In His Bed

Chapter 2: The Hallway in the Room

ARIA

"There's nothing to talk about." I was already moving, scanning the floor for my shoes, my dress, anything that would let me leave this apartment with some fraction of my dignity intact. "I'm going to go home, and you're going to go back to being someone I don't think about, and in a week this is going to feel like something that happened to a different person."

"Is that how it worked last time?"

I stopped.

Stan hadn't raised his voice. He never raised his voice, I remembered that about him too, the way anger came out of him low and precise instead of loud, a blade instead of a fist. He'd pulled on a shirt at some point, not bothering to button it, and he was watching me with an expression that had stopped being unreadable and started being something worse. Patient. Like he had all the time in the world to wait for me to stop running.

"Don't," I said.

"Don't what? Bring up the last twelve years? You brought them up. You said in a week this'll feel like something that happened to someone else. That's not new information, Aria. That's a system. You've been running it since you were fifteen."

"You don't get to talk to me about systems."

"Why not?"

"Because you're the reason I built one."

The words came out before I could stop them, sharper than I meant, and for one second the room went very still. I watched it land on him, watched something flicker and close, fast, the way it always used to when we got too close to the thing neither of us said.

Twelve years and he still did that. Twelve years and some i***t part of my chest still noticed.

"That's not fair," Stan said, quiet now.

"Fair." I almost laughed. "You want to talk to me about fair."

"I was fifteen."

"So was I." My voice cracked on the second word and I hated it, hated that after everything, after the fortress I'd built brick by brick out of exactly this kind of moment, he could still find the one crack in it inside of ten minutes. "I was fifteen and you let an entire hallway laugh at me because it was easier than telling them the truth. You knew what my dad's business had just done to us. You knew, Stan, better than anyone, because I told you everything, and you used it."

"I didn't use it."

"You let Marcus use it. Same thing."

"It is not the same thing." For the first time, something cracked in him too, not loud, just a fraction more real than the controlled stillness he'd been wearing since I opened my eyes. "You have no idea what that year looked like for me. My father was." He stopped himself. Recalibrated. I watched him do it, watched twelve years of practice smooth his face back into something careful. "It doesn't matter. It's not an excuse."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

Silence sat between us, and it was, infuriatingly, not an empty silence. It had weight to it, the specific charged weight of two people who used to be able to read each other's next sentence before it was spoken, standing close enough now that I could see the fast, uneven rise of his breathing, could see him not looking at my mouth and failing.

"I remember the treehouse," he said, low, almost like it surprised him to say it out loud. "More than I remember most of the last twelve years, if I'm honest. I remember exactly what you said to me the day before it happened."

"Don't."

"You said you'd never let anyone talk about me the way they talked about my dad. You said it like a promise. Like it was obvious."

His jaw tightened. "And two days later I let a hallway full of people do exactly that to you, and I've never told you I'm sorry, because I've spent twelve years pretending it didn't happen instead of ever having to look at you and say the words."

My chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with the last twelve hours and everything to do with the last twelve years, and I hated him for it, hated the specific unfairness of being handed the apology I used to lie awake wanting, at the worst possible moment, in his bedroom, with his shirt half buttoned and his voice doing the thing it used to do when he actually meant something.

"You don't get to do this now," I said.

"Do what?"

"Be him. The version I." I stopped myself before the sentence finished, before I handed him the other half of a truth I'd spent twelve years burying. "It doesn't matter. None of this matters, because in nine months this is going to be a story I tell no one, and you're going to go back to running your company, and I am never doing this again."

Something shifted in his face, quick, unreadable, gone before I could name it. "Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"You want to pretend last night doesn't have to mean anything. Fine. I'm not going to chase you around my own apartment arguing about it." His voice had gone flat, controlled again, the shutters coming back down with practiced speed. "But you should know that's not actually what you want. You're just better at lying to yourself than you used to be."

I found my shoes. Found the door. Didn't look back at him, because looking back at him felt like exactly the kind of mistake my whole adult life had been built to avoid, and I was not, I was not, going to let one night in his bed undo twelve years of knowing better.

"Goodbye, Stan," I said, and left before either of us could say the thing we actually meant.

The elevator doors closed on his face, still watching me, still not looking away, and I pressed my back against the mirrored wall and closed my eyes and let myself, for exactly four floors, fall apart.