Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
A part of us.
Like she’d always been meant to be here.
I watched her in the soft glow of the patio lights, the breeze lifting her hair, her laughter drifting across the table like a song I still knew by heart.
For the first time in a long time, Thanksgiving didn’t feel like just another day at the office.
It felt like hope.
I did my best to squash it before it swelled too deep in my chest, but it was useless. I couldn’t help but watch her and wonder if she was feeling it, too — if that joy radiating off her felt like the relief I’d been so desperate to give her.
I walked Ariana out to her car around eight. I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want her to leave, but she told the crew she needed to get home to FaceTime Georgie, and I used it as an excuse to head to the arena to prepare for tomorrow’s game.
The quiet of the night surrounded us once the door was shut, a jolt of laughter following us out into the cool night. I smiled, stuffing my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t reach for Ariana.
“That was so fun,” she said, digging in her purse for her keys. She unlocked her car with two beeps and a flash of the lights. “I can’t remember the last time I had a Thanksgiving like that.” She shook her head. “I never have, actually.”
“Not even with Nathan and his family?”
She snorted. “Please. His family is so hoity toity, they wouldn’t be caught dead at a table with babies. They had enough trouble the first year I brought Georgie, and he was a teenager.”
Her eyes widened, like she just realized she’d said something she shouldn’t have.
“Don’t take it back,” I said. “This is a safe place. You can say whatever you want, no judgment.”
She sighed, looking down at the keys in her hand as we reached her car. “It’s terrible, though, isn’t it? How easy it was for me to talk shit about my husband?” She shook her head.
I wanted to say so many things, but I kept quiet, afraid she might change the subject or backtrack if I spoke too soon.
“I just…” She blew out a shaky breath, her free hand slipping into her hair. “I just don’t know how I got here.”
Her voice was small — not fragile, but honest in a way that made my chest tighten. She looked up at me, then down again, like the words were fighting their way out.
“One moment I’m just a young girl falling in love,” she said softly, “and the next I’m…
I’m this woman I don’t recognize at all.
I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any purpose outside of Sweet Dreams, which wasn’t even mine to begin with.
I don’t feel butterflies anymore. I don’t feel… anything.”
My heart cracked open.
“And I love Nathan,” she added quickly, instinctively, reflexively — the way someone says “I’m fine” after they’ve been limping for miles. “I do. He’s… I know he’s a great man, a great husband. I know I’m lucky. I just…”
Her voice thinned.
She swallowed hard, eyes shining.
“Sometimes I…” She shook her head, wiping at tears before they fell. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Don’t apologize,” I murmured, stepping closer. “Not to me.”
She laughed — a broken, bitter little exhale — like she half expected me to tell her she was being dramatic.
But I never would. I wasn’t him.
Ariana inhaled, a long trembling breath that lifted her shoulders and dropped them again.
“Tonight was… God, it was like seeing another life I could have had. I felt so at ease. I loved being here with this family, with Ava and Rowan and Lennon, with all these people who so quickly called me a friend. I could see Georgie here with all of them.”
She paused, throat shifting before she looked at me.
“With you.”
The air changed, thickening and humming and pulling tight like a wire between us.
I felt it down to the bone.
Her gaze didn’t waver, even as the atmosphere sizzled between us. Years from our past flickered like highlight reels in my mind — and I knew she was experiencing the same. I saw it in the flush of her cheeks, in the way she leaned into me, the way hope flashed in her eyes.
“Do you remember the time we hosted Thanksgiving together?” she asked.
“I remember everything, Ari.”
Her breath caught, and the way she looked at me emboldened me to continue, to not waste this chance. I didn’t care if it was wrong. I didn’t care that she bore the last name of another man, that the man she’d sworn vows to was my boss.
At the end of the day, she didn’t belong to him. She never could.
Because she was mine, and I was hers, and no amount of time or distance could ever change that.
I reached up, sweeping a strand of hair gently behind her ear before my hand cupped her cheek.
She trembled under my touch, even as she tilted into it, like she was afraid to give into the desire I felt pulsing through her.
“Every day,” I said quietly. “Every night. Every word and touch and kiss.”
My thumb brushed her jaw, heart pounding in my throat with every syllable I uttered.
“You are embedded in me like the code that makes me operate. You were then. You still are now.”
“Shane…” she whispered, shaking her head — but she didn’t move away. She didn’t pull back.
I framed her face with both hands, tilting her chin just enough that her eyes fluttered closed.
“If you tell me to stop, I will.” My voice dropped to a raw whisper. “But selfishly… I really hope you don’t. I want to kiss you, Ari. I’ve wanted to kiss you since the moment you crashed back into my life. Please…” I swallowed, wetting my lips. “Let me kiss you.”
For a heartbeat, she hovered there — breath trembling, body leaning, soul caught between fear and longing.
And then she pressed up onto her toes, searing my mouth with the gentle brush of her lips.
It was the gunshot that set off a chain of reactions — her gasping, me inhaling a breath that burned my lungs, the night air around us pulling taut before it snapped like a rubber band.
I descended, my mouth firm against hers as my heart pounded in my chest. I wanted to go slow. I wanted to savor that kiss and each tender press of her lips against mine.
But I was like a caged beast, and she’d unlatched the door.
My fingers curled in her hair, cradling the back of her neck and holding her to me. I sucked in a breath on that kiss, and when I opened my mouth and she did the same, letting my tongue in to dance with hers, I moaned, deep and guttural.
“Fuck, I’ve needed this for so long, Ari,” I groaned, kissing her harder, more frantic. “Needed you.”
I backed her into her car, pinning her against the door and pressing the full weight of me into her. I wanted her to feel how my heart raced out of control, how I trembled where I held her, how every breath was shaking out of me.
“You think you’re hiding it,” I whispered against her mouth, brushing my nose to hers before I was stealing another long kiss.
I was greedy. I could never have enough.
“But I know you, Ari. I’ve always known you. I see when you’re scared. I see when you’re shrinking yourself to survive.” Our foreheads were together, her hands knitted in my sweater as I shook my head against hers. “It kills me not to pull you out of whatever situation is making you do that.”
Her breath hitched as I kissed down her throat, up over her jaw, claiming her mouth again with a kiss I hoped said more than any words could.
“You deserve to breathe, Ari,” I whispered. “You deserve to speak without flinching. To exist without apologizing. I don’t know what happens behind your doors, but I know what it does to you. I can see it in your eyes.”
My thumb swept her cheek.
“And I swear to God, I’m trying to respect the life you chose. The vows you made. But if you ever… if you ever looked at me and said you needed a way out—” I swallowed hard. “I’d take your hand and run. Tonight. Right now. Without looking back.”
I exhaled, trembling.
“I’d choose you, Ari. Over everything. Every time.”
She whimpered, and then her arms were around my neck, pulling me into her. She hiked one leg up and I answered by lifting her completely. Her legs wrapped around me and we both groaned when I pressed against her, when the heat of me combined with the heat of her.
“Fuck,” I whispered, cock hardening at the feel of her, and she thrust against me with a moan of her own.
We were ravenous, kissing hard enough to bruise, teeth sinking into skin deep enough to mark.
And then, suddenly, she pulled back.
Ariana’s hands pressed firmly into my chest, her eyes wide as they flicked between mine.
And I watched the exact moment guilt flooded over her, taking out any desire in its wake.
“Stop,” she panted, and she couldn’t look at me as she wiggled out of my grasp. I dropped her feet to the ground gently. “We have to stop.”
“Okay.”
“We have to stop now. Right now.”
“Okay,” I repeated, calmly. Once she was safely on the ground, I pulled away, even as my body and heart and fucking soul screamed in protest. I held up my hands, letting her see I was listening, that she was in control.
Her eyes finally met mine again, and then immediately welled with tears. She sniffed them back, shaking her head. “That was wrong. That was — we can’t —”
“Okay. Ariana, it’s okay.”
“How can you say that?” Tears spilled over, and she swatted them away. “It’s not okay. Nothing is okay. I’m married, Shane.”
Her words sliced me to the bone.
“To your general manager,” she added, digging the knife deeper. “Do you realize what it would mean for me, for you, if he ever found out what we just did?”
She ripped her car door open, and she might as well have ripped my heart from my chest in the process.
I wanted to beg her to stop, to stay, to talk to me, to be with me.
I wanted to scream I don’t fucking care what it would mean!
But I’d already crossed a line, and I knew that even though she hadn’t stopped me then, the invitation was revoked now.
“And you’re a liar,” she said with her back turned to me. She angled her chin over her shoulder just enough for me to see the pain in her face when she added, “You wouldn’t choose me every time. You didn’t even choose me the first time.”
She was in the car in the next breath, her door slamming shut, engine firing to life, wheels screeching as she threw it in reverse.
I stood there like an idiot — chest heaving, mouth parted, hands still lifted like I was trying to hold on to something already long gone.
Her taillights burned into the night, two red smears bleeding into the dark as she shot down the driveway and disappeared around the bend.
I didn’t chase her.
God, every cell in my body wanted to.
I wanted to sprint after her, pound on her window, tell her she had it all wrong — that I’d choose her now, tomorrow, always, that I’d never make that mistake again.
But wanting wasn’t the same as deserving.
She’d trusted me with something raw and trembling and secret. And then I’d kissed her like every restrained thought in me had snapped.
She wasn’t running from me.
She was running from what it meant that she didn’t pull away.
I looked down at my hands — the same hands that had held her face, her waist, her heart for one impossible minute — and curled them into fists.
“If you think I won’t fight for you this time,” I whispered to the empty drive, “you don’t know me at all.”
The ache in my chest sharpened. It was the kind of pain that made me feel alive, the kind that existed because what I was fighting for mattered.
She mattered.
I wouldn’t chase her now. She needed space. She needed safety. She needed breathing room.
But I could prove her wrong.
Her taillights were long gone, swallowed by the night, but I stayed there anyway — rooted to the driveway like leaving might undo the last ten minutes.
Hell, maybe I deserved to stand there and feel every ounce of what I’d been missing for years.
Because one thing was certain as the air finally settled around me:
She could run from the moment, from the intensity, from me.
But I would never run from her again.
And I didn’t care what I risked in the process.