The Wrong Kind of Right

chapter 10

I almost kissed her.

I'd been telling myself for days that I wasn't going to let this become something, and then I nearly undid all of it in one storm-lit second on an overturned crate in my own boathouse, with rain hammering the roof and Aria looking up at me like she wasn't afraid of a single piece of what I was.

I remember the exact moment I stopped myself — her eyes flicking to my mouth, the small intake of breath, the way she didn't pull back even a fraction, like she was waiting for me to close the distance. Every instinct I had said do it. And then, underneath that, quieter but louder somehow, came the other voice — the one that remembered standing in a church hallway checking my phone every thirty seconds, absolutely certain nothing was wrong, right up until the moment everything was.

I looked away first. I told her we should sleep. I felt her go still beside me, not hurt exactly, but recalibrating, the way people do when a door closes without an explanation.

I didn't sleep. Not really. I lay there half the night with her weight against my arm, warm and real and closer than anyone had been in eight months, running the same calculation over and over: what if I'm wrong about her the way I was wrong about Claire.

It wasn't fair to either of them, comparing the two. I knew that, even as I did it.

By morning, the storm had passed, sunlight cutting through the boathouse windows in long gold bars, and Aria was already awake, quiet, watching the water instead of looking at me.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey." Careful. Polite. The tone she used with people she was keeping at arm's length — the tone I'd used on her the very first day.

I'd done that. I'd taken something that felt honest and turned it careful overnight, and I didn't even have the excuse of not knowing better. I knew exactly what I was doing. I just didn't know how to stop being scared long enough to do anything different.

"We should head back," she said, standing, not waiting for me to agree.

I watched her walk out into the morning light ahead of me, putting distance between us that had nothing to do with the path back to the house, and I thought: you're doing it again. The exact thing you swore you wouldn't do to someone else.

I didn't fix it that day. Or the next.

It would take a lot more than good intentions to undo what one flinch in a boathouse had started.