Chapter 5
960 Words
He avoided her for three days.
It was almost impressive, how thoroughly Cayden Hollis could disappear inside his own house. Gone before she woke. Home after she'd gone to bed. At school he was always surrounded by people, always just out of reach, always somewhere she wasn't.
Aria let him run for three days.
On the fourth, she stopped letting him.
She caught him in the kitchen at midnight.
She'd heard him come in — she'd started learning the sound of him without meaning to — and she came downstairs in time to find him at the counter with a glass of water, still in his jacket, looking like someone who'd been driving around with nowhere to go.
He froze when he saw her.
"You're avoiding me," she said.
"I'm getting water."
"For three days?"
He set the glass down.
"Aria—"
"You said you'd tell me." She crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of him, close enough that he couldn't slide past her without making it obvious. "You said not here, not like this. Fine. We're here now. It's quiet. Everyone's asleep. So tell me."
He looked at her for a long moment.
The kitchen was dark except for the light over the stove, everything soft and shadowed, the house silent around them.
"You really don't remember the party," he said.
"I remember pieces. Lights. Music. Me dancing." She held his gaze. "And someone watching."
Something moved across his face.
"That was me," he said.
The words landed quietly. But they landed.
"You were at that party," she said slowly.
"I was visiting a friend. Out of town. I wasn't supposed to be there." He looked away, then back. "You were dancing in the middle of this room full of people and you weren't performing for anyone. You were just — somewhere else. Like the rest of us weren't there."
Her heart was pounding.
"We didn't even talk," he said. "Not really. The power went out for like ten minutes — some breaker thing — and everyone was freaking out and you just kept dancing in the dark like nothing happened. And I—"
He stopped.
"And you what?"
"I found you. In the dark. I don't know why. I just walked across the room toward where you'd been." His voice was lower now. "And you were there. And we talked for ten minutes while the lights were out and I never even saw your face properly. And then the power came back and someone grabbed me and I lost you in the crowd and by the time I looked again you were gone."
Aria stood very still.
The memory shifted in her mind — the dark, the music still playing off someone's phone, a voice beside her she'd talked to and never seen.
She'd thought she dreamed that part.
"That was you," she whispered.
"That was me."
"I looked for you," she said. The words came out before she could stop them. "After. I went back to find whoever I'd been talking to and I couldn't — there were too many people and I didn't have a face or a name and I thought—"
"You looked for me?"
She realized what she'd admitted and stopped.
But it was too late. It was already out, hanging in the dark kitchen between them.
"Eight months," Cayden said quietly. "I looked for you for eight months. I didn't have a name. I didn't have a face. Just ten minutes in the dark and a girl who danced like the world wasn't ending." He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "And then my mom shows me a photo of her fiancé's daughter. And it's you."
Aria couldn't breathe.
"That's why," she said. "That's why you've been—"
"Cold. Difficult. Blocking every guy who looks at you." He nodded slowly. "Because the second you walked through that door I knew exactly who you were. And you didn't know me at all. And we're supposed to be — " he gestured between them, "— this. Brother and sister. There's no version of this that isn't completely insane."
The kitchen was silent.
Her heart was racing in a way that had nothing to do with surprise anymore.
"Say something," he said.
She looked at him.
The boy from the dark. The one she'd talked to for ten minutes and looked for and never found. Standing in her kitchen at midnight, finally with a face.
"I don't know what to say," she said honestly.
"Yeah." He pushed a hand through his hair. "Me neither. That's kind of the problem."
Neither of them moved.
The space between them felt very small.
"This can't happen," she said quietly. It wasn't quite a question.
"I know," he said.
"Our parents are getting married."
"I know."
"This is impossible."
"I know that too." His voice was barely above a whisper now. "I've known it for three days. It hasn't changed anything."
She should have stepped back.
She didn't.
And for a long moment in the dark kitchen, the boy she'd been trying to remember and the girl he'd never been able to forget just stood there, inches apart, with everything impossible sitting between them.
Then, upstairs, a door opened.
Footsteps.
They sprang apart half a second before the kitchen light flicked on and Victoria's voice said, sleepily, "What are you two doing up?"
"Couldn't sleep," Aria said.
"Water," Cayden said.
Victoria looked between them, too tired to read the air.
"Well. Go to bed. Both of you."
Aria went.
But at the top of the stairs she looked back, and Cayden was looking up at her, and neither of them said anything.
They didn't have to.
Everything had already changed.
- Writer
