20. Chapter 20
Chapter 20
Matt
I pulled a coin from my pocket when we parked in front of the restaurant and held it out to Riley. “Okay, we have two decisions to make.” I pressed the coin into her outstretched hand. “Choice number one, heads we get food to go and tails we eat here.”
She tossed the coin in the air, and I caught it, covering it with my hand. My eyes fell to her mouth, lips still a little swollen from how hard she kissed me, pink lipstick faintly smudged around the outline of her mouth despite her efforts to clean it up. She smiled when I moved my hand away to reveal the coin. My eyes dropped to the way the fabric of the dress hugged her chest. I forced myself to look away, reminding myself that the rules said I couldn’t touch her there yet, no matter how much I wanted to. I looked at the coin in my open palm, heads face up. “Guess I’m going to have to find another way to show you off.” I placed the coin back in her hand and pulled out my phone to pull up the restaurant website.
“What is the second decision?” She asked me as she ran her thumb over the metal.
I kept my eyes fixed on my phone, too scared to see how she would react. She had practically slammed her mouth against mine when I asked to kiss her earlier without any hint of fear in her eyes, but I couldn’t shake the fear that she may have changed her mind in the time since. “I get to kiss you whenever I want to tonight or we go back to the rules, you call it.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shake her head. “I want you to kiss me whenever you want to.” There was no hesitation in her response, just blunt honesty. I looked over at her, forcing my eyes to stay on her face and not any lower. God, that dress was so distracting. Her mouth pulled tight with worry. I brushed my thumb against one corner of her mouth until she relaxed.
“Just for tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll revisit the rule,” I said.
Riley shook her head again. “Just for tonight, if you want. Starting tomorrow, we get a kiss hello and a kiss goodbye, at minimum. We’re not going back to nothing.” Her eyes were on my mouth, her tongue flicking out over her lips.
Fuck it. Fuck these rules. I wanted to toss the rule out completely, to kiss and touch her however we both wanted without a stupid rule. The only rule should be that we did whatever the other was comfortable with. But Riley struggled with setting boundaries, and I knew the clear rules between us made her feel safe. “Okay, kissing whenever we want to from now on. The rule changes to nothing more than kissing.” I offered my hand to shake on the rule change like we had done during our other discussions setting rules for whatever this was.
She laughed and leaned over the center console. “Kiss on it or no deal.”
I met her over the console but kept my mouth away from her. My hands smoothed over the goosebumps on her arms and shoulders, my thumbs teasing the thin straps of her dress while I studied her face for any sign of being uncomfortable. She scraped her teeth over her bottom lip, pupils flaring as she stared at my mouth. I twisted one thumb in a strap, fighting the urge to drag it down.
“Matt,” my name left her lips as a breathy whine, and she twisted my tie around her hands to pull me forward to close the distance. Did she have any idea how sexy she sounded, how she was making me feel? “Please.”
I fought against her tug to pull me closer, drinking in how much she wanted me, how unashamed she was about it because she felt safe with me. I love her, the thought crashed through me. I swallowed hard to keep the words to myself. Riley was it for me, and I wished she could see that. I wish she understood that she was safe to fall, that I wasn’t going anywhere. “I just need to take in this moment,” I said.
Her eyes flashed with panic before dropping away from me. Did she know what I was thinking? “I need you to kiss me again,” she finally said, lifting her eyes to meet mine again.
“Whatever you need.” I started with a soft peck of my lips against hers, pretending to pull away after. Riley made a noise of protest and leaned into me, her mouth chasing mine. I let her draw it out into a soft languid kiss.
“I could sit here and kiss you all night, but I would really like to move this date past being in my car,” I said, forcing myself to pull away from her again. I untangled my hands from her hair and dress, reaching for my phone and the coin in my lap, shifting to hide that I was hard again. “Heads you pick our food, and tails I pick.”
***
I drove with my right hand squeezing Riley’s soft thigh while she flipped the coin to decide which way we needed to turn next. She was all smiles this time, not even a hint of the panic from earlier on her face. We pulled into the city park filled with people with blankets spread over the grass all facing a giant screen.
“Hmm, movie night in the park. I feel like you planned this,” Riley said and reached for the door handle.
“Wait!” I jumped out and came around to open her door. I lifted the food bag from her hand and sat it on the roof of the car so I could pull her into my arms. I kissed her, relishing the feeling of her pressed against me completely this time. Like everything always did with her, it felt like something we had done a thousand times. My body buzzed from the relief of having her back in my arms. Kissing her, holding her, made me feel like I didn’t even know what a real kiss felt like before her.
“I planned for the possibility,” I admitted when we broke apart. Riley wrapped her arms around herself and shivered slightly. I pulled her jacket from her seat and wrapped it around her shoulders, holding it steady as she slipped her arms into the sleeves.
Riley watched me, her hands clutching her jacket to hold it closed over her stomach, as I pulled blankets and pillows from the back seat of the car. She looked down at the heeled shoes she wore, grinding the edge of one heel against the pavement before she bent down to her tote bag on the floorboard. She supported herself against the roof of the car as she kicked off the heels and replaced them with simple flats.
Once everything was gathered in our arms, I led her to a spot as far away from everyone else as we could get. I spread the blanket across the softest patch of grass I could find, then helped Riley sit down. I sat behind her, my legs stretched out on each side of her and pulled her back to rest against my chest.
“Are you going to be able to eat like this?” she asked. She pulled the to-go containers from the bag.
I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and pressed a kiss against the crown of her head. “I can make it work,” I assured her. I pulled a piece of creased notebook paper from the pocket of my shirt, smoothing it out and laying it on the blanket next to us. The words were smudged from how many times I had folded and unfolded the page, adding things to the list as I thought of them.
“What’s this?” Riley picked it up.
“Everything I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
She squeezed my leg before twisting around so we were facing each other while she looked over the list. It was mostly getting to know you things, like questions about our parents and childhood, bucket lists, travel dreams, and various favorites. After our first date we had skipped a lot of learning about each other, never revisiting the subjects we hadn’t covered that day.
“How have we not talked about all of this?” Riley’s eyes were wide when she looked up at me.
“I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like we skipped over all the early dating subjects and straight to acting like people that have known each other forever.”
We’d slipped into a routine focused on the now and only filled in the blanks of the past when necessary. I didn’t know her parents’ names, or the names of her brother and sister-in-law. I had never told her about Oliver or my sisters and their husbands aside from the fact that they existed. I didn’t know her middle name. We hadn’t talked much about what our childhoods were like.
“Matt, what’s your middle name?” Riley asked, the paper fluttering from her hand back to the blanket.
“My middle name is Matthew.” Her eyes were so wide they looked like they might pop out of her head. “I go by Matt, but my first name is Rupert,” I explained.
“Holy shit. I should have known that already. How did I not know that?”
I shrugged and smiled. “I think that’s more my fault than yours.” I wrapped her right hand in mine and shook it, her arm flopping around as I did. “Hi, I’m Rupert Matthew Fletcher Junior. What’s your name, beautiful?”
She tried to fight back the laugh that bubbled out of her, the look of panic wiped from her face. “Riley Elaine Harrison. I’m not a Junior but I do share my mom’s middle name.”
We recapped our parent’s names and professions for each other. I told her about Oliver and how we had drifted apart when I moved away but were closer now that I had moved back. I told her how my parents never shied away from showing their kids the good and bad sides of marriage and always used any moment they could to teach us about healthy relationships. That they were strong believers in PDA and that’s probably where I’d gotten it from.
Riley’s parents were the opposite. They had married young and had all three of their kids early in their marriage. They both came from divorced parents and struggled with a lack of communication skills. They tried their best to hide it from them, but there were many nights of Emery climbing into Riley’s bed because of their fighting. It wasn’t until they were all in high school and her parents on the verge of divorce that they finally tried marriage counseling. Their marriage was stronger now, but it took a lot of work and left Riley with a lot of unsavory memories. Talking about her parents made Riley’s eyes glisten with tears.
I moved her food from her lap and pulled her into my arms. “Riley, I’m so sorry,” I said into her hair. I had learned at a young age how lucky I was to have the parents that I did, that more people had a story similar to Riley’s than mine.
“Explains a lot, huh? My therapist said it did when I told her last week.” The fabric of my shirt was wet from her tears. She pulled away and I could see tear stains and mascara smudges on my white button down. “Matt, your shirt.”
I lifted a napkin to her face, gently wiping away the tears and smudged makeup on her face, pretending I didn’t see the smudges on my shirt. “It’s just a shirt.”
“I wish I didn’t cry so much.” My heart ached as I watched her open her phone camera, using it as a mirror while she swiped at the dark smudges under her eyes. She did cry a lot, with almost every emotion. I had never met another person that showed their emotions as strongly as she did, that didn’t fight back their tears. Riley cried as easily as I smiled.
“It just means that you feel things deeply,” I told her. “It’s one of my favorite things about you. I mean, not that you’re hurting, but how deeply you feel.” The two of us both wore our hearts on our sleeves, it was like we were made for each other.
The tears started again, happy this time. Tears gathered at the corners of her mouth as she smiled at me. I brushed them away with my thumb.
“You’re amazing,” she said to me through her tears.
I rolled my eyes and tried to fight back the grin lifting my mouth. I love her. My brain scrambled for something else to say. “I know I am, but it is nice to hear you say it,” I joked.
She kissed me, more confident than she had been earlier. Her hands rested lightly on my forearms, not clutching me like she thought I might run away. Maybe she was starting to see that I meant it when I said I was here when she was ready.
“Careful, Riley, we’re in public,” I whispered in her ear. I was hard again just from kissing her. I really needed to get that under control. My fingers teased the strap of the dress on her right shoulder where the jacket had slid down.
“You really like this dress,” she whispered.
Fuck yeah, I did. She looked sexy in it, especially as the evening went on and she grew more comfortable in it, hiding less and less under that jacket. “I do. Tell Emery that you’re keeping it.”
“How do you know it’s not mine?”
I leaned away from her and picked the list back up. “Riley, there’s a lot I still need to learn about you, but I know how you act when you’re uncomfortable. You’ve been pulling at that dress all night and keep pulling that jacket closed over it. You never do that in your clothes. I hate that you’re uncomfortable, but I wish you knew how incredible you look in this.” I reached out and moved the jacket from where she had started to pull it closed across her stomach. I knew that was the part of her body that she felt the most self-conscious about. It was soft and stuck out further than her boobs, and she often hid it behind her arms or objects when she could. I slid my hand under the jacket, cupping her side just below her ribs and brushed my thumb over the swell of her stomach, keeping my eyes on her face for any clue I needed to stop. “Also, you never wear all black.”
Every visible patch of skin blushed at my words. I watched her work through her thoughts as she absorbed my words, fighting back the urge to ask what she was thinking.
“What’s the next question, Rupert?”
I wrinkled his nose in feigned disgust at the sound of my first name. “That’s Matt to you, missy. The only person that calls me Rupert is my mother when she’s mad at me.”
“Excuse you, my name is sweetheart, not missy,” she teased.
“Sweetheart, gorgeous, beautiful, my dear, honey, baby,” I peppered her face with kisses as I listed off every pet name I could think of until we’re out of breath from laughing and lying back on the blanket. I had to remind myself we were in public surrounded by families, trying not to think about how she felt under me.
I pulled the list of questions from under Riley’s back and asked the next one, forcing some space between us so my body would calm down. Soon we ran out of questions on the list and transitioned to asking each other anything we could think of. We laid there, side by side, hands intertwined, and lost in the world of just the two of us until the sounds of car doors pulled us back. We sat up and see up see we’re the last ones left on the grass.
Riley pulled the coin from my shirt pocket and held it up. “Where to next?”