoiding Cam’s side of the room like it’s a minefield. He doesn’t approach, but you catch him watching, that smirk fading into something broodier as the night wears on. Eventually, you bail with your roommates, the cool night air a relief after the stuffy house, your head buzzing from the liquor and unresolved tension.
A week slips past in the grind of college life—lectures that drag, group projects that suck the soul out of you, and late-night cramming sessions fueled by vending machine snacks. You and Cam orbit each other in shared spaces: the cafeteria where your friends overlap, the quad where he tosses a football with the guys while you pretend to study under a tree. No big confrontations, just these glancing moments—him nodding your way with that cocky lift of his chin, you rolling your eyes but feeling that pull anyway. The anger simmers low, mixed with what-ifs that hit at random: What if you’d never seen those messages? What if college hadn’t turned everything upside down?
Cam’s angle, that week is hell. He’s slamming through workouts at the gym, weights clanging louder than necessary, trying to sweat out the frustration. Seeing you around campus, acting like you’re fine without him—it pisses him off, but mostly at himself. He almost texts you a dozen times, fingers hovering over the screen, but deletes them all. Too soon, he thinks. Or maybe he’s just chicken shit. The cocky side wants to play it cool, wait you out, but the gentleman buried under the aggression knows he owes you more than games.
It’s Thursday evening when he finally cracks, cornering you in the library stacks after spotting you buried in a textbook. You’re flipping pages, highlighter in hand, when his shadow falls over the table. “Hey,” he says, voice low but insistent, that aggressive edge creeping in as he pulls out the chair across from you without asking. “We gotta talk. This ignoring shit is getting old.”
You don’t look up, capping the highlighter with a click that’s louder than necessary. “I’m not ignoring you. I’m studying. Big difference.” Your tone’s clipped, the pull from those glancing moments ignored as you gather your stuff, slinging your bag over your shoulder and brushing past him like he’s just another obstacle.
He follows, steps matching yours, his hand grazing your elbow—not grabbing, but close. “Come on, five minutes. That’s it.” But you’re already out the door, weaving through the crowd, leaving him standing there with a curse muttered under his breath.
Friday’s worse for him. He spots you in the cafeteria line, grabbing a tray and sliding in behind you. “Fancy meeting you here,” he quips, that cocky smirk in place, but his eyes are pleading. “Let me buy your lunch. Peace offering.”
You pay for your own sandwich, muttering “No thanks” as you head to your friends’ table, sitting with your back to him. He lingers at the counter, tray forgotten, frustration boiling over into a sharp exhale before he dumps it and storms out.
By Saturday, he’s tried twice more—once in the quad, yelling your name across the grass, only for you to keep walking; another time outside your dorm, leaning against the wall like he’s casual, but you slip past with headphones on, volume cranked. Each ignore hits him like a punch, the cocky facade cracking as he retreats to his room, slamming the door hard enough to shake the frame.
In Cam’s mind, that week’s a blur of failed attempts and self-loathing. He’s not used to this—chasing, begging without words. The gym sessions turn brutal, him pushing weights until his muscles scream, but it doesn’t drown out the replay of your cold shoulders. He wants to grab you, shake some sense into the situation, but the gentleman in him holds back, knowing he deserves the freeze-out. Still, the asshole part fumes: how long are you gonna make him chase you?
Sunday night hits the peak. Another party, same crowd, but Cam’s in a mood—downing shots like water, chasing them with hits from a joint passed around the backyard. He’s laughing too loud, arm slung over some buddy’s shoulder, but his eyes keep scanning for you. You’re there, keeping your distance, chatting with friends until the night’s winding down. That’s when it goes south: Cam stumbles, knocking over a table, his words slurring as he tries to play it off. “I’m good, man, for real.” But he’s not—face pale, swaying like he’s on a boat.
Your friends nudge you, because of course, you’re the one who knows his limits, his tells. “He’s trashed,” one says. “Someone’s gotta get him back.” And somehow, it falls on you—old habits, shared history, whatever. You sigh, grabbing his arm as he blinks at you, recognition dawning slow through the haze.
“The hell… you?” he mumbles, leaning into you heavier than intended, his breath a mix of whiskey and weed. “Missed you. Wait, no—don’t go.”
“Shut up and walk,” you mutter, half-dragging him out to the street, his weight solid against your side. He’s rambling now, aggressive bursts mixed with slurred apologies. “I fucked up ? But you’re… you’re it. Don’t ignore me forever.” His hand fumbles for yours, gripping too tight before loosening, that gentleman reflex kicking in even drunk.
The walk to his dorm’s a comedy of errors—he trips over nothing, laughs hysterically, then gets quiet, head hanging. “Why I do that shit? With her? Dumbass move.” You don’t respond, just keep him moving, unlocking his door with the key he fumbles out of his pocket. Inside, you dump him on the bed, grabbing a water bottle from his mini-fridge and shoving it at him. “Don’t puke on me, Cameron.”
He chugs half, spilling some, then flops back, eyes half-lidded but fixed on you. “Stay? Just… till I pass out.” It’s vulnerable, stripped of cockiness, but you shake your head.
“Go to sleep, Cam.” You turn to leave, but his hand catches your wrist—gentle this time, thumb brushing your skin.
“Please.” One word, rough and raw. You hesitate, then sit on the edge of the bed, waiting as his breathing evens out, the room quiet except for the hum of the fan. Once he’s out, you slip away, locking the door behind you, the whole mess leaving you exhausted but oddly softened.
⋆.𐙚 ̊⋆.𐙚 ̊⋆.𐙚 ̊
Same old one-shot idea. I had a headache writing this 🙃
Notes: you’re in a class with Cam and slowly realize there might to more to him than star football player
No use of y/n, fluff, sort of slow burn, you’re both in college, he’s so damn tall
Word count: 5179
Everyone on campus knew Cameron Cade, if not directly then as something of a campus celebrity. He almost seemed mythical, whispers about the football team’s golden boy, their soon to be NFL prodigy.That’s why it was so strange when you walked into your Intro to Ceramics class junior year and found The Cameron Cade sitting in the studio, scrolling through his phone. You hadn’t even considered that he might be the artistic type, so there were levels of shock to seeing him, not to mention that you had never actually been this close to him. You weren’t by any means one of Cade’s fangirls, but there was something that radiated from him that made you nervous. Nervous, but still strangely drawn to him.
You walked to take a seat on a stool close enough to his, but not too close. Trying to balance glancing at him without staring like a stalker while discreetly texting your best friend about your new classmate.
Your professor walked into the room, you’d had her for a different art class last year and had gotten along with her pretty well. After introducing herself, she had each student introduce themselves and tell the class why they chose this course. Half listening, you heard students mention wanting to minor in art, wanting to pick up a new hobby, and some other reasons you couldn’t quite recall. But there was one deep voice that broke through the haze of your boredom.
“Hey, my name is Cameron Cade, uh I mean honestly I need a fine arts elective to graduate so that’s why I’m here” He awkwardly smiled, hoping his candor didn’t offend the professor. It wasn’t that he disliked art, it just wasn’t football so there wasn’t really room for it in his life. Cameron seemed relieved when the professor smiled at his introduction and moved onto the next student.
An elective requirement cleared the question of why he was in the class for you, but you still found yourself curious about him. You weren’t really even sure what it was you wanted to know but you knew there was just something about him. You introduced yourself a few people later and eventually filed out of the studio with the rest of the students, but you couldn’t shake Cameron from your mind. It was ridiculous you told yourself, you literally knew next to nothing about this man. All you knew was that he was apparently really good at football, but as of that morning you now knew that his dimples made something in your chest tighten and that his eyes on you when you introduced yourself almost made you stumble. But no, you really didn’t know him at all.
You didn’t see him again until class the next week. Your professor asked students who had ceramics experience to raise their hands, so you did. You’d done a little bit in high school and found that you actually really enjoyed it so you would spend the evening at your local studio from time to time. She then asked for students who were entirely new to the craft to raise their hands, the remaining half of the class raised their hands, Cameron among them. Your professor had always been big on students learning from one another so you had an inkling of what was going to happen next. She went on to pair each experienced one with one who didn’t have any experience. Of course, seemingly by luck or misfortune of the draw, you were paired with Cameron.
You knew most of the girls, and the guys, in the class would’ve loved to be paired with him but he was the only person you absolutely did not want to have to work with. You didn’t have anything against him, but given the effect he had on you after barely glancing your way you didn’t know how you’d function as his partner. But you didn’t have time to figure out a way to work with someone else, because as you sat panicking the star quarterback was walking across the studio to your station.
You involuntarily sat up straighter as his green eyes locked on to yours. He extended a hand but it almost seemed awkwardly lowered for his hand to be level to yours on the studio stool. All 6’5” of him towering over you, you couldn’t help but mentally make a gentle giant joke.
“Hey I’m Cam” he had an air of calmness about him, a confidence that still wasn’t cocky. Your hand connected with his for just a little too long, his hand entirely wrapping around yours. You silently prayed that your hands weren’t sweaty enough for him to notice. As he sat down on the stool next to you, you introduced yourself but just as your name left your mouth, he responded
“I remember your name, you organized one of the fall semester galas last year right?” he phrased it as a question but in truth he was certain. You couldn’t believe he remembered that, you didn’t even remember him being there. Then again, event planning doesn’t leave much time for fawning over football players.
“Wow yeah, I did. I didn’t even realize you were there, or that you knew who planned it” you felt your face redden and had to break eye contact to try and keep your face from betraying your flattered disbelief. Cameron smiled slightly wider as he continued.
“Of course I did, it was great. Also you gave a really impressive introduction speech and I asked a couple of my friends about you.” Cam’s confidence slipped for only a moment, as if he hadn’t meant to say the last bit he rushed to ask “but uh, you said you’ve done ceramic work before?”
Yes, the class, you know about the class. You could wonder why Cameron Cade would ever ask about you later on, but for now, you put those questions away and gathered your thoughts. You explained your exploration of ceramics in high school and your casual enjoyment after. It’s not as if this could have really mattered to him, but he listened like it did. Like really listened, asking you questions about pottery and the things you liked about it. You began to find yourself rambling more and more the longer he looked at you, so you decided it was his turn to talk.
“But anyway, I know you said this class is a requirement but like why ceramics not music or drawing or something” he seemed to think for a moment, a breath of relief left your body as his focus momentarily shifted from the redness in your face you couldn’t figure out how to suppress and the eye contact you couldn’t hold for more than a few seconds.
He raised his hand to scratch his buzzed head as he thought, almost a cartoonish gesture you thought to yourself, but either way it seemed to help him formulate his answer “I’ve never really given much thought to anything that wasn’t football. My dad loved football when I was a kid so I guess I’ve kind of had tunnel vision all my life. I don’t know, I guess I figured the way your hands move to hold a football might be something like the way they’d move to make a pot.” as he conveyed his comparison, he seemed to get bashful once realizing how silly it was, a nervous chuckle leaving his mouth as he mumbled “I don’t know”
You smiled though and reassured him “No I get it, sports and art are very different but this seems most like what you know, what you’re good at” His smile widened at your response, glad to know you didn’t think he was a complete idiot. You stared at one another, smiling, for just a beat too long when your professor dismissed class. You said your goodbyes and found yourself far more excited for next week’s class than what you’d expected.
Walking into the studio next week, Cam was already there, waving you over to sit with him. You thought that maybe after talking to him, establishing that he was in fact a real person and not some elusive campus legend, you wouldn’t feel your heart beat a bit faster when you approached him. You couldn’t have been more wrong, in fact it was worse. Your heart not only started beating faster but felt like it was doing flips in your chest. After talking to him, you realized he wasn’t just the football team’s godsend but he was kind, and attentive, and smart, and you needed to stop there. You couldn’t let this new crush, though you were reluctant to call it that, throw you from your entire routine.
The two of you made small talk for a bit until the professor began class. She announced that your first project would be the inexperienced student throwing a piece at the instruction of the experienced student. She said that the true test of knowing a subject is teaching it to another, this way you would both grow your skills not only in pottery, but in communication as well. After her instructions, your fellow classmates shuffled to gather clay and aprons, then proceeded to claim a pottery wheel for their pairing.
Once you and Cam had grabbed a chunk of clay, you set down a place mat and began your teaching “So the first thing you have to do is wedge the clay, so you’re going to throw the clay onto the table and shape it into a cube. This helps get all of the air out of the clay, because if you fire it with air bubbles in it, it will literally explode in the kiln and ruin all the other pieces in there too.” Cam’s undivided attention on you made you nervous, but you were determined to appear unshaken. One of the reasons you loved ceramics was because the clay in your hands steadied your mind. So you grabbed the clay and threw it on the table a few times to demonstrate before handing it to Cam so that he could do the same. You weren’t sure but somehow you forgot that the man towering over you might not understand the force with which he was supposed to throw the clay, especially given how solid the block seemed.
Without meaning to, he damn near hurled the clay onto the table. The thud resounded throughout the studio making other students stop what they were doing to search for the source of the noise. The clay sitting on the table had morphed from a cube into more of a slab. “Oh shit! I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to do that, that's my fault I-” apologies flowing from his mouth as he was seeming mortified at the idea of disappointing you, but what started as surprise morphed into an echoing laugh on your part. Causing the students who just resumed their work to look over at your table again before once again returning to their own pieces. His face seemed to soften as he realized you weren’t upset as that smile that was plastered on posters all over campus began to spread across his face. Maybe it was just a trick of the camera, but this smile felt more authentic, more real. Reaching his green eyes and accentuating his dimples on either side of his mouth.
Through laughter you sputtered “No, you're so good, I should’ve told you how hard to throw it, like you’re fucking massive of course you almost broke the table.” Your comments on his height almost seemed to make him shrink, to become shy. As you came down from your laughing fit, you explained to him that you don’t have to put much force behind the throw, you can honestly let gravity do most of the work. His second attempt was far more successful, in fact you thought he actually might be good at this. You would never tell him that though, for fear of slipping up and admitting that somewhere in the back of your mind you also thought he might be good at other things too.
Once he’d properly wedged the clay, the two of you moved over to the wheel. You tried to explain how to properly shape clay on the wheel but it wasn’t the easiest thing to explain in words. The clay kept spinning off center, it even flew off the wheel once. Realizing that verbal instruction wouldn’t do much “get up” you said. Instantly he did exactly what you said, standing up from the stool and waiting for your next instruction. You sat down on the wheel and started it slowly, shaping the clay with a firm enough hand to get the form you wanted, but soft enough to not to push the clay off the wheel. You stopped spinning to look up at Cam, but he sort of just stared at you with a nearly blank, but inquisitive, look on his face. You were probably wrong, but you thought you saw a small smiling tugging at the corners of his moth. Your instructions were better when you were physically going through the steps at the same time so you asked Cam “You wanna try again”
“Uhhh-” he began, but before he could say anymore the professor’s voice interjected over his own. She announced that this first piece would be due at the end of next class, it didn’t have to be perfect, just something the inexperienced student had begun to work on. You realized that you and Cam didn’t have something Cam made to present and this boy was not about to get in the way of your grades. “I don’t think we’re gonna have enough time to finish just during next week’s class, would you want to meet here to work on it some other time?” You would’ve never known it but Cam’s heart was doing its own gymnastics routine as he posed the question, the idea of spending time alone with you as terrifying as it was exciting.
“Um yeah, yeah that sounds good” fidgeting with the hem of your shirt as you responded. The two of you agreed to meet Thursday at 6 in the studio, there weren’t any classes at that time so you should have the place all to yourselves.You said your goodbyes and as soon as you were out of his eyeline you quite literally sprinted to your friends dorm. When you finally stood in front of her door, doubled over and breathless you barely felt like you had the energy to knock, but you did.
“My god, did you get hit by a truck?” she exclaimed in a half serious, half joking tone. You stumbled into her room and immediately laid flat on her bed “Yeah no ok, just make yourself comfortable I guess” She chuckled as she playfully reprimanded you. After catching your breath and kind of putting your thoughts together, words began to spill from your mouth like a river with a broken dam, you couldn’t stop or slow down,
“Dude this is actually insane like remember I told you Cameron Cade is in my class?” you didn’t wait for an answer as you hastily continued your story “Well me and him got partnered up for this project and its actually stupid how beautiful he is like obviously he’s beautiful he’s quite literally the university’s poster boy but like there’s something about him when he’s a real person, he’s funny and sweet and he’s got this dumbass smile like I literally can’t even look at him when he does it, and these dimples, god, but anyway we didn’t finish the project in time so we’re meeting up on Thursday to work on it together and like what if I can’t be alone with him what if I embarrass myself I mean-” upon noticing you hadn’t taken a single breath since you started talking your best friend interrupted you, smiling putting her hands on your shoulders as she said your name.
“Ok slow down, take a second to breathe” the two of you breathed together, steadying yourself next to her. After making sure you were ok, she responded in the way that only a best friend could. She pointed at you and sang “OOOOOOOOH YOU HAVE A CRUUUUUUSSSSSHHHH” She placed her hands back on your shoulders as she began to shake you while she giggled and teased you. You couldn’t help but laugh, she always knew exactly what you needed in the moment.
“I do not!” you insisted, pushing her away. She stopped her taunting and looked at you incredulously, even a blind person could have seen the lie on your face. “Ok maybe I do…” you were attempting to suppress the smile on your face but failed miserably. “I don’t know, I just don’t want to embarrass myself or do something stupid in front of him. Also I mean everyone on campus damn near worships him like why would I have a chance?” Your best friend kissed her teeth, knowing what you were saying was utterly ridiculous
“You won’t embarrass yourself, come on, he’s just a guy. Also be so serious yeah everyone on this campus worships him, but you’re not everybody. I don’t pick just any random to be my best friend, I have a reputation to uphold” she commented, nudging you as she sat a little bit straighter, illustrating this supposed reputation she was maintaining. Everything was always better after talking to her. The two of you spent the rest of the day in her dorm, watching shows, occasionally showing the other a tiktok of one of Cam’s plays on the field. By the time you retired to your own room, you realized the buzz you felt about Thursday was settling in you. Less anxious, more anticipatory than anything else.
Classes on Thursday drudged on, it felt as if every minute until 6pm was extended to an hour each, but finally 6 lazily rolled around. You walked from the library to the studio, wondering if you or Cam would be there first. As you opened the door, you noted that the answer was him. You figured the rigidness of lifelong training probably instilled punctuality into his core. He sat at a desk, a block of clay already wedged. Specks of gray clay dried on his hands and apron, he’d also managed to get some on his stupidly gorgeous face somehow.
“Well would you look at that you prepped the clay without breaking anything.” smiling as he looked up at you.
“Yeah you know, I’m not just good on the field” there it was, that confidence you noticed when you’d first met. You assumed it was a cover, as it was for most people, but something about his was real, genuine. You jabbed his side with your elbow as if to remind him of his first attempt at wedging. The two of you moved over to a wheel. You centered the clay for him and asked
“K, you ready?” you looked up at him expectantly but he seemed suddenly uncertain.
“Actually could you show me one more time?” but you realized that just watching you wouldn’t do anything. He was an athlete, he needed a more hands on approach. You knew it was a cliche in almost every rom com from the 90s, but whose to say, maybe they were on to something? Trying to figure out the most normal way of phrasing it you suggested
“You know what, I think you’ll learn better with a more physical approach. I know this is going to sound weird but I really do think that you sitting behind me as I throw would help your progress.” You prayed he didn’t just take this as you making some desperate pass at him. You could see every bright white tooth of his in the grin that grew across his face upon hearing your suggestion. He comically threw his hands in the air and sighed
“Whatever the teacher says goes I guess” you took your seat behind the wheel as he pulled up a second stool behind you. Once he sat behind you, it almost felt as if his body cloaked yours. You weren’t touching yet but he had no problem seeing over your head, you began to imagine what it would feel like if he moved just an inch closer. You turned the wheel on and began to explain the basics of throwing, pressure, hand positioning, things like that. Once you were ready to begin shaping the clay you directed him
“Ok, so put your hands over mine so that you can get a feel of the shape your hands need to make and the pressure you need to apply” He obeyed silently, carefully placing his hands over yours. You felt a shock radiate through your body at his touch, his broad hands effortlessly enveloping yours. He held your hands in his softly, but with purpose, ensuring he didn’t cross a line. As you moved your hands entirely in sync, pulling the clay up then pushing it back down a few times, gently placing two fingers in the center of the clay at the top. Delicately and slowly pressing down and running your fingers along the smooth, widening interior while your other hand held the cool outside walls steady. Throughout all of this as his hands stayed overlaid with yours, mimicking your movements perfectly your mind couldn’t help but wander. At one point he leaned forward and you felt his chest just barely press against your back. He mumbled an apology but as he began to straighten his posture you leaned back, shifting your weight just slightly. “No it’s ok” you almost whispered, afraid the moment was so delicate that it could be broken by sound alone.
Then suddenly the moment was broken, but not by sound, by the lights. They must’ve run on a timer, because as soon as the clock hit 9 the two of you were left in pitch black. Bodies still pressed together, suddenly aware of the heat shared between the two of you. Both of you infinitely more aware of his breath on your neck, the smell of your perfume mingled with the earthy scent of clay, the skin on your back pressed against his torso only separated by the thin cotton layers of your clothing. Warmth rushing to your cheeks as you became conscious of his contact. You jumped up, scrambling for your phone to light the pitch black studio. When you pointed the light towards him, he couldn’t conceal a smile, much less the fact that he was trying to conceal it. You felt caught somehow, exposed and vulnerable. You shifted your focus from the mouth that was centimeters from your neck only moments ago to the vase the two of you had just made.
“You did a really good job though, so I mean we’re done for now, but nice work” You felt a coldness on the outside of your hands where his palms had been, a chill on your back where his heartbeat had been. Amused by your almost impressive lack of tact, his smile was no longer poorly concealed, but now spread across his face, reaching his light eyes. He seemed almost proud at how flustered you were.
He shrugged your compliment off, feigning nonchalance “Yeah you know, I do what I do.” That dumbass smile stayed on his face even after you rolled your eyes.
“Alright let’s not get too ahead of ourselves now” You retort, softly placing your hand on his bicep to playfully push him away from you.
He pretended to stumble back a few steps, as if you’d actually hurt him. He held the spot on his arm where you hit him, knitting together his eyebrows he groaned “Ow, you know if I bruise and I can’t play the next game I’m telling coach it’s your fault.” You finally smiled, even though you would never admit that you did actually think he was really funny. The two of you quietly cleaned up the studio before you left, but a comfortable silence. Far more comfortable than it should have been with a guy you’d only met a couple weeks ago. Then again that same guy was all pressed up against you a few minutes ago, so maybe the things that “should be” didn’t exactly apply. You exchanged goodnights and a hug that lasted just a bit too long before you went your separate ways for the night.
As soon as you got home you facetimed your best friend to tell her everything that happened that night. The two of you stayed up for nearly two hours giggling and echoing parts of your story back to one another. When you finally went to bed, you felt a soft smile settle on your face. A swirling contentment found its place in your chest, that was actually the best sleep you’d had in a good minute.
The next morning you were able to sleep in since you didn’t have any morning classes. You slowly stretched and opened your eyes, taking in the sunlight peeking through your blinds. You blinked the sleep from your eyes as you pulled your phone off the charger. You always slept with your phone on DND so you swiped up to see the notifications you received throughout the night. 4 new emails, an assignment was graded, some promo text from a clothing brand you've subscribed to, all of these were pretty typical but there was one banner that caught your eye. “Cameron Cade started following you.” You couldn’t believe it but you actually giggled and kicked your feet just like in the movies. Damn what was this guy doing to you?
Once you followed him back you proceeded to stalk his account, of course you’d done it after that first class with him but it was different now. His bio simply read “HIM” his profile picture was a picture of him celebrating after a game, which had to be something one of his friends took. You scrolled through his posts, there were pictures of him with his family, with his team, with his friends. Honestly it was all really sweet, though there was the occasional thirst trap only a college athlete could get away with. You caught yourself checking the comments to see if he responded to any girls before reminding yourself that one weird night in a studio didn’t have to mean anything, but hopefully it did.
Before you knew it, it was time to head to the studio again. Punctual as ever, Cameron was there before you, holding the pot the two of you had made. When his green eyes met yours, it felt just like that night in the studio. The two of you, alone, close and warm. For a moment it was like there was no one else in the studio. You sat next to him and joked “So what, you cyber-stalking me now, Cade?”
He gently placed the vase down and like the smartass he was, he retorted “I mean I’m pretty sure I got a follow back and isn’t the whole thing about stalking that it’s one sided?” Knitting his eyebrows in faux confusion, leaning just a bit closer to you.
“I mean it would’ve been rude not to follow back, I mean especially because I know how much you idolize me” responding to him with the same half-joking tone. Leaning in exactly as much as he had.
He investigated your face, his eyes scanning yours, then down to your nose and mouth. The two of you sat there for a moment, you willed the blood rushing to your cheeks to slow. You were close enough to smell his cologne as he sat up, basking in his newfound realization that he could in fact make you nervous, very nervous. “Do you want me to idolize you?” he asked quietly enough for you to still hear your heartbeat in your ears.
That was when the professor made her way to your station. She investigated the vase asking how the two of you felt about the assignment. “I really enjoyed it, I realized that over the weekend I kept thinking about it, wanting to be back in the studio.” Your professor smiled at Cameron’s words but to you they had a separate meaning. Was it you he kept thinking of over the weekend? It had to be, you’d been thinking of him of course. The two of you received an A on the assignment. You realized it might’ve been the first time you completed an assignment without thinking about the grade you’d get, all you’d thought about was him.
“So, how would you feel about celebrating our first project this week? Maybe dinner?” There was that hint of nervousness from when he had admitted to asking about you last year, though it still didn’t seem to contradict his self-assuredness. He didn’t take his eyes off you as he awaited your answer, it’s not like he was waiting that long of course.
“Wait a minute is the number one college football player, Cameron Cade, asking me on a date”
“Yeah something like that”
“I’d love to get dinner actually”
The two of you exchanged numbers, an electricity humming in the air for the rest of class. When class was dismissed instead of your usual goodbye, Cameron hugged you. Rather than just his hands over yours, his embrace blanketed your body. Warm and comfortable, when he pulled away you missed his arms around you even after just a moment of contact. You walked back to your dorm humming, silently thanking the University for requiring Cameron to take a fine arts course.
That weekend, Cam arrived at your door with flowers and a fresh cut. He opened the car door for you and let you be on aux. He mixed chivalry with modernity in a perfect way, opening doors for you but letting you speak to the waiter first. Picking up the check before you’d even realized it was there and when you complained he said you could get it the next time, even though he knew he would never let that be the case. Somehow 3 hours whirled by and you were back at your doorstep, saying goodnight.
The streetlights illuminated his towering physique, light curling along his biceps. Tracing the sharpness of his jawline. You unlocked your door, opening it slightly before realizing that wasn’t how you wanted to end the night. You stepped towards him, focusing your sight on his eyes rather than his lips. Once you were barely an inch from him, you felt yourself stand on your tippy toes as he wrapped a strong arm around your waist. Like clay, your lips melding into one another. The two of you smoothly merging into one, you both somehow still while the rest of the world seemed to spin on a wheel. You’d taught the last lesson, but now you had a feeling he was ready to take the lead.
Author's Note: Thank you guys so much for the love and support on pt.1, I'm so so grateful y'all loved it! I saw some requests for part two and I'm officially done with classes and on thanksgiving break now! Also, sorry for the shitty summary… I had no idea what to put. I literally wrote this in 3 hours, sorry for grammar or spelling mistakes. I also spammed Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls on repeat while I wrote this lmao.
Read Part One Here: Part One
Summary: After months of misery and agony for Cameron and almost a year since the breakup, Isaiah decides he’s had enough of his constant moping and pissy attitudes with everyone just because Siday cut him off for good. What happens when Cameron finally decides to fight for a second chance? Will he get his second chance? Will Siday finally give in?
Warnings: Angst with happy ending, use of n-word, cussing, cameron yearning, mentions of cheating.
Face Claim: Tems as Siday
Word Count: 2.9K (Sorry I got so carried away…whoops)
Cameron was at the compound moping for the fifth time this week, Isaiah was fed up with him snapping at everyone more than usual. He doesn’t know what happened between Siday and Cameron, but he wanted it to go back to normal. With the occasional snaps and outburst from Cam, he used to typically joke around with him and the other guys. But, he hasn’t been the same for awhile now, so something must’ve happened with Siday.
When they first started dating, Cameron was on his A-Game—always trying to be better and showing up in a good mood, hell, he was even friendly with the guys—woud he still snap at them? Yeah sure, but not nearly as much as he does now. Now, Cameron just stays to himself—he doesn’t bother talking to anyone and when he does, it typically turns into pushing and shoving. He comes in with his headphones on and gets to work, still managing to mope around the whole entire time. Every time Isaiah would see him looking like a kicked puppy, it would piss him off. Cameron wasn’t doing anything to help himself—he wasn’t trying to get over Siday, he was just constantly in a melancholy mood. Isaiah had enough of it, if he wasn’t going to get over Siday or try to—then he needed to try and fix whatever bullshit went down between the two of them.
“Cade get over here, lemme talk to you…” Isaiah calls out from across the room, his arms folding across his chest with a stern look plastered on his face. Cameron jogs over to him and wipes the sweat off of his forehead with the bottom of his shirt, “What’s up?” he says in a quiet, monotone voice. Isaiah squints at him and gives him a judgmental once-over.
“Why you been acting like you hate the world? You and Siday good? Cause I’m sick of you walking around pissy n’ shit, you makin’ me pissy, nigga” Isaiah tried his best to keep his tone as monotone as possible, but the thought of Cameron walking around all pissy just irritates him. Cameron purses his lips and runs his hands down his face with a sigh, looking down at the ground and back up at Isaiah with a shrug, “Nah, man, she broke up with me a few months ago.” Cameron was trying to act nonchalant but it wasn’t working because he had already been walking around the compound for months all depressed.
Isaiah nods and tilts his head, acting like he didn’t know, “Whatchu do man? Cause’ Siday was a good woman, man, sweetest person I ever met.” He wasn’t one to be in other people’s personal lives, but when it’s messing with the other players and his work, he was going to get to the bottom of it. “I fucked up, bro, I was being a dickhead, I–I, uh, had cheated on her a few times with a few girls…some girl was blowing my phone up when I was in the shower, Siday saw it and lost her shit.” Cameron rubbed his hand over his mouth and shook his head—hearing it aloud just makes him more angry at himself. He knew Isaiah wasn’t going for that shit—he had met Siday more than a handful of times and she was always the kindest person in the room. She was good to Cameron—helped motivate him and pushed him to be and get better.
“C’mon man…” Isaiah says with a shake of his own head, with nothing but disappointment written all over his face, which was expected, he paused and sighed before speaking, “So, you just gon’ let her go? You ain’t try and beg for forgiveness? You gotta be an idiot, Cameron, you don’t let a good woman like that get away from you.”
Cameron’s face twitches in irritation, feeling himself getting a little fed up with Isaiah asking and pointing out the obvious. “Yeah, man, I tried—Siday don’t give out second chances, I already pled my case…told her if she ever changed her mind, she got my number. Did all I could.” he says with a shrug of his shoulders, his hands being shoved into his pockets with a nonchalant look on his face. Isaiah has to fight the urge to groan in his face, but he does roll his eyes in annoyance—this boy is too damn proud for his own good. “Nigga…you cheated on her, why the fuck would she call your number?! She’s not gon’ wanna call you. You gotta show her your a changed man, that you realize how bad you fucked up, and how you’re gon’ show it to her, you understand me?”
Cameron rolls his own eyes and tilts his head with an irritated look making its way to his face. “How the fuck am I supposed to do any of that if she won’t even speak to me?! She don’t want nothin’ to do wit’ me, bro." Cam says matter-of-factly as he throws his arms up in defense, cocking his neck forward slightly. Siday and Cameron had run into each other a few times out in town and whenever she saw him, regardless of her destination, she turned around and went the complete opposite way—not wanting to run into him in any kind of way.
“You know where the girl lives, you know what she likes, what she doesn’t, you know her favorite places, flowers—this is your woman. If you want her back, you gotta work for it. Stop making excuses,” Isaiah says with a pat on Cameron’s shoulder, disappointment and irritation laced throughout his face. “Now, get outta my face and go home, go figure yo’ shit out. Don’t come back til’ you do—I’m sick of seeing you look pathetic, Cade.”
So, that’s what Cameron decided to do—well he left, but he didn’t go home. Instead, he found himself in front of Siday’s apartment with a bouquet, pink roses and baby’s breath—her favorite flowers, hoping she was home. He stood there for a moment, looking down at the flowers and back at the door, his heart racing a mile a second. When he finally mustered up the courage to knock on the door, it was quiet at first—he didn’t hear any movement from behind the door. So, he knocked again, a little harder this time because maybe she didn’t hear it the first time. He was going to give up, but then he heard her voice on the other side and it shot what felt like electric shocks through his body. He straightened his posture quickly and tried to look as normal as possible and not like he was mortified that she would slam the door in his face.
Siday didn’t hear the first knocks, she was on the couch in the living room, studying for an exam she had coming up. The second knock came through loud and she called out a small, “coming!” as she laid her laptop and notebook on the table. She walked over to the door, looking through the peephole before unlocking the door and opening it. ‘No fucking way’ she thought. She contemplated opening the door for a moment, really wanting to just pretend she never saw him at her door and that she wasn’t home, but she already announced herself. Siday unlocked the door and slowly opened the door, leaning on her hip with both hands on the doorknob—ready to slam it shut in his face, until she saw the flowers. Her favorite flowers.
Cameron’s eyes practically fell out of his head at the sight of her when she opened the door, he had almost forgotten how alluring she was. He had forgotten how to speak, his mind racing with so many thoughts, his eyes taking every feature of hers that he had missed so much. From the beauty marks littered all over her face, to the glow of her brown skin, all the way down to each and every curve he loved to run his hands over. Siday was looking around like she was being pranked, he had been standing there with a bewildered look on his face, not saying a single word. She rolled her eyes and went to slam the door in his face but that was quickly stopped before she could even fully step back—Cameron’s hand slamming against the door with his free hand and giving her an apologetic look.
“Wait—Siday, I–uh. I got you these…” he says in a quiet voice, holding out the bouquet towards her, hoping she doesn’t take them and beat him to a pulp with them. She had every right to, he doesn’t even know how he mustered up the courage to actually come here, but he’s here now, and he’s not going to give up. He’s going to get Siday back.
Siday looks up at him with a small squint, her face scrunching with confusion but slowly she grabs the flowers out of his hand—their fingers brushing against each other’s. Was she still pissed at him? Yes. Has she forgiven him? Absolutely not. But, did that touch make all her nerves light on fire and make butterflies erupt in her stomach? Unfortunately. “Thanks…You came here to give me flowers? That’s it?”
She asks in a weary, but soft voice.
Cameron silently cheered as she took the flowers from him and didn’t chuck them back at him, he clears his throat and rubs his hands down his sides, flexing and spreading them while speaking, “No! No—um, I wanna talk to you, if that’s good with you?” He knew he sounded so pathetic, and it was killing him. He was Cameron Cade—he never thought there would be a day where he was going to beg a girl to let him come back, but here he is. But, he loved Siday, he would do whatever it took to get her back—Isaiah’s words playing back in his head as he looked at her.
Siday sighed and clutched the flowers a little tighter as she tilted her head with a deadpan look on her face—feeling a little irritated. She didn’t believe in second chances, and she knew that’s what Cameron came here to talk about, why else would he bring flowers to his ex-girlfriend who he hadn’t spoken to in literal months. “About what, Cameron?” she asks in a slightly irritated, but defeated voice—her eyes scanning his face for any sign that this was a sick joke his friends had put him up to.
“I miss you, Sida–” She groaned and attempted to slam the door in his face again, but his hand caught it before she could, “Please, just—hear me out, Sid. Can I come in, please? I don’t wanna have this conversation in the hallway…” he said with his hand still resting on the door, hoping she wouldn’t actually close it. But, Siday sighed and stepped back while opening the door more—a silent invitation for him to come in.
Cameron silently thanked whoever his guardian angel was that day because every other time he had been near her, she completely ran away. He walked into her apartment and waited for her to move first, watching as she closed and locked the door, turning around and walking toward the kitchen to put the flowers in a vase. Cameron sat down on the same stool he sat in all those months ago while she cleaned up cuts and gashes from that fight, he watched her grab the scissors and the vase, prepping the flowers to go in the vase, “Talk, Cameron, you ain’t come here to stare at me all night.” she says in a quiet voice as she looks down at the flowers.
He nods and clasps his hands together on the counter—he could’ve sat there and stared at her all night if she would’ve let him, but that wasn’t the point, “Right—sorry. Like I was saying, I miss you bad, Siday. I ain’t been the same since—and I–I know it’s my fault. I did more than fuck up, Siday I ruined one of the best things to ever happen to me, and I feel the consequences of it every day.” Siday listens with an unreadable expression, but on the inside her still broken heart is clenching and trying to escape out of her chest, “Yeah, well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that, Cameron.” she says in a flat tone as she looks up at him and shrugs.
Cameron bites the inside of his cheek before figuring out how he’s supposed to beg her for forgiveness, or at least let him try to show her he wants to be different—for her. He runs a hand over his head and down his face with a frustrated sigh, mostly with himself for not preparing what he was going to say to her. So, he got up and walked around the counter and over to her, standing right beside her—using his finger to turn her chin to look up at him. He looks into her eyes and sees nothing but exhaustion and annoyance.
“Siday, I love you, okay? I want to be back in yo’ life—I can’t stand not seeing you every day. I wanna hear yo’ voice, laugh, all of it. I’m tired of waking up and not seeing you next to me, tired of not seeing those pretty ass eyes lookin’ at me like I created the fuckin’ ground we walk on— I want my girl back, bro, I know how bad I fucked up—and I know it’s hard to come back from that, but please, just let me prove it to you Siday, I can be better for you.”
Siday almost fell straight into it—almost folded immediately when he turned her head to face him. She hated when he did that when they used to fight, that’s all it took to turn the dial back on her frustration. But, not this time, she knew better. She spent months reflecting on the year they dated, the arguments, the soft moments, the bad moments, all of it. “You cheated on me, Cameron. You stepped outside of our relationship I don’t even know how many times, and never thought to break it off with me or tell me. You got caught, and now you’re sorry. I’m supposed to believe you changed? That you won’t do it again? You know I’m not for second chances, so what makes you think I’ll give you one? Why should I even give you one? I’m sure there’s someone out there that wouldn’t even think about doing that to me—wouldn’t make me a second option.”
Cameron’s fingers still were gripping her chin—he’s surprised she didn’t even slap his hand away. Her words did though, his jaw clenched as he listened to her. The thought of Siday with someone else, the thought of them treating her better than Cameron did, sends a rush of jealousy through him but he pushes it down instead of relishing in it at that moment. He had thought about it plenty of times since their breakup; whether or not she had moved on and found someone new—someone better, someone that wouldn’t even think about looking at another woman.“I know. I can’t even tell you how sorry I am, there ain’t even enough words in the dictionary to tell you how sorry I am. But, I can show you. Give me the chance to prove it to you—prove that I’m sorry. One chance. If you decide you wanted nothing to do with me ever again and want me to go fuck myself—I will. I’ll leave you alone. Just lemme prove it to you, Sid. I love you, okay? I can’t live with myself knowing I ain’t try to get you back, knowing that I let you slip away.”
Cameron didn’t even know it, but a tear had fallen down his cheek—he’d never cried in front of anyone before and he never intended to. But, something about Siday and the thought of never getting to hold her, kiss her, hear her laugh, or see her smile, was tearing him up inside. He had to try. And, he felt like he had the best luck in the world, like his good karma was catching up to him because by the grace of whatever God—Siday’s shoulders drop and she frowns as she watches the tear fall, reaching up and wiping it gently. “Fine. One chance. You fuck up? I’m done with you—for good, you understand?” she asks in a soft, but firm voice.
Cameron nods immediately and lets out a breath he had been holding while waiting for her to speak, “I understand. I won’t, I swear, Siday. You won’t regret this…” he says in a relieved, joyous voice. Siday wants to laugh at how excited he sounds, but she won’t give him that satisfaction yet. Instead she nods and turns back to the flowers—trying to calm her nerves and emotions that are all bubbling back up from all those months ago, “Good.”
