Page 44 of Stay with Me

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Three hundred thousand views? In two days? Ryan had made my video go viral! Okay, so I really wanted to get mad at the fact that I’d been putting in all this hard work over the years and Ryan just sitting next to me boosted my views like that, but I couldn’t. These women weren’t blind. The man was fine, hot, absolutely gorgeous. Who could blame them for their thirst when my ass was parched from the moment I laid eyes on all six feet of him?

I broke my own rule and read some of the video’s comments. Many were about how cute we were together. A few were calling him by various names, everything except Ryan Boyé, saying things like, “That’s trifling-ass Trey,” so I figured he must’ve had a doppelgänger out there somewhere. A few people even commented on my actual review of the product, but the vast majority of the comments were about how fine and fuckable Ryan was. So I stopped reading the comments, because I wasn’t sure if I should’ve been pissed or flattered.

I was on my porch, thinking about me and Ryan and how much I’d miss him when he left Tennessee. Then I told myself not to think about it, not to think at all and just enjoy what I was feeling, what he was making me feel. I shifted my eyes to his end of the duplex where he rarely spent any time anymore. Over the past few days since we became an official we, he’d eaten dinner, showered, and slept at my place among other very delightful activities. I’d lost count of how many times we’d done that, and it was amazing to me that after years, literal years, of having sex with Benny and then Khalil, I damn near felt like a virgin every time Ryan touched me. What he did to me, the things he made my body experience, were beyond logic and reasoning. No sex should be that good, but Ryan’s was. Hell, I had convinced myself that I couldn’t achieve an orgasm with a man. I was completely wrong. Like Nicky and Ryan said, those other men had no idea what they were doing or just didn’t care.

And it wasn’t just the sex, it was the way he looked at me, listened to me, treated me. And I can’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy the way he pursued me and courted me.

I laughed. And to think I had actually mourned not being with Benny and Khalil when neither of them was half the man Ryan was even on a bad day. I’d never see either of them the same way again.

*****

“You sure you have the camera angled right? Can they see my head?” I asked. My head was in the kitchen sink as Ryan prepared to wash my hair for a co-washing tutorial. I had done one before, but this video was sponsored by a new, black-owned hair care company. They’d sent me three bottles of their mango sunshine conditioner and were paying me well to try it out. I was prepared to film myself washing my own hair when Ryan volunteered to wash it for me. Our other video was approaching one million views, and I think he was enjoying the Internet fame.

“Yeah, baby. They can see your big-ass head.”

“My head isn’t as big as yours.”

“Shiiiiiit, wanna bet?”

“Is the camera on, negro?”

“Yeah, damn, are you gonna edit all this shit we’re talking out?”

“I’m gonna mute the sound and do a voiceover.”

“So they won’t be able to hear anything we say?”

“No, they won’t.”

“So if I say you got the best pussy in the world, they won’t hear it?”

“No, they won’t. But some of them might be able to read your lips, Mr. Project Oversight Manager. Keep playing and mess around and lose that job of yours.”

“Sweetheart, they love me at Sable Inc. I’m invaluable,” he said, shedding his accent and replacing it with an ultra-sophisticated version.

“Is that how you really talk at work?”

“Most days. I know how to code-switch, don’t curse, play the games to get ahead.”

“Don’t you work at a black company?”

“Yeah, but it’s still Corporate America. Same rules apply for the most part.”

“Hmm, you ready? You remember what I told you?”

“Yeah, and I won’t forget to hold the bottle of conditioner up to the camera and let it focus on it.”

“All right, let’s do this.”

“I got it, baby.”

I closed my eyes and smiled as he leaned over my back and began to wet my hair with the sprayer. Moaned softly when he started massaging the conditioner into my hair, letting his fingers graze my scalp. It had been ages since someone other than me washed my hair, and evidently, Ryan was just as deft with his hands on my head as he was other places.

After he was finished and had wrapped a t-shirt around my head to dry my hair of the water without stripping it of moisture as instructed, I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him so deeply, I think I actually startled him a bit. But the way he had washed my hair, so gently, and on camera? Well that turned me completely on.

He gazed down at me as I started tugging on his jogging pants, pulling them down over his ass. “The camera’s still rolling, baby,” he said.