In His Bed

Chapter 14: Too Close

Aria

We ended up back at his apartment that night, going through security footage his team had pulled from the gala, both of us too tired to keep pretending the couch cushion between us needed to stay empty.

"Pause it," I said, leaning closer to the laptop screen. "Right there. Who's that, by the bar?"

Stan squinted at the grainy frame. "Catering staff, I think. Doesn't match anyone on our list."

"Dead end, then."

"Another one." He rubbed his eyes, dragging a hand down his face, exhaustion finally catching up to both of us after two days of adrenaline with nowhere to go. "We've been at this for six hours and we have nothing."

"We have a shorter list than we started with."

"Barely." He closed the laptop, set it aside, and for a moment neither of us said anything, the quiet settling comfortably between us in a way it hadn't in years, not since before Fairview, not since before either of us learned exactly how much a single hallway could cost.

"Can I ask you something?" I said finally, surprising myself with the question before I'd fully decided to ask it.

"Anything."

"Are you scared? Actually scared. Not the version you say out loud to sound reasonable. The real one."

Something shifted in his face, the careful composure he wore like a second skin slipping, just slightly, at the directness of the question. "Yeah," he admitted, quiet. "I'm terrified, Aria. Not just of the blackmail. Of all of it. The baby, you, whether I'm going to be any good at this, whether I'm going to become the version of my father I've spent my whole life running from."

"You won't."

"You don't know that."

"I do, actually." I turned to face him fully, something in me loosening at the rare sight of him without any armor at all. "Your father would never have driven to my apartment at midnight because I was scared. He would have sent someone to handle it. You showed up yourself. That's not nothing, Stan. That's the whole difference."

He looked at me for a long moment, something raw and unguarded moving behind his eyes, closer to seventeen than thirty than I'd seen him since the morning I woke up in his bed. "I think about that hallway every single day," he said quietly. "Not because I'm punishing myself. Because I promised myself I'd never again choose the easier silence over you. And I keep almost breaking that promise anyway, every time something gets hard."

"You haven't broken it."

"Not yet." His hand found mine on the couch cushion between us, tentative, like he expected me to pull away and was bracing for it anyway. "I don't know how to do any of this the right way. The baby, the blackmail, us. I've never had a version of myself that knew how to be steady for someone else. I only know how to be steady for a company."

"Nobody knows how to do this," I said softly. "I don't either. I've had a plan for my whole life and none of it accounted for you."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"I don't know yet." My voice had gone quieter than I meant it to, honest in a way that frightened me a little. "I keep waiting for the version of you that disappears when things get hard. The one from the hallway. And you keep not being him, and I don't know what to do with that yet."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I know you keep saying that."

"I mean it every time." His thumb moved, slow and absent, across the back of my hand, and something in the small unconscious gesture undid me more than any of his actual words had managed to. "Aria, I think I've been in love with you since I was fifteen years old, and I never let myself say it because saying it felt like handing you a weapon I didn't trust myself to survive you using."

The room went very still.

I felt the words land somewhere low in my chest, unbearably specific, twelve years of careful distance suddenly feeling paper thin against the weight of what he'd just said, and for one long, suspended moment neither of us moved, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, close enough that some reckless part of me leaned in before I'd fully decided to.

Stan's breath caught. His eyes dropped, briefly, to my mouth, and for a fraction of a second I thought he was going to close the last of the distance between us, thought I might actually let him.

Then his phone buzzed on the coffee table, sharp and insistent in the quiet, and I watched something close behind his eyes, fast and involuntary, the same old reflex reasserting itself before either of us could finish what we'd almost started.

He pulled back first.

"That's probably the security team," he said, voice gone carefully even, already reaching for the phone, already rebuilding the distance between us with practiced speed. "I should take this."

"Stan."

"It's fine." He wasn't looking at me anymore, already standing, already retreating into the version of himself that handled things instead of felt them. "We should focus on the list. We're running out of time."

I watched him go, watched twelve years of old habit reassert itself in the space of a single phone buzz, and felt the specific, familiar ache of almost having something and watching it slip away at the exact moment it mattered most.

"Right," I said quietly, to a room he'd already half left. "The list."