Love & Disobey

The suburbs had a particular way of looking exactly alike no matter which city you were in. Same manicured hedges. Same mailboxes standing at attention. Same perfectly sealed windows with perfectly sealed lives behind them. Aria Wells had catalogued the view from passenger-seat windows her entire life — her father's car, her mother's car, school buses, Jade's ancient Corolla with the broken air conditioning — and she had come to believe that suburbs were less a place than a condition. A decision people made about how much of the world they wanted to see. She watched the current set of them blur past and tried to feel something other than the particular hollow anxiety that had been sitting in her chest since she'd packed the last box three days ago. She was nineteen. She was starting her second year of college in a city where she knew exactly nobody. Her mother had remarried four months after a divorce that had taken two years to finalize, which was either impressively fast or not fast enough depending on who you asked. Aria had not been asked. She had been informed, then consulted on paint colors for her new bedroom in a house she had never seen, belonging to a man she had met twice. Both times in a restaurant. Both times with the particular stiffness of people performing normalcy for an audience. Marcus Stone had been polite, attentive to her mother, and had looked at Aria with an expression she hadn't been able to place — something careful and assessing that didn't feel like a new stepfather getting to know his wife's daughter. It felt more like someone evaluating a situation they weren't yet sure about. She had not mentioned this to her mother. Her mother was humming. Diana Wells — Diana Stone now, though she hadn't changed her name yet, a delay Aria found quietly comforting — had been humming cheerfully to the radio for the last forty minutes, her fingers tapping the steering wheel in approximate rhythm, her whole body radiating the kind of contentment that was almost physically warm. She was happy. Genuinely, openly, unreservedly happy in a way that Aria hadn't seen from her in years, and Aria was not so selfish as to resent it. She was only a little selfish about it. That felt acceptable. She pressed her temple against the cool glass of the window and let the suburbs blur and thought: I am adaptable. I am good at this. I found my footing at three different high schools and I will find it here. I will be fine. She was not entirely convinced, but repetition had always been her primary coping mechanism. --- The house was not what she had been picturing. She had been picturing something nice. Something in the "wealthy professional" register — clean lines, good landscaping, a three-car garage and a kitchen that had been recently renovated. The kind of house that appeared in real estate listings with words like contemporary and executive. What the moving van pulled up to was a mansion. Stone — actual stone, grey and old and massive — sprawling along the edge of what appeared to be a private estate, trees pressing close on three sides, a gravel drive long enough that the gate at the bottom had been out of sight for a full thirty seconds before they reached the front. The grounds alone were larger than anything Aria had grown up on. There were gardens. Actual, deliberate, tended gardens — not the kind of front lawn that someone mowed on Saturdays but actual cultivated beds of something dark and low and serious-looking along the entire front face of the house. Aria sat in the passenger seat and did not say anything. Her mother put the van in park and turned to look at her with an expression that was half excitement and half the particular wariness of a woman who knew her daughter very well. "I know," Diana said. "You don't know what I was going to say." "You were going to say something measured and noncommittal that would technically be a compliment while making it very clear that you are overwhelmed." Aria looked at the house. At the stone. At the gardens. At the enormity of all of it pressing against the autumn sky. "It's very large," she said. Her mother laughed and squeezed her hand. Her grip was warm and certain, the same grip she'd used to hold Aria's hand crossing streets when she was small, the grip that had always meant: I've got you, we're fine, keep moving. "Be open-minded," Diana said. "That's all I'm asking. Just — look at it with open eyes." Aria looked at the house with open eyes. It was still a mansion. "Okay," she said. And meant it, more or less. --- Marcus Stone opened the front door before they reached it. He was, objectively, a striking man. Silver-haired in the way that some men managed to make look distinguished rather than simply old — cut close, precise, the kind of silver that suggested authority rather than age. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow in a way that looked like ease but probably wasn't. He smiled when he saw Diana, and the smile was real — Aria was good at detecting performed warmth, and this wasn't it. He loved her mother. That much had always been visible. He turned that smile toward Aria. It was still warm. It was also something else. Those dark eyes moved over her with an attention that was not hostile, not unkind, not anything she could point to and name as unwelcoming — but it was assessing. Careful. The way a person looked at something they were still determining the nature of. "Aria." He extended his hand. His grip was firm and brief. "It's good to have you here. The house has been too quiet." "Thank you for having me," she said, because it was the correct thing to say and because she was, above all things, good at correct things. He nodded. Something in his expression settled slightly, as though she'd passed a small test she hadn't known she was taking. Then Diana was at his side and the attention moved away from Aria entirely, and she exhaled quietly through her nose and stepped into the house. The interior was — well. It was the kind of interior that happened when someone had both significant money and actual taste, which was rarer than significant money alone. Stone floors in the entryway, warm rugs, high ceilings with old wood beams, bookshelves visible through an open doorway. It smelled of coffee and something woody and faintly of the outdoors, as if the forest pressed close enough to seep through the walls. "Damien is at practice," Marcus said, leading them toward the staircase. "He'll be back for dinner. I've put you on the second floor — I thought you'd prefer the east-facing room. Better light in the mornings." Aria noted that he had thought about this. She filed it away without deciding what it meant. --- The bedroom was beautiful. She hadn't expected that either, though she supposed she should have stopped being surprised by this house's capacity to exceed expectation. It was spacious and high-ceilinged, with two tall windows that looked out over the back gardens and the treeline beyond, a desk of actual solid wood that she immediately wanted to work at, and bookshelves built into the wall beside the bed that were, currently, empty and waiting. It looked like a room that had been prepared for a person rather than a guest. She stood in the center of it for a moment with her one bag over her shoulder — the rest was in the van, would take the better part of the afternoon to haul up — and let herself simply be in it. The light was good. Marcus had been right about that. It came through the east-facing windows at an angle that was warm even in early autumn, and the trees beyond the garden were just beginning to turn. It was, she thought, against her better instincts, a very good room. She set her bag on the bed and began to unpack the things she'd carried herself — her laptop, her notebook, the three books she refused to put in boxes because they needed to be accessible always. She set them on the empty shelves and stepped back and felt, for the first time since the moving van had pulled out of their old driveway, something that was almost like the beginning of okay. Then she heard the motorcycle. --- The sound came up the drive with no particular attempt at subtlety — a low, rolling growl of an engine that announced itself the way expensive, well-maintained things did, which was to say with complete indifference to whether anyone approved. Aria moved to the window. She told herself she was just looking. She looked. The motorcycle was black. The figure climbing off it was — she needed a moment to find the word, which was unusual because words were generally her strong suit. Tall. That was the first word. Black jacket, dark jeans, a helmet tucked under one arm with the ease of someone who did this every day. He was laughing at something on his phone, his head tipped slightly, shoulders relaxed, and even from the second floor and through glass Aria could see that he was the kind of person who occupied space effortlessly — not because he was trying to take it up but because his presence simply expanded to fill whatever room, or driveway, or estate grounds he happened to be standing in. His face, when he turned slightly and the afternoon light caught it properly, was — fine. It was fine. It was a perfectly ordinary face that happened to be structured in a way that most faces were not, all clean angles and dark hair that had been somewhat destroyed by the helmet and somehow looked better for it. Aria stepped back from the window. She was not staring. She had glanced, assessed, and made a completely neutral and dispassionate observation about the appearance of the person she was going to be living with for the foreseeable future. That was sensible. That was practical. That was not, in any way, the beginning of a problem. She went back to unpacking. --- Dinner was at seven, in a dining room that managed to be formal without being cold — a long table, candlelight, the smell of something her mother had apparently insisted on cooking herself in a kitchen she'd spent the afternoon learning the layout of. Diana had always cooked when she was nervous. The familiarity of it, the smell of it, made the unfamiliar room feel marginally less like a stage set. Marcus sat at the head of the table. Diana sat beside him. Aria sat across from an empty chair and told herself she was not thinking about who would fill it. He arrived at seven twelve. Not dramatically late — late enough to be noticed, early enough to be forgiven. He dropped into the chair across from her with the particular economy of someone accustomed to arriving into spaces and having them rearrange around him, exchanged a brief word with Marcus that had the easy shorthand of people who knew each other well, accepted a plate from Diana with a smile that Aria reluctantly noted was genuinely charming, and then — He looked across the table. At her. One moment. Maybe two. Long enough to be a look and short enough to be denied as one. His eyes were dark — brown or something darker, she couldn't tell in the candlelight — and there was something in them that she couldn't name, some quality of attention that was different from the casual assessing glance of someone being introduced to a new stepsister. It wasn't warm. It wasn't unwelcoming. It was something more like recognition. As if he'd been expecting her. As if she were something he'd already considered. Then it was gone. He reached for his water glass, turned to say something to Marcus, and resumed being a person at a dinner table who had simply looked at another person at a dinner table and found nothing of particular note. Aria found her fork. She was not flushed. It was warm in the dining room, is all. The candles. "Aria is starting at Crestwood in the fall," her mother said, in the bright voice of someone navigating a social situation by sheer force of warmth. "Second year. She's studying literature." "Good department," Damien said. He did not look up from his plate. "Professor Hale is worth taking if you can get a spot. She's brutal but she's right about everything." Aria blinked. "I'll keep that in mind," she said. He nodded once. Went back to eating. Did not speak again for the rest of the meal. Aria told herself she was relieved. She ate her mother's cooking and answered Marcus's careful, considerate questions about her degree and her previous university and the subjects she found most interesting, and she was pleasant and appropriate and gave nothing away, and all the while she was acutely, inconveniently, entirely against her will aware of the person sitting directly across from her in a way she had not been aware of another person in a very long time. Relieved, she told herself again, more firmly. Absolutely relieved. --- That night, in the beautiful east-facing bedroom with its empty bookshelves now half-filled and its good light now dark and its windows looking out over a garden she couldn't yet see, Aria lay awake and stared at the ceiling and told herself tomorrow would be normal. She would find the campus. She would find her classes. She would construct, as she always had, a quiet and manageable and perfectly survivable life in this new place, and the fact that the person across the dinner table had looked at her for two seconds in a way she couldn't stop turning over in her mind was not a sign of anything. It was dinner. People looked at each other at dinner. That was what dinner was for. Tomorrow would be normal. She was almost asleep when she heard, faintly, through the floor below her — footsteps, deliberate and unhurried, moving through the house. Stopping, for just a moment, somewhere beneath her room. Then moving on. What she didn't know, lying in the dark in her beautiful new room in this house full of things she didn't yet understand, was that normal had already left. It had slipped out sometime between the motorcycle in the driveway and the candlelight and those two seconds across the dinner table, and it was not coming back. Nothing in her life, from this night forward, would ever be normal again.