30. Chapter Thirty
Aspen
Four steps. That’s all it is — four steps of hotel carpet and courage to go after something I want — and I cross them quickly before I lose my nerve.
I’ve been thinking about doing this all dinner, watching him tangle himself in his own jokes and feeling his nerves bleed into my own. And now I’ve got my chance.
I grab his shirt and pull his face down to mine, and I kiss Stanley Ermington for no other reason on this earth other than I simply want to.
His lips touch mine, and a small, stunned sound leaves his chest. Our tongues collide, and he’s kissing me back like he’s hungry for me.
He drops his hand and grabs his keycard out of his pocket.
His hand finds the door behind him. The little green light flashes, and then I hear the door unlock, and we’re inside his room.
The door clicks shut, and it’s just us in the dark room.
And I’m the one pushing this. I’m the one who started it.
Running on the clean, bright adrenaline of having finally chosen something with my own two hands.
It escalates because I want it to. Because I let it. His jacket falls on the floor. Then my coat. His hands are careful, and his mouth is at my jaw, my throat, and I’m pulling him toward the bed.
And then it gets real.
Real enough that I hear Gavin’s voice in my head — are you even sure it’s mine — because the last time I was under a hockey player, I got hit with reality so hard that I thought my life was going to change forever.
I go rigid.
It isn’t a decision. That’s the worst of it.
I want Stanley — I have never not wanted him, the wanting was never the problem — the problem is that doing this is the exact thing that nearly took me apart.
And I freeze because my body can’t tell the difference between then and now, and it locks up around the memory like a fist.
I pull back. My hand comes up between us, flat against his chest.
“Wait—”
He stops.
Instantly. Completely. The second my palm hits his chest, he goes still, and then he’s easing back, giving me air, both his hands lifting off me and up into the space where I can see them.
There’s no sigh, no held breath, no flicker of come on anywhere on his face. No friction at all. He just stops.
“Hey,” he says, low, even, and no edge on it. “Hey. It’s okay.”
And I’m bracing for his annoyance by me telling him to stop, the pressure, the gentle wheedling, the sigh that turns this into my fault, the thousand small ways a man can tell you that your fear is an inconvenience he’s being very patient about.
He doesn’t do any of them. He sits back on his heels in the dark and gives me space.
“We don’t have to do anything,” he says. “Nothing’s a great option. I’m a huge fan of nothing. We can put the TV on and watch strangers buy houses they can’t afford.” He looks at me then. “We can just hang out. I’m not going anywhere.”
And he doesn’t ask. That’s the part that undoes a thread in me.
He doesn’t say what’s wrong or did I do something.
He doesn’t make me find words for the thing crouched in my chest because he already knows.
He’s the one person in my life who knows.
So he just connects it, quietly, without mentioning it.
We end up lying down on top of the covers, turned toward each other in the city light. His hand is loose around mine like that was always going to be enough. And because he cannot survive thirty consecutive seconds of silence, he starts to talk.
“You’d be terrifying, you know.” He says it to the ceiling. “Pregnant. If that ever happened. Hypothetically. To you.”
I freeze. “What?”
“You’d have a spreadsheet.” Total confidence. “Don’t argue, you’d have a color-coded spreadsheet for the nap schedule before the stick was even dry. Feeding windows. A tab for the pediatrician. Cross-referenced. There’d be a binder, Linwood. A laminated one.”
“Oh my god.” It comes out as a horrified laugh. “Stop. Why are you saying this? This is so weird—”
“I’m just saying you’d be efficient about it.
Frighteningly. The hospital would be scared of you.
” He’s grinning at the ceiling, lazy, like we’re discussing nothing serious.
“And I’d be the worst. The actual worst. I’d be so insufferable about it.
I’d tell everyone. I’d go back downstairs right now and tell Channing.
” He pauses. “I’d be at every appointment.
Every single one. Annoying every doctor in the building, asking nine hundred questions, getting in everyone’s way.
You would not be able to get rid of me. You’d try. It would not work.”
I know what he’s doing now. I don’t think he has the faintest idea that he’s taken the single worst thing that ever happened to me — the thing that taught me how much it matters who I give myself to — and he’s standing on top of it, in the dark, telling me a different possibility.
One where I’m not left. One where I’m not second.
One where the hockey player doesn’t vanish.
He’s insufferable, he’s at every appointment, he won’t go. If it happened.
The cringe drops out of me without my permission.
I go quiet because it’s working. He thinks he’s just being ridiculous to make me smile.
And somehow that’s what makes it work. He isn’t making it a moment, and he’s not watching my face for the effect.
He’s taking the terror off me, holding the nightmare up to the light and turning it slowly until it stops looking like the thing that ended me and starts looking like something I could almost want.
“You’d really stay?” I say softly.
He turns his head on the pillow. The grin goes soft at the corners, and for once, he doesn’t reach for a joke to land on.
“I’m not a leaver, Linwood.” He looks at me. “Whatever else I am. I don’t have it in me.”
And the want comes back.
Not in the flood this time, not the adrenaline that carried me across the hall — something steadier than that.
Something with its eyes open. Because I have evidence now that I didn’t have an hour ago.
He stopped. He didn’t push. The fear isn’t gone — it’s never going to be gone, I know how this works — but it’s smaller than the want now, and for the first time in three years, I have a reason to believe the wanting might be survivable with this particular person.
So I choose again. Smaller this time. More careful. Mine.
“Okay,” I say.
He goes still. “Okay?”
“But I need—” I push up on one elbow, and I make myself say it, all of it, out loud, because being precise is the only way I have ever known how to hold fear in place. “I need you to have something. Do you have something?”
“I—yeah.” He’s already reaching for his bag, no smirk, no questions. “Yeah. I think I’ve got it.”
“And.” This is the hard part. I keep my eyes on his face so I can watch it when I say the words — watch for the flicker, the joke, the thing that would tell me he doesn’t understand what he’s being handed.
“I need you to promise me. Even with it. Promise me you won’t—” My throat shuts.
I force it open. “Promise you won’t finish inside me. ”
I watch him take it completely seriously. No joke. Not even the ghost of one.
“I promise,” he says plainly. “Both. The thing and the promise. I’ve got you, Aspen.”
He doesn’t tell me I’m being paranoid. He doesn’t tell me the one makes the other unnecessary, doesn’t explain my own fear back to me. He can see that I need them both, and he just gives me all of it like needing it is the most reasonable request anyone’s ever made of him.
“I promise,” he says again, softer, like he heard the sentence I didn’t say out loud.
And the night changes.
The fear that has run my entire adult life takes a step back — not gone, just quiet and outvoted. And for the first time, I don’t need to analyze whether I’m safe.
I lean in and kiss him.
Gently, this time. No adrenaline behind it, nothing to outrun — just my mouth on his. He kisses me back like he means it and like he has all night, no rush in him anywhere, no hands trying to move things along. Just Stanley, letting me set the pace.
I have never once thought of him as a lover.
He’s been a hundred things to me — the boy across the rink, the name in my father’s mouth, the lie, the enemy, the one person who knows my worst thing — but never this.
And now that I know how his mouth feels moving slow and certain against mine, I don’t think I’ll ever manage to see him as anything less again.
I sit up enough to pull my shirt over my head.
His eyes drop, and something in his breathing changes. I reach back and unhook my bra and let it fall. He inhales like the air in the room just got thinner.
“Asp—”
I don’t let him finish the thought. I lean in and kiss him quiet. I find the hem of his shirt and drag it up and off, and when his bare chest meets mine, I put my mouth to the corner of his and whisper, “Don’t be scared to touch me.”
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, and there’s something serious moving under all that gold. “This,” he says. “This changes things. You know that.”
I kiss the corner of his mouth. “I know.”
“Are you okay with that?” His voice has gone low and careful. He kisses my cheek like he can’t quite hold still. “With change?”
I nod, and I mean it all the way down. “Are you?”
His fingers slide up the bare length of my spine, and I feel him shiver. “I don’t know if I’ll survive it.”
“Survive what?” His mouth is at my throat now and it’s hard to keep a sentence in one piece.
“Going pro.” It comes out rough, half into my skin. “Having you. All of it.”
And there it is — the thing he’s most afraid of laid right down next to the thing I’m most afraid of, the leaving, the distance, the year from now. Except he’s the one trembling now, and for once I’m the one who gets to be steady.
“I’ve heard about the Hawthorne House rules,” I say.
“Yeah?” His breath is warm against my collarbone.
“So just follow number one.”