The Best Things Happen When You Least Expect Them

Desired

So apparently, it had become fashion to publicly flirt with Natalie. Of course, Ilya had not been the first to show interest in her, although his little confession might have been the sincerest out of all of them, but David became more and more irritated at what rate this fire was catching on.

Jeff seemed to have finally gotten over Cierra. There had been a little one on one time between him and Natalie in the garden of the house that Jason had rented for the 4th of July weekend. David had seen them through the windows and, following an instinct he couldn't quite name, immediately joined them. Had they actually been standing so close that there was reason to believe anything was going on? Maybe not so much but what happened next surely did give plenty reason to make David want to send Jeff back to prison. In an attempt to make a joke, Jeff took Natalie by the waist and dipped her backwards over his knee. Ever the professional, David took out his phone and recorded the whole thing, going along with it as if he didn't secretly ask himself who Jeff thought he was, touching Natalie like that. And she didn't seem happy about it too. As soon as she had seen him coming out into the garden, her arms crossed before her chest and she turned away from him, facing the ocean instead. Her posture remained uninviting when Jeff grabbed her, and David could feel her discomfort from across the lawn. But who was he to intervene? It was not like he had any claim and Natalie was old and bold enough to fight of an unwanted touch. But she let it happen, even if not looking too happy about it, she didn't protest. Did that maybe mean she did want it, but David's presence was what made it awkward? He had let out a sight that reminded him more of Jason than he was ready to confess and turned away from them.

Of course, the Instagram story blew up like a volcano and by the time vidcon came around, the fans were pretty much convinced that Natalie and Jeff were secretly married. And then Jeff poured even more fuel into the flame by bringing the whole thing up on stage. Well, who was Natalie actually dating? David had been relieved to be sitting at the other end of the large couch, he was sure that hadn't everybody been focused on Natalie in that moment, it would have been over for him then and there. How could Jeff be so disrespectful towards her? It wasn't like she herself fueled all those God damn rumors and it was nobody's business who she was dating and especially since she was not dating anyone. She wasn't, right?

And what it let to was even more of that kind of behavior towards her. Dom, of all people, asking her on camera if she wanted to go out with him. Of course, David knew that this had been supposed to be a joke, but that was exactly his problem: people were making a joke out of Natalie. And this was exactly what he had been worried about. Natalie was not Tana or Corinna or even Dom. For Natalie, things like dating and romance weren't only punchlines made for some joke on the internet. Natalie had not been corrupted by a city in which people married for views and publicly divorced each other a month later. Natalie wanted the white wedding and the growing-old-together. David was pretty sure of that because he knew that she stored every book Nicholas Sparks had ever written under her bed, obviously hoping that no one ever found out just how fond she was of the version of romance sold by these novels. He had seen the worn-out books and DVDs quite some time ago but was recently reminded of his discovery when waking up some morning with a picture in his head of Natalie in a blue dress kissing him in the rain. He was fairly sure that he had seen Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams do the same on some Nicholas Sparks cover.

Another member of their friend group worrying David on that front was Zane. To be fair, Zane's interest in Natalie dated further back than Jeff's, but David was not sure that it was therefore necessarily more sincere. After Natalie had not given into his advances the first time around, before it had become a sport to go after her like that, Zane had stopped bothering her and went on to hyper fixating on Stass. But ever since this new trend had come around, he too had started making passes at her again. Maybe a little bit also because Stass could've not been less interested.