13. Aria
ARIA
The kids are at Carol's, the house is quiet, and I have officially run out of reasons to keep my hands to myself.
I spent forty minutes on a dress I told myself was casual, then changed it twice because casual apparently required exactly the right amount of effort to look effortless.
Lily approved on her way out the door. She declared me actually pretty for once, with the devastating honesty only a five-year-old can manage, and let Carol herd her toward the car before I could ask what for once was supposed to mean.
I checked my reflection three more times after they left, which was three more times than I usually bothered, and told the woman in the mirror to calm down before she talked herself out of an evening she had already decided she wanted.
Jake picked me up in real clothes like he'd promised, a button-down instead of the usual flannel, hair combed in a way that made him look faintly uncomfortable with himself.
He opened the truck door for me, which felt like an old-fashioned gesture from a man who built decks for a living, and I decided I liked it more than I wanted to admit, more than I planned to tell him tonight.
"You clean up well," I said, sliding into the seat.
"I own more than one shirt. This is common knowledge I've been hiding from you."
"A whole wardrobe. Scandalous."
"I contain multitudes."
"Big word for a man who talks to lumber for a living."
"I contain a thesaurus too. It's a whole thing."
The restaurant was small, candlelit in a way that felt deliberate rather than accidental, tucked into a town I'd never had a reason to visit before tonight.
The hostess called him by name like he'd been there before, and he ducked his head, admitting under his breath that he might have called ahead to request the corner table.
"You called ahead."
"I wanted it to go well. Sue me."
"That's oddly sweet for a man who lost a footrace to a waterfowl two nights ago."
"I'm a complicated man, full of contradictions and minor bird-related setbacks. Keep up."
We talked about nothing that mattered for the first twenty minutes, the food, the drive, a mutual disdain for parallel parking, and somewhere in the low hum of easy conversation I stopped bracing for the evening to go wrong.
"You're staring," Jake said, halfway through the second course.
"I'm observing. There's a difference."
"What are you observing?"
"That you're nervous. It's a good look on you. I don't get to see it often."
"I am not nervous."
"Your knee has been bouncing under this table since we sat down."
He stilled it immediately, which only proved my point, and the twitch at the corner of his mouth gave up trying to stay hidden.
"Fine. I'm a little nervous."
"Why?"
"Because I've wanted this longer than I probably should admit tonight, and now that it's actually happening I keep waiting for something to go wrong."
I reached across the table and covered his hand with mine, and he turned his palm up to catch my fingers like he'd been waiting for exactly that permission.
"Nothing's going wrong," I said.
"Not yet."
"You're supposed to say something romantic there, not ominous."
"I contain multitudes. I told you."
His phone buzzed once against the table, midway through dessert, and something softened in his face at whatever the screen said.
"Carol?" I asked.
"Noah wants to know if geese have feelings. Apparently he's still thinking about the ambush."
"Tell him the goose has zero feelings and enormous confidence."
"That's basically my working theory too."
By the time we pulled back into the driveway, the porch lights on both our houses glowing yellow against the dark, the easy conversation had gone quiet in a different way, charged instead of comfortable, and neither of us reached for the door handle right away.
"Carol's got them until morning," Jake said, not quite looking at me.
"I know."
"I'm not assuming anything by saying that."
"Never thought you were."
He walked me to my door anyway, old-fashioned to the last, and stood on the step with his hands in his pockets like a teenager working up the nerve for a first kiss, which struck me as thoroughly absurd considering we'd already done exactly this, on this exact porch, just days before, in the middle of a storm.
"You could come in," I said. "For coffee, or not coffee, or whatever this is. I'm bad at offering things without overexplaining them."
"I noticed."
"Are you going to make this easy for me or not?"
He answered by closing the distance instead of finding words, one hand coming up to my jaw the way it had that night in the storm, and I stopped worrying about which invitation I'd actually meant the second his mouth found mine.
Inside, the house held its breath around us, quiet in the particular way a house gets when it knows it's about to become the setting for something. He kicked the door shut behind him without breaking the kiss, and I laughed against his mouth at the sound of it.
"Smooth," I said.
"I've been practicing."
"On doors?"
"On everything. You have no idea how many hours went into that maneuver."
I pulled him toward the stairs instead of answering, and he let me, his hand rough and warm around mine exactly the way it had been the very first day, back when I'd told myself that was just a coincidence worth noticing and nothing more.
We didn't rush it. That surprised me more than anything else about that night, how unhurried he was with every button, every inch of skin he uncovered like he intended to memorize the whole of me before he let himself want anything more than that.
My hands weren't half as patient, tugging his shirt loose, mapping the solid warmth of him with a kind of hunger I hadn't let myself feel in longer than I wanted to think about.
"Aria." My name in his mouth sounded like a question and an answer at once.
"I'm right here."
"I know. I keep needing to check."
"Check as many times as you need."
He kissed me again like he meant exactly that, slow and thorough, and I let my head fall back into the pillow as his mouth moved from my jaw to the curve of my throat, until my whole body ached for more of it.
The lamp on the nightstand threw everything gold, his shoulders, the line of his back under my hands, the careful concentration on his face like he was building something and intended to get every measurement right, down to the last board.
"You're doing that thing," I said, breathless, "where you overthink everything."
"I don't overthink you."
"You measure twice. I can feel you measuring."
"Would you rather I didn't?"
"Honestly? Less narrating, more doing."
That got a laugh out of him, low and rough against my collarbone, and whatever careful restraint he'd been holding onto finally gave way to something less measured and more instinctive.
His hands were sure now, his mouth finding mine again like he had stopped needing permission for it, and I arched into him, into the weight and warmth of him settling over me.
Somewhere in the tangle of sheets and skin I lost track of whose heartbeat I was feeling, his against my palm or mine against his chest, the two of them beating so close together they might as well have agreed to keep time as one.
The last coherent thought I had before the night dissolved into heat and breath was that six years and four hundred miles had somehow led exactly here, to this bed, this man, like the whole detour had been the point all along.
Everything after that stopped being sentences. It was heat and hands and his mouth finding every place I had not known was starving for it.
He held himself over me like I was something worth being careful with even now, and I met that with none of my own hesitation, pulling him closer, telling him with my own two hands what I could not manage to say out loud.
The storm outside had nothing on the one we made between the sheets, gentle at first and then not, until there was no caution left in either of us.
We moved together like we had been doing this for years instead of minutes, like every mile and every year that had ever separated us had only ever been a held breath before this.
Afterward, we lay tangled in sheets gone soft with washing, his heartbeat slowing under my ear, one hand tracing lazy, absent patterns along my spine like he could not quite stop touching me now that he had started.
"Well," I said, into the quiet.
"Well," he agreed.
"That's it? That's your whole review?"
"I'm still recovering my ability to form complete sentences. Give me a minute."
"Take your time. I'll wait."
He laughed, and I felt it against my cheek more than heard it, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all, content to just breathe in the dark with the whole rest of the summer stretched out ahead of us like something we had finally earned.
"Tell me something," he said, tracing a slow circle against my shoulder. "Where did you grow up? Before Lily's dad, before any of it."
"All over. My dad worked construction, actually, funny enough. We spent every summer at some lake up in the mountains though, same rental every year, until I was about twenty. Millbrook. Tiny place, blink and you'd miss it."
The hand resting against my skin went still for half a second, then started moving again. I chalked it up to a man losing his train of thought and didn't think much more of it.
"You okay?" I asked, propping myself up slightly to see his face better in the dim light.
"Fine. I'm just picturing you as a lake kid. It's a good image."
"I was a menace, actually. I told a grown man he was building his dock wrong once. I still stand by it, for the record."
He laughed, but it came out a beat late, like he had needed a second to remember how. I filed the moment away without really filing it away at all, the way you do with the small, strange things that only end up mattering in hindsight, once you finally have the rest of the story to hold it against.
"I should say something," he said eventually.
"You don't have to say anything."
"I want to."
He shifted, propping himself up on one elbow to look at me, and in the low light his expression went somewhere I could not follow, something that looked almost like fear dressed up as tenderness.
"I haven't let myself want something this much in a long time."
"Neither have I."
"Good. That's good." He was quiet for a long moment, his fingers drawing idle lines along my arm.
"I keep thinking about how close I came to never knocking on your door at all, that very first week. I almost let you keep to yourself."
"What stopped you, in the end?"
"Lily, mostly. And then you, pretty quickly after that." He shook his head slowly, something rueful in it.
"I'm glad the fruit clause happened. For the record."
"The fruit clause was the single best legal document this fence has ever produced."
He kissed my forehead, lingering there a beat too long, like he was memorizing the shape of the moment before it could slip away from him.
Afterward, in the dark, his face did something I could not read, gone and back in a blink. I told myself it was nothing. I was wrong, but I would not know that for weeks.