Page 73 of Stay with Me

“Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you for loving me like you do.”

He shook his head. “Naw, baby. Thank you for letting me love you and for loving me back.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

45

Five months later…

“All right, everyone. You know why you’re here, why you’ve packed this hall today. You’re wearing the t-shirts. You’ve seen their videos. So I wanna know, are you ready for this year’s Natural Hair Expo’s featured guests?”

The crowd roared in response to the MC’s question.

“Okay! Their YouTube channel has over two million subscribers, they average more than half a million views per video, both have huge social media followings, so suffice it to say, these two have taken the online and natural hair worlds by storm. I present to you the newlyweds we all love, 4C Angie and Ryan!!”

Ryan grinned and gripped my hand, leading me to the stage as the crowd erupted again, growing even louder as we stepped onto the stage and took our seats. We were both wearing t-shirts with our new channel name and logo on them—4C Love. We waved, and when Ryan brought my hand to his lips and kissed it, I thought they would shout the roof off of that convention center.

“Woo, y’all really do love them,” the MC, a fellow vlogger known as Naturella Gabriella, said. “As you all requested, this will be a Q&A rather than a panel discussion. There are two mics set up at the front of the aisles, and we’ll take as many questions as we can in the time allotted.” She turned to us. “Ryan, Angie, on behalf of everyone here, I want to thank you two for joining us. I know newlyweds have other things they could be getting into.” She gave us a smile and a wink.

Ryan lifted one of the microphones that had been lying in our chairs to his mouth, and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get to that later when we get back to our room.”

The crowd laughed.

Then Gabriella said, “Hmm…well, we can all tell from your videos that you two can barely keep your hands off each other.” She turned to the crowd, and added, “Y’all remember that kiss at the end of that video where Ryan washed her hair, right?”

The crowd nodded, and yelled, “Yes!”

“All right, let’s have the first question.”

We fielded a ton of questions about anything and everything from Ryan’s accent, to what it was like for us being full-time vloggers, to the lipstick I was wearing at that moment.

“Are you guys going to upload a wedding video?” one young lady asked.

“Yes, as soon as Ryan edits it,” I answered, cutting my eyes at my husband.

“That’s my wife’s way of calling me out,” he said. “But I’m working on it.”

Most of the crowd laughed a little too hard, something I called the Ryan Effect. Woman seemed to lose their minds around him, laughed too hard at his jokes, smiled too much when they were in his presence, stuff like that.

A teenaged girl approached the mic, expressing to us how much she enjoyed our videos, and then she asked, “Ryan, anyone can tell how much you guys love each other, so my question for you is: what do you love most about Angie?”

He reached over and grasped my hand in his, looked into my eyes, and said, “Everything.”