Daddy's Favorite (ManxBoy)

Chapter Seventeen

Ace P.O.V.

I had come to the conclusion Aiden was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Before him, I would've continued hating myself the way I had learned to my entire life, but now, I think I was coming around to loving myself. Or at least I was learning how to fake it. I found myself saying things that I would've never thought I would've heard myself say. They were perfectly normal things like speaking up about things I didn't like or saying no when I didn't want to do something, but they were things I didn't normally say or do. I realized that I had slowly being doing that ever since I first met him. He'd been helping my confidence all along.

I made the decision to change my dance from the upbeat, technical dance that Sandra had helped me with to the raw, emotional one I had made that night and it was the best decision I could've made. The judges loved it. I knew then that I had made it onto the show. It's very hard to get every single judge to agree on one thing, but they agreed on me.

I learned to move past what had happened to me with Aiden's help and he'd even hired a self-defense teacher to teach at the center. He not only wanted to help me, but a lot of other people in the neighborhood in case something should ever happen to them. He offered to get me my own private classes, but connecting with more people than just my dance students gave me that feeling of a greater purpose in life, like I was put here to connect with others and help them relieve stress from their own lives.

I was feeling pretty damn amazing.

"You love him, huh?" Gigi broke through my daydream. Her question didn't even give me pause.

Aiden was teaching me to love myself.

And I was teaching myself to love him.

When I was falling in love with him, I felt like I was in a pool. I could touch the bottom of the pool so I felt safe from drowning. There were borders so I knew that the water was secluded to one area. And there were stairs so I knew that I could climb out any time that I wanted to.

I don't know when my pool turned into the ocean. I couldn't touch the bottom. The water stretched out for as far as I could see and there was no shore for me to escape to. The only thing that was keeping me afloat was Aiden.

I wasn't falling.

I was in it.

I was in love with him.

"So much that it's scary." I dug my fork into the salad that I had barely started eating and poked around it a bit, but never really put anything into my mouth. I tried to tell him I loved him one time when I was slightly high on hormones after having sex on the balcony, but the words never formed quite right. I thought it was because I didn't mean it, but it was because I was scared that I meant it wholeheartedly.

"Hey...what's wrong?" She had picked up on how in my head I was. She always could. That was just the way she was.

"What if he's just having fun? What if he's not in it like I am?" I couldn't see him loving me back. These were legitimate fears that I had.

"I don't think he would've moved you into his house if he wasn't in it for the long run." She laid her palms on the table, giving me her full attention. "That's not things that people just do."

"That's not things that average people do. But he's rich. He has money to just throw around. He could have whatever he wants and what if he just wants a live in friend with benefits?"

She tapped her fork against the side of her plate. "Seems like an awful lot to go through for a friends with benefits situation. I mean, y'all didn't have sex for like three weeks."