Page 69 of Teach Me to Laugh

New Year’s came and went. So far, it’d been a real good year and I fully believed this was because I’d welcomed it with my lips pressed tightly, lovingly, and a little possessively against Amara’s. We’d spent New Year’s with our little family of good friends in the condo I shared with Amara. The girls had cracked the bottles of wine Raina had gotten for Christmas, and danced up a storm in the living room. It had been a good night, and the beginning of this New Year had been even better.

It was early February and my relationship with Amara had been going strong. I’d even convinced her to move her stuff into my room. This had been a bit of a fight as she liked the color of her walls and had no interest in moving into my plain white room, as she’d put it. Still, she did because my room had a huge bathroom with an impressive soaker tub. I’d also had to promise we’d paint a feature wall. She’d tried for the whole bedroom, but I’d calmly explained that in a relationship, there was compromise. I might have explained this, but I’d been willing to paint the whole damn condo purple if that meant I made her happy. My dad, when he eventually saw it, would blow a gasket.

School was just as intense, but with Amara giving me all the sweetness she’d been hiding for years, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I felt like I was walking on top of the world.

Damn, I was a man who now had date night. I loved date night.

If I were to have been told the day I met this little woman who breathed spitfire and glared ice, that within half a year I’d be a man who looked forward to date night, I would have laughed in disbelief. Now, I couldn’t imagine my life any other way. I was happy. I was in love. And I was building a fucking good life with an even better woman who had finally come into her smiles.

That was another thing. Amara was smiling on a regular now. It had been a good month that I’d had her smiles, but they still took my breath away. I had a feeling that I could have her and her smiles for a hundred years, and they would still steal my breath.

Mom had called last week to check in and ask about my Christmas. Although I normally didn’t have a crazy holiday with all the fixings I’d had with Amara and my family of friends, Iusually saw my parents at least once. I hadn’t this year and I knew my mom was feeling my absence. I could hear it in her voice. So when I finally told her about Amara and the reason for my absence, she exclaimed firmly that we were coming for dinner so she could meet her.

I’d never had a woman I was serious enough with to tell Mom or Dad about, so this was a big thing.

That was why Amara was fretting beside me as I pulled my truck up the large concrete pad of my parents’ massive house. Her blue eyes were as big as saucers and her usually pink cheeks were ghostly pale.

Reaching across the cab, I squeezed her thigh gently. “Stop worrying.”

“What if they hate me?”

“It doesn’t matter what they think because I love you.”

“But,”

“They will love you.”

She shook her head. “You can’t know that.”

“I do.” I stated firmly, entirely believing my words. “Stop worrying.”

She glared at me like I was telling her to swallow a ghost pepper without burning from the inside out, so I barked laughter as I pushed open my door to climb down from the truck. I met her on her side, taking her trembling hand in mine as I walked her to the front door.

Mom was already there, waiting for us. She was smiling elegantly, wearing a comfortable outfit of brown pinstriped pants and a cream sweater. Her hair was tied back at the nape ofher neck in her signature bun. Mom was a pediatric surgeon and although she hadn’t wanted her own children, she loved them. So when she smiled, she had a smile that was welcoming and easy to trust—a smile perfected for nervous children. It was with this smile that I felt Amara’s tension disintegrate.

“You must be Amara? How lovely to meet you.” I watched in muted fascination as my mother pulled the woman I one day intended to make my wife into her arms, and then into her home.

I already knew, as I watched Amara move into the home I’d grown up in, that she would complement my existing family perfectly. Maybe she’d even make it more of a family when one day she gave my mother grandbabies.

Amara’s insecurity was gone before I’d even made it through the door. The two women disappeared into the long hall, and I smiled, because Amara didn’t look back over her shoulder with big uncertain eyes. She didn’t plead, silently, for me to save her. Instead, she fit. And what I’d already known was solidified in concrete as I saw my life unfolding with the very woman who’d undone me the summer before.

Amara wasn’t much of a morning person this sunny Saturday morning. She wasn’t feeling her usual energetic self, because last night had been Friday night date night, and I’d taken my time showing her how spirited I was on date night.

Still, as many times as I’d had her the night before, when I opened the bathroom door to see my navy blue sheet curledaround her toned leg, stretching up over the pale pink of her naked body, I felt suddenly animated.

“Don’t look at me like that.” She said with a sleepy firmness that had my grin stretching. I didn’t respond and she opened her eyes, squinting at the bright light of the bathroom that spilled into the room around me. “I’m serious, Beckett. I’m exhausted. Dead to the world and you’re looking at me like,”

Fucking hell, the woman was adorable. She was propped up on her elbows now, her dark long hair an absolute mess around her tiny face. Her cute nose was scrunched and her full lips were pouting.

“How am I looking at you?”

“Like you want to work me outandover.” She flopped back to the bed. “I can’t.”

“You can.”

“Nooo,” she droned, nuzzling into my pillow. Her little arms came up and she hugged it, her body relaxing back into the mattress.

I decided she could most definitely be worked out and over. I didn’t care that I’d just had a shower as I walked back to the bed, dropping my towel at the foot. I crawled up the length of her body. “I’ll do all the work.” I murmured, kissing a sliver of exposed skin over her hip. “You don’t have to do anything.” I added, kissing another piece of skin. And another, and another, until I’d made it to her shoulder. I nipped her gently there and she moaned a throaty sound that had me feeling desire in every fiber of my being. “All you have to do is say yes.”

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