In His Bed

Chapter 7: Said Out Loud

Aria

The elevator to the top floor of Montenegro Holdings was mirrored on every wall, which meant I had eleven floors to watch myself lose my nerve in triplicate.

I'd braced for a version of this that never happened. On the walk from the lobby to reception to the private elevator his assistant waved me into without even asking, I'd rehearsed the Stan from Chapter Two. Controlled. Careful. The man who deflected first and felt things later, in private, where no one could watch him do it. I'd built my whole plan around that man. Say the words fast, before he had time to retreat behind his own composure. Get through it before he could make it about anything other than the truth.

The doors opened onto his office, glass walled, city spread out behind his desk like something he owned along with everything else. He was on his feet before I'd finished stepping out of the elevator, phone already set down, every trace of the boardroom version of himself gone from his face the second he saw mine.

"What happened," he said. Not a question. A demand, low and immediate, closing the distance between us before I could decide whether I wanted him to.

"Nothing happened." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the only reason I trusted myself to keep talking. "I need to tell you something, and I need you to let me say all of it before you say anything back."

Something shifted behind his eyes, some old instinct recognizing the shape of a conversation he wasn't going to like. "Okay."

"I'm pregnant."

The words landed in the room and didn't leave. I watched them hit him in real time, watched the exact second his face stopped being the man from the boardroom entirely.

I'd braced for panic. I'd braced for the careful, controlled retreat I remembered from Chapter Two, the shutters coming down fast, calculation replacing feeling before either of us could get too close to something real. I'd priced out that reaction on the walk over and told myself I could survive it, because I'd survived it once already, twelve years ago, in a hallway that had taught me exactly what Stan Montenegro did with information that scared him.

He didn't do any of it.

His face went through something else instead, something I didn't have a category for because I'd never seen it on him before, not once, not even at fifteen. Shock, first, raw and unguarded. Then, underneath it, arriving so fast it was almost simultaneous, something that looked, impossibly, like relief.

"You're sure," he said. Quiet. Careful with the words in a way that had nothing to do with self protection.

"Two tests. Yesterday."

He sat down. Not in his desk chair, the executive one behind eleven floors of glass, but on the low couch against the window, like his legs had simply stopped agreeing to hold him up, and put his face in his hands for a long moment before he looked back up at me.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"Whatever you're bracing for right now." He stood again, slower this time, and crossed the last few feet between us like he was giving me every opportunity to stop him and choosing, deliberately, to give me the chance. "I can see you doing it. You're standing there waiting for me to be the person from twelve years ago. The person who chose the easy thing because the hard thing was scary."

"You did that once."

"I know I did." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the word know, and it was the first time in twelve years I'd heard him sound anything other than entirely in control of himself. "I've had twelve years to think about exactly how badly I did that, Aria, and I am not doing it again. Not with you. Not with this."

"You don't have to say that."

"I'm not saying it because I have to." He was close now, close enough that I had to tip my head back slightly to keep looking at him, close enough that I could feel the specific unsteady quality of his breathing, matched almost exactly to mine. "I'm saying it because it's true, and because I think some part of you already knew it was going to be true, which is why you're standing there looking like you're furious at me for not confirming what you were afraid of."

The accusation landed harder than I expected, mostly because it was accurate. I had built the entire walk over around a version of him that let me stay safe, stay armored, stay exactly as certain of my own solitude as I'd been for twelve years. His actual face, open and frightened and unmistakably present, gave me nothing to be armored against.

"I don't know how to do this," I said, and my voice finally, unforgivably, cracked. "I don't know how to let this be something we do together instead of something I survive alone."

"Then don't figure it out today." He reached for my hand, slow, giving me every second to pull away, and when I didn't, closed his fingers around mine like it was the easiest, most obvious thing in the world. "Today we just say it out loud. Together. That's it. That's the whole job today."

"And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow we figure out the rest." His thumb moved once, absently, over my knuckles, a gesture so small and so achingly familiar it undid something in my chest I'd spent twelve years reinforcing. "But you're not doing tomorrow alone either. I need you to hear that part specifically, because I don't think you actually believe it yet."

I looked up at him, at the version of Stan I'd stopped believing existed somewhere around age sixteen, and felt the fortress I'd built my whole adult life around develop its first real crack.

"I'm scared," I admitted, and it cost me more than anything I'd said in twelve years.

"I know." His hand tightened around mine. "Me too. We're allowed to both be terrified and still not run."

Outside his window, eleven floors down, the city kept moving, indifferent to the two of us standing very still in a glass office, holding onto each other's hands like something depended on it, because, for the first time either of us was willing to admit out loud, something finally did.