Page 30 of From Us, Forever

“The things that I have to do for my girl,” he mumbled as we tucked into our food. “Do you come here often?”

“Yes,” I nodded, biting into my meal. “I used to wait out the rush hour here. The subway was my least favorite place when it got crowded. I think that’s pretty obvious.” I glanced at my knee.

He offered a small smile, his hands splaying over my thighs. “Were you lonely?”

My eyes locked with his. “All the time. I mean, I had Gabe, but no one I used to know. It made me cry a lot, like a baby.” A dry laugh spilled out of me. “Wishing and hoping that you’ll come and save me one day, thinking that if you knew the whole truth, you’d never leave my side. You know what my favorite morning routine was?”

“No.” A sad smile lifted his lips as his fingers started to draw random patterns over my skin.

“I used to punish myself by googling your name and seeing everything that they had to say about you. Every morning, without fail. And it used to get me all the time, but I still wouldn’t stop. I would rather watch your life in pictures than not at all. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing your face. I used to track every news update of you guys, which was why I didn’t know you moved to New York. I was floored, quite literally and figuratively, to see you at the apartment.”

Those six years were like a blur now.

Those days were filled with panic and anxiety, the thundering of my heart when I woke up fighting to keep up, struggling to pay the bills while mourning my lost love. Those concerns were no longer a part of my life.

Now I woke up witha smile on my face with different worries. I found the things that I lost, the things that were taken from me. I found him. Through the misty, murky path,I found him anyway.

He grinned. “A little stalker, huh? But I was surprised too to see my girl on her knees. I thought it was a wet dream for a second. The only thing that was missing was a maid costume.”

I rolled my eyes as we discarded our empty cartons.

He pulled me closer.

I buried my head on his shoulders, circling my arms around his body but never quite reaching all the way.

A sudden fleet of white clouds covered the powdery blue skies, hiding the raging sun behind them. The stickiness on my back soon disappeared, and I let out a happy sigh.

“I was too,” he started, and I looked over at him, confused.

His eyes glimmered with a mix of sadness and love. There was a softness to them that brushed the depths of my soul. “I was lonely too, believe it or not. I had my best friends—my brothers around me andmy family all looking at me with pride and happiness, yet my soul felt empty. Almost as if I waslocked in a vacant room and someone robbed all the light away. I had all these people around me, yet I was the loneliest person in the room because I didn’t have you. I didn’t realize I loved you that much till I lost you, and there wasn’t anything I could do.” A forlorn smile tugged the corners of his lips.

My heart squeezed at his words, imagining the pain he must have gone through thinking that I cheated on him. We both suffered in our own ways.

A quiet moment passed between us as I cuddled closer to him, and we both enjoyed the silence.

“How did the press conference go?” I asked a while later.

“It went as expected.” He shrugged, his eyes roaming over the kids playing football, carefree and unmaimed from the darkness of the world. “We did put a plug on the rumors, so it went great, I guess. I’m used to shit like this at this point.”

“Already?” I scrambled for my phone and checked the latest news on the band. My eyes rounded with each article that I skimmed through as disbelief flooded my blood. They were already praising the boys and denying the wild accusations thrown at them as nothing.

“Wow, that was fast,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, when the press likes you—they really like you.” He exaggerated the last words with a lift of his brows. “The fans are always on our side. As long as we have them, nothing can damage us. We owe them everything.”

I nodded.

Curious, I thumbed through Jay’s social media page, where he had millions of followers. Every post on his profile had over a million likes. I pressed on a recent one of him, shirtless just wearing his leather jacket and biting his lips at his camera.

“Are you stalking me in front of me?” His lips twitched, and his eyes glowed with mirth.

“I haven’t seen this one. You posted it yesterday. When did you take this?” I questioned; lines etched my forehead as I read the comments, my stomach burning with jealousy.

“I didn’t. I have a team for that. I hardly even keep up with it.”

I rolled my lips between my teeth. “What the hell are these comments? Isn’t there a filter to this?”

“I don’t really read them.”

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