Yours: A Forever After Novella by Natasha Thomas Page A

eat together without someone asking us when we were going to stop playing around and settle down. The bitches at school were relentless; using my girl to get my number, befriending her to get closer to me. It didn’t matter how many times I made it clear I wasn’t interested, that shit didn’t stop until Harleigh graduated,” Lyric sighs.
     
    I can’t help but place a kiss on the hinge of his square jaw and squeeze his thick thigh in solidarity. He hates reliving our days in high school when we had to be even more vigilant about our relationship. Back then, even subtle touches like a brush of our shoulders as we passed each other in the halls was misconstrued as us fucking like rabbits. Being careful and learning to hide became a way of life for us because of it.
     
    “How long?” Dad prompts, looking me and then to Lyric.
     
    “I was seventeen, nearly eighteen,” my husband returns.
     
    “Are you saying that you’ve been dating my girl since she was fifteen?”
     
    Unperturbed by my dad’s anger, Lyric states,
    “Yeah, I am. The day Harleigh turned fifteen, I asked her to be my girlfriend. But honestly, she’d already been my girl for years, just not officially.”
     
    “Fucking hell,” dad hisses. Leaning forward and bracing his elbows on his knees, dad looks down at his boots. “Fifteen? She was just a kid. You were a grown ass man, dating a kid. What the fuck were you thinking?”
     
    Lyric goes to speak, but I cut him off by disentangling his arms from around my waist and standing up.
    “Don’t,” I say tersely. “Don’t go there and prove me right.”
     
    “What?”
     
    “This,” I snap, pointing at him, “is why I made Lyric keep us a secret. What you’re doing right now, what you and everyone else would have said, how you would have judged him and me, is why I didn’t want to tell any of you. Dad, you trusted Lyric with me from the time I could crawl. You, just like everyone else knew one day we would be together, you said as much to me. But somehow, I knew when we told you we were dating you wouldn’t condone it. Whatever reasons you came up with, whether it was me being too young, Lyric being too old, him just starting to prospect with the MC, or me going off to college soon, I knew you would come up with reasons as to why we shouldn’t be together.”
     
    “Harleigh…I just…”
     
    “No, dad. Just no. I love Lyric. I have loved him my entire life, and I won’t have you questioning him or his morals. Lyric didn’t touch me, not like that, not until I was ready. He was the perfect boyfriend and has been an even better husband when we’ve actually lived in the same state, that is.”
     
    Turning to Lyric, the smile lighting up his handsome face encourages me to go on.
    “My decision to marry him doesn’t reflect on how your or mom raised me. If anything, it proves you did your job well since I had such amazing role models. You and mom taught me what to look for in a relationship. I’m just lucky enough to have found it early and in my best friend. All I wanted was the opportunity to build a life with him. To be together without the expectations of weddings, babies, and buying a house, all of which we weren’t ready for back then. We loved one another enough to want to make the commitment to love, honor, and cherish the other every day for the rest of our lives, but that didn’t mean we wanted to conform to everyone else’s ideas of what our marriage should entail.”
     
    Warm hands on my shoulders spin me around so that I’m staring into a pair of blue eyes that are filled with pride, lust, and so much love I could drown in it.
    “Not loved, Angel, love. I love you more today than I did the day I repeated my vows to you, and I’ll love you harder and longer than anyone else ever could. Don’t forget that, baby. Never question it either. You are mine, and I’m yours. Forever after, Harleigh.”
     
    Can you say swoon? Because that’s what I did right then