In His Bed

ARIA The first thing I noticed was the sheets. Too smooth. Too cool against my skin in a way my own sheets never were, not after three years of the same twin size mattress and a comforter I'd had since college. These were the kind of sheets that came with a thread count instead of a price tag. The second thing I noticed was that I didn't have a headache. I should have had a headache. I'd had, how much champagne? Two glasses, maybe three, the kind of night where the glass in my hand kept getting refilled by someone else's hand before I noticed it was empty. But there was no headache. Just a slow, syrupy heaviness low in my stomach, and an ache in muscles I hadn't used in longer than I wanted to think about, and underneath both of those, quieter, a warmth I recognized before I let myself recognize it. The warmth of having been touched. Held. Wanted, specifically, by someone who'd known exactly where to put his hands. I kept my eyes closed. Don't, I told myself. Don't do the thing where you catalog the evidence before you're ready for the verdict. I did it anyway. Bare shoulder. Someone else's shirt draped over the back of a chair that was not my chair, in a room that was not my room, in an apartment that smelled like cedar and clean laundry and something underneath that was warmer, more specific, a smell my body responded to before my mind could place it, the way a name comes back to you in a dream half a second before you wake. My mind placed it anyway. My eyes opened. The ceiling was wrong first, too high, exposed beams, the kind of ceiling that came with an apartment that took up an entire floor. Then the light was wrong, gray and early, filtering through floor to ceiling windows I'd never seen before in my life. Then the weight beside me on the mattress, unmoving, breathing slow and even in the specific rhythm of someone still asleep. I turned my head. For one full second, my brain gave me nothing. A blank, mercy of a second where he was just a man, dark hair against a white pillow, one arm thrown up over his head, jaw shadowed with morning stubble, undeniably, catastrophically good looking in the unfair way of men who'd never had to work at it. Then the second ended. "Oh," I said, out loud, to no one. "Oh, no." Stan Montenegro's eyes opened. He didn't startle. That was the first thing, he didn't jolt upright, didn't grab for a sheet, didn't do any of the things a normal person did when they woke up next to someone they hadn't planned on waking up next to. He just looked at me, steady, the way he'd apparently learned to look at everything in the last twelve years, like nothing in the world had the right to catch him off guard. Then something moved behind his eyes, quick, involuntary, gone almost before it started, and for half a second he wasn't a stranger in an expensive apartment. He was fifteen years old, laughing so hard at something I'd said that he'd had to sit down on the curb outside Fairview Prep, and I hated, hated, that some part of my chest recognized that look before the rest of me caught up and remembered everything that came after it. "Aria," he said. Just my name. Low, rough with sleep, and something else underneath it that I refused to name. "Don't." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, which was fine, because sharp was armor and I needed armor immediately, ideally several layers of it, ideally a decade's worth. I sat up, already reaching for the sheet, already cataloging exits, bathroom, hallway, front door, how many floors down, did I have my phone. "Don't say my name like that." "Like what?" "Like we're seventeen and I just climbed through your window." I was out of the bed now, and the shirt draped over the chair was, infuriatingly, my own, someone had at least had the decency to fold it, though I couldn't decide if that made it better or worse. I pulled it on, buttoning it with hands that were not, I told myself firmly, shaking. "Like this is normal. Like waking up in your bed, of all the beds in this city, is a thing that happens to me on a Tuesday." "It's Sunday." "That is not the point, Stan." He sat up slowly, unhurried in a way that made me want to scream, the sheet pooling at his waist, watching me with an expression I couldn't read anymore, hadn't been able to read in twelve years, not since the last time I'd known exactly what was going on behind his face, and it had turned out to be nothing at all, nothing but calculation, nothing but a boy deciding I was worth less than his own reputation. "What do you remember?" he asked. The question landed like a hand at the base of my spine, not unwelcome, exactly, which was the worst part. Just unbearably specific. I remembered fragments. His voice low against my ear at the gala, saying something that had made me laugh before I'd caught myself. A hand at the small of my back, guiding me through a crowd like it had every right to be there. The particular gravity of being looked at by someone who used to know exactly how to look at me, before either of us had learned to hide anything. I remembered wanting, and I remembered not caring, for one night, that wanting had always been the thing that got me hurt. "Nothing," I said. "I don't remember anything." It was, for the first time in twelve years, a lie I couldn't quite make myself believe. Stan watched me say it, and something in his face told me he didn't believe it either. "Okay," he said quietly. "Then we should probably talk about that."