The Morning After
Aria
I woke up and for exactly thirty seconds I forgot everything.
No lawsuits. No cameras. No federal investigations or filing cabinets or unknown numbers or smoke from dumpster fires. Just warm sheets and morning light coming through curtains that weren’t mine and the specific, devastating awareness of Caden Voss asleep beside me with his arm across my waist like he’d decided that was where it lived now.
Thirty seconds of pure, uncomplicated peace.
Then my brain caught up and remembered everything and I decided, firmly, that I was going to ignore all of it for at least another hour.
I turned carefully, trying not to wake him.
Failed.
He stirred immediately, the way light sleepers do, eyes opening slow and finding me before he’d fully arrived at conscious. For a
