In His Bed

Chapter 3: Damage Control

ARIA

By the time my cab pulled up outside my building, I had rebuilt the wall three times and watched it fall twice.

It doesn't matter, I told myself, unlocking my door, stepping over the mail I hadn't picked up since Thursday. One night. Bodies don't have memories. Bodies just have chemistry, and chemistry isn't the same thing as feelings, and you are twenty seven years old and entirely capable of having s*x with someone and not falling apart over it.

I believed myself for almost eleven minutes. I knew, because I counted.

At minute twelve, I was standing in my shower with the water too hot, replaying the exact sound of his voice saying my name, and I had to physically brace a hand against the tile and remind myself that this, this specific weakness, this exact softness, was the thing that had gotten me hurt the first time. Wanting Stan Montenegro had never once in my life been free.

I got out of the shower. I made coffee I didn't drink. I opened my laptop, closed it again, opened a case file for a client meeting on Tuesday, read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a single word of it, and finally gave up and lay down on my couch in the middle of the afternoon like a woman recovering from a minor surgery instead of one night I'd apparently agreed, in some unremembered moment, to enjoy.

He said sorry, some traitor part of my brain kept offering, unhelpfully, on a loop. Twelve years, and he actually said it.

It doesn't undo anything, I told the traitor part back. It's not supposed to feel like it undoes anything.

It felt, annoyingly, like it undid something.

STAN

Nine floors up and eleven blocks away, I was having a version of the same argument with myself, and losing it slightly faster.

I stood at the window of my penthouse with a coffee I'd made and not touched, watching the city do its ordinary Sunday business fourteen floors below me, and thought about the exact way Aria's voice had cracked on the word fifteen, and hated myself with a precision that twelve years of controlled living hadn't managed to dull even slightly.

I was fifteen wasn't an excuse. I'd meant that. But sitting with the truth of it, that I had, in fact, told her the thing I'd spent twelve years avoiding, out loud, in my own bedroom, at the worst possible moment, didn't feel like the relief people described when they talked about finally saying the hard thing. It felt like standing in a doorway I could never walk back through.

I picked up my phone four times to text her. Put it down four times. On the fifth, I actually opened her contact, she was still saved, still exactly where I'd left her twelve years ago, Aria W., no last name change, no updating, like some part of me had never let myself forget the shape of her name on a screen, and started typing.

I meant what I said.

I deleted it.

I know you said nothing happened this morning. I don't believe you, and I don't think you believe you either.

I deleted that too.

I was three words into a third attempt, I'm not trying, when my phone rang, and Yvette's name came up on the screen, and I felt the particular relief of a man handed a reason to stop doing the harder thing.

"Yvette."

"Sorry to call on a Sunday." Her voice was warm, easy, the voice of someone who'd made herself indispensable enough that calling on a Sunday never needed an apology that actually meant anything. "The Hendricks contract needs your signature before Tuesday's board call or we lose the window. I can bring it by, or you can swing by the office, whatever's easier."

"Bring it by." It came out faster than I meant it to, relief disguised as efficiency. "Give me an hour."

"You okay? You sound off."

"I'm fine."

"Okay." A pause, just a beat too long, the kind of pause that meant she didn't believe me and was choosing, deliberately, not to push. "See you in an hour, then."

I hung up, and looked back down at my phone, at the three words still sitting in the message box to Aria, unsent.

I'm not trying.

I deleted them, set the phone face down on the counter, and told myself it was better this way. Better to let the morning cool into something manageable before I said anything I couldn't take back. Better to give her room.

I didn't examine, too closely, how much that decision felt like the last twelve years all over again, choosing the safer silence over the harder truth, one more time, because it was easier than finding out what happened if I didn't.

ARIA

Across the city, I fell asleep on my couch at four in the afternoon, and dreamed, for the first time in years, about a treehouse and a promise I'd meant with my whole fifteen year old heart.

I woke up two hours later to a text from my doctor's office confirming a routine appointment I'd forgotten I'd scheduled weeks ago, back when the only thing I'd had to worry about was a stomach bug that wouldn't quit.

I stared at the reminder for a long moment before I registered, with the slow cold drop of a thought I wasn't ready for, exactly how many days late I was.