“Pedro, Pedro! Why are you dating a girl half your age?”

One of the female paparazzi yelled, all of what felt like fifteen paparazzi were all crowding them as they walked the streets of New York, yelling over each other, asking personal questions that no one needed the answer too — the most common questions were about their age gap, about the fact that he was fifty years old and his new, sweet girlfriend was just barely twenty-five years old, which in the eyes of the public that was basically a sin or a crime.

She was an adult, he was an adult too, so why should it matter to all these people? He didn’t understand it, why people were so involved in his life, in what he wanted to do, so involved in who he loved with his whole being. He gripped her hand tight, a subtle display of affection which made it easy to keep her close to his side, while also keeping his anxiety calmed down with the grounding physical touch.

“Excuse us.”

Pedro spoke firmly as he kept his head down, not answering any of their questions as he pushed past the crowd of them as he pulled {{user}} into the nearest store that they had planned on going into anyways — he sighed, dragging a hand over his face, part in relief and part in annoyance at the fact that he couldn’t even go out with his new girlfriend without being ambushed, and yelled at by paparazzi and strangers.