Chapter 18 Aiden
AIDEN
It’s the middle of the night when Harper taps my shoulder. She’s standing there barefoot, wrapped in one of my sweaters, her face pale and tight, eyes shining too brightly. Her hands are shaking in the dim light.
I bolt up. “Mason—”
“He’s fine.”
I scan her for injuries, for panic, for the kind of fear that means immediate action. “What’s wrong?”
She doesn’t answer right away. She lifts her hands. The envelope is unmistakable.
Old. Yellowed. Creased. My handwriting across the front. Seeing it in her hands feels like the floor dropping out from under me, a sensation so sudden and violent it steals my breath. That’s happened to me before at a fire. Third floor burnt out the fourth from underneath my feet.
It felt just like this, except now, my face goes cold instead of hot.
“I didn’t know that was still in there,” I say quietly. My voice sounds distant, like it belongs to someone else. “I wrote it the morning after you left the cabin.”
Her eyes flick up to mine, wide and disbelieving. “You wrote me a letter?”
“Yes.”
The silence stretches, thick and unbearable. The past presses in on us, no longer something I can keep tucked away in a drawer. She looks down at the envelope again, her fingers tightening around it like it might vanish if she loosens her grip.
“Why didn’t you send it?”
It’s a fair question. One I don’t want to answer.
I run a hand through my hair and lean back against the headboard, suddenly needing the support. There’s no deflecting this. No minimizing it. Not now. No matter how I feel, she deserves answers.
“I walked to the mailbox… I’m not sure how many times.” The words come out rough, scraped straight from somewhere I don’t usually let myself go. “I stood there with it in my hand. Just stood there like an idiot, staring at the slot.”
Harper doesn’t interrupt. She doesn’t move. She listens.
“I was afraid. Of being vulnerable. Of you rejecting me. Of proving to myself that I wasn’t good enough for you.” I swallow hard. “So, I kept it. I’ve read it and re-sealed it probably a hundred times over the years. It was my reminder of what a coward I am.”
Her breath stutters, a sound so small but it still cuts straight through me. She looks up at me again, eyes swimming. “And you kept it.”
“I couldn’t let it go. Even if I tried to let you go.”
She lowers her gaze back to the envelope, fingers trembling now, and I know what she’s about to do before she does it. She opens it.
I could snatch it now, beg her to let it go. But I’m not that guy anymore. She deserves better.
Harper unfolds the paper slowly, like she’s afraid it might tear if she moves too fast.
I recognize the creases immediately. I put them there myself, smoothing it flat over and over again, reading and rereading the words until they felt burned into me.
Watching her hold it now makes my chest ache in a way I don’t have language for.
This letter was never meant to be read out loud. It was meant to exist quietly, like me.
Her voice shakes as she starts. “Harper,” she reads. “Last night was not a mistake. You were not a mistake.”
I close my eyes.
Hearing it spoken instead of remembered is brutal. The words sound younger than I feel now, raw and earnest and terrified in a way I’d wanted to forget.
“But I am a mistake,” she continues, tears slipping free and streaking down her cheeks.
“You’re twenty-two with your whole life ahead of you—college graduation, career, a future full of possibilities.
I’m a thirty-four-year-old firefighter with more scars than sense and a father who taught me that men like us don’t stick around.
We aren’t supposed to. Because we hurt people when we do that. ”
My throat tightens painfully.
“You deserve someone whole,” she reads. “Someone who isn’t terrified of love. Someone who can give you the life you deserve. I’m not that man. But God, I wish I was.”
She has to stop for a second, pressing her fingers to her mouth like she’s trying to hold herself together. I don’t interrupt. I don’t move. I don’t deserve to make this easier on myself.
“When you looked at me last night,” she continues softly, “you saw someone worth saving. But I’m not sure I am. And I can’t risk dragging you down with me when I inevitably fall apart.”
Her voice breaks completely on the next line.
“I’ll remember last night for the rest of my life. Please be happy, Sunshine, even if it’s not with me.”
The room goes quiet in the aftermath, the words hanging between us. Harper lowers the letter slowly, her hands shaking openly now, her face crumpling. She looks up at me through tears, devastation and clarity colliding in her expression.
“You really loved me back then.”
“Yes,” I answer immediately, the word torn out of me. “But I was too broken to do anything about it.”
She lets out a sob that sounds like it’s been waiting six years to exist and folds in on herself. I sit up without thinking and pull her into my arms, holding her as tightly as I dare, my chin resting against her hair as she cries.
“We really could have had six years,” she says through tears. “Six years of us.”
“I know.” The regret is a living thing inside me, heavy and constant. “And I’ll regret that for the rest of my life.”
She pulls back to look at me, eyes red and fierce. “I don’t want to live in regret about that night. Let’s put that behind us.”
“Can’t.”
“What?”
I take a breath. “The day I pushed you away… I can’t put that behind me. I don’t ever want to forget what a stupid fucking decision that was.”
She laughs and kisses me, and I taste the salt of her tears. Tears I caused. Tears I get to kiss away. We hold each other there in the quiet.
“The time we spent apart,” she begins, “it’s like I said—I don’t regret anything that gave me Mason.
Even the heartbreak and the failed marriage, all of it.
So, I’ll hang onto that part of it. All the parts of life, even the shitty ones, they come together in ways we can never predict to give us the best of life. ”
“My grandmother used to say life gives us roses and thorns. Maybe that’s what this is.”
“So, am I a rose or a thorn?”
I laugh. “You’re cheeky, that’s what you are.” Then I kiss her again, and this time, I don’t stop. I never want to stop kissing Harper.
I roll her over and end on top of her, pulling her leg over me as we make out. Harper’s sweet whimper drives something in my spine, and I can’t help but grind against her when I hear it. Her back arches, pressing her tits against my bare chest through her sweater.
The sweater she stole from me. The one she looks too damn sexy in.
Between kisses that become bites, she wriggles beneath me, and I make room for her when I realize why she’s wriggling. She flings her panties across the room, as I shove my pajama bottoms off in a hurry.
We both need this. We need each other. We always have.
She’s wet and hot, and when I stroke her pussy, her moans become mewls. “Please, baby, don’t make me wait.”
“Never,” I promise as I thrust halfway inside. Ragged sounds come from us both. But when I look into her eyes, I slow down. Even my breathing slows. Time stops. This moment is the one all the poets write about.
I don’t know how she does it. All I know is that she does.
She reaches up for me, pulling me to her mouth for another kiss, and soon, our bodies take over.
Bodies are impatient things, unwilling to wait for a moment to settle.
Always craving, always yearning for more.
She rocks beneath me, and I do everything I can to slow things down, but it doesn’t stick.
I have to force myself to slow. I need to say this. Need her to hear it. I dive as deep as I can go inside of her and hold still.
When she moves to meet my next thrust and I don’t move, worry lines her brow. She pants, “What’s wrong?”
“You are everything to me. Everything.”
Her worry line melts away into relief as I start up again, and this time, she lets herself go in my arms. No more tension, no more holding back. She has to hold a pillow over her mouth to muffle the sounds she makes. But I throw it aside and kiss her to take that worry away, too.
Her sounds will live in me for the rest of my life.
I pull out and turn her over, letting her bury into the pillows before I thrust into her from behind. Our bodies smack together—me shoving forward, her shoving back. Until I reach around her hip and play with her clit.
Her body milks me, and her voice goes high and sharp. Those tiny hands fist the bedspread, as she shakes. “Oh my God, Aiden, yes!”
I feel it. Every throb, every gush. Her orgasm sends a shockwave to my balls, and before I can stop, I’m coming, too.
I collapse onto her back, kissing whatever bit of skin I can reach as we slow to a stop.
She rolls over beneath me and wraps herself around me, kissing and licking and biting me until I lay my head on her breast. Then she holds me there, stroking my back.
Harper’s voice is quiet. Contemplative, maybe. “For a long time, I told myself you didn’t give a shit bout me. It was easier than believing you were scared.”
I swallow hard. “I cared too much. That was the problem.”
She pulls back enough to look at me, her eyes searching my face like she’s recalibrating every memory she’s ever stored of me. “You should have trusted me.”
“Trusting you was easy. I didn’t trust myself.”
Her sigh is laden with pity. “Aiden…”
There’s no fixing the past. There’s only understanding it well enough not to repeat it. We rearrange ourselves so that she’s a human weighted blanket on most of me. When Harper finally exhales and leans her head against my shoulder again, I feel something settle into place inside me.
I’ve always wanted this. To feel her pressed to me, to feel her settle there, like she knows she’s safe in my arms. To feel like she trusts me, and to know that trust was earned.
The clock on my nightstand glows faintly in the dark, numbers I register without really seeing. Time is doing something strange, stretching and folding in on itself the way time does when you’re exhausted.
She wipes at her cheeks, then laughs softly, the sound fragile but genuine. “I can’t believe you kept the letter.”
“I couldn’t throw it away. It felt like erasing proof that what we had mattered.”
She nods, understanding immediately and complete. “It always mattered.”
There’s a strange comfort in knowing neither of us handled things well back then. In acknowledging that we both made choices out of fear, not malice. That neither of us was trying to hurt the other, even when that was exactly what happened.
“I don’t know what this looks like going forward,” she says softly. “With Mason. With everything else.”
“I don’t either,” I answer honestly. “But I know what I don’t want.”
She tilts her head to look at me. “What’s that?”
“I don’t want to lose you again.” I reach out and lace my fingers through hers, grounding myself in the warmth of her hand. She squeezes back, a silent affirmation.
The phone ringing cuts through the quiet. I reach for it and glance at the screen. Chief Morales.
My stomach drops. There’s more? I answer immediately, keeping my voice low. “Morales?”
“Aiden,” he says, skipping every pleasantry. His tone is tight, controlled, the way it only gets when something has already gone wrong. “We’ve got him.”
Every muscle in my body goes still. “Marcus?”
“Yes,” the Chief replies. “That damn firebug was arrested about fifteen minutes ago trying to break into the firehouse.”
The words don’t fully register at first. Mine come out slowly. “Break into the firehouse?”
“He set off a silent alarm at the rear service entrance,” Morales continues. “Security cameras caught him casing the perimeter before he tried the door. He didn’t get far. Patrol was already nearby.”
My grip tightens on the phone. Images flash through my mind unbidden—Marcus pacing outside the bar, the note written in shaky, furious handwriting, the way the fire had burned hotter than it should have. This wasn’t random. This was fixation.
“What was he doing there?” I ask. But I already know.
He saw the patrol around my building and decided to hurt Harper through hurting me. Because he’s a fucking lunatic, and they don’t think through their plans.
Morales exhales. “That’s what we’re still figuring out. He wasn’t armed with anything incendiary when we picked him up, but he had tools. Bolt cutters. Gloves. He wasn’t sightseeing.”
I close my eyes briefly, relief and anger colliding so hard that it makes me dizzy. “Is he in custody?”
“Yes,” Morales says firmly. “He’s being booked now. Attempted breaking and entering, arson, multiple charges. He’s not going anywhere.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Did Marcus say anything?”
“Enough to confirm what we already suspected,” the Chief replies. “You and Harper weren’t incidental. He knew where she was staying. He knew where you worked. He’s singing loud and clear, like he’s bragging. Psycho idiot.”
I look at Harper, who’s watching my face closely, reading everything I’m not saying out loud. Her eyes widen slightly as she pieces it together.
Morales continues, “We’ll need statements tomorrow, but tonight—you keep your people close.”
“I will,” I say. “Thank you for calling.”
“Get some rest, Sloan,” he says quietly. “You’ve earned it.”
The line goes dead.
I lower the phone slowly and turn back to Harper. “They arrested him. Marcus tried to break into the firehouse.”
Her hand flies to her mouth, tears springing instantly to her eyes, this time from sheer, overwhelming relief. “He’s… it’s over?”
Over is a different question. “He’s in custody. Chief says we should get some sleep, and I think he’s right. How about you?”
She exhales a shaky breath and leans into me hard, burying her face against my chest as her body finally lets go of the tension it’s been carrying for days. I wrap my arms around her and hold her there, solid and unyielding, my heart pounding with the aftershock of what almost happened.
We stay like that for a long time, holding on to each other in the dim light, the city still and distant beyond the glass. The danger hasn’t erased what was lost, or the fear that led us here, but it has stopped—contained, controlled, unable to reach us anymore.
Harper tilts her head back to look at me, eyes still wet but steady. “Thank you. For being here for me, even when I tried to run away.”
“Anytime, Sunshine.”
“Sleep…” Her shoulders slump and her body goes loose. “I think I might actually be able to do that.”
“Let’s give it a shot.” I motion for her to cuddle up, and she’s a barnacle, clinging to my side like I’m the thing keeping her together.
For the first time in six years, the night doesn’t feel like something I have to survive.