39. Aria
ARIA
We had not fixed anything. We just stopped pretending we could stay away from each other long enough to try.
Three weeks had passed since the candles burned down to nothing on my kitchen table, since Jake stood on his own porch and I stood at my sink and neither of us said the thing that needed saying.
He had called eventually, four days after the fight, his voice rough on the phone like he'd rehearsed the first line and forgotten the rest. We had talked around it since then the way you walk around a hole in the floor you both know is there, careful steps, eyes down, nobody mentioning the drop.
Lily had a dentist appointment. Noah wanted to build a bird feeder. The days filled themselves in with small ordinary things, and underneath every one of them the actual conversation sat untouched, gathering dust like furniture nobody wanted to move.
Meridian's deadline was eight days away now. I knew this the way you know a storm is coming from the pressure in your ears before the sky ever changes color.
Carol had the kids for the evening again, an excuse so thin by now that neither Jake nor I bothered pretending it was about anything else. He showed up at my door a little after eight with a toolbox he did not need, claiming my porch railing had a wobble he'd been meaning to look at for a week.
"The railing's fine, Jake."
"It's not fine. I noticed it a few days ago."
"You noticed it because you were looking for a reason to come over."
He set the toolbox down on the step anyway, and something in the set of his shoulders told me he'd known I would call it before he ever knocked.
"Maybe I did," he said. "Is that a problem?"
"No." I stepped back to let him in, and the air between us shifted the second the door clicked shut, the way it always did now, charged and careful at once, two things that had no business sharing the same room. "Just don't lie to me about a railing. Lie to me about something more interesting."
"Noted. Next time I'll say I came over because I missed you."
"That's not a lie though."
"No," he said, quieter. "It isn't."
We ended up in the kitchen without deciding to, the way we always did, him leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and me pretending to look for a wine bottle I already knew was empty.
The house held the particular hush of a place built for four people currently occupied by two, and I felt him watching me the way he'd been watching me for weeks now, like he was trying to memorize something before it changed shape on him.
"You're doing the thing," I said, giving up on the wine and turning to face him.
"What thing?"
"The staring. You've been doing it for days. Carol asked me yesterday if you'd taken up meditation."
"I don't stare."
"You absolutely stare. You did it at dinner two nights ago. You did it in the driveway this morning when you thought I wasn't looking."
He didn't deny it a second time, just held my eyes a beat longer than the conversation required, and something in my chest pulled tight in response, half want and half a nerve I couldn't name.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You can ask."
"Have you decided?"
There it was, finally, out loud in my kitchen instead of buried under bird feeders and dentist appointments, and I felt the whole evening tilt toward the thing we'd both been avoiding since the candles burned out.
"Not yet," I said.
"Aria."
"I know how that sounds. I know I don't have much time left to sound better than that."
"I'm not trying to push you."
"You're pushing a little."
"Fine. I'm pushing a little." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, an old tell of his, the same motion he made right before admitting something he'd rather not.
"I just keep doing the math in my head. Eight days. Three weeks out of every four. I run it about forty times a day and it never comes out easier."
"You think I'm not running the same math?"
"I don't know what you're running, Aria. That's the problem. You went quiet on this the second the fight ended, and I let you, because I didn't know how to ask again without it turning into the same argument."
"So instead you brought a toolbox."
"Guilty as charged," he admitted, and something almost like a laugh escaped him, tired and real at once. "I'm better with a level in my hand than with the right words. You know that about me by now."
I crossed the kitchen and took the level out of his hand before he even realized he was still holding it, setting it on the counter behind me, and he let me, watching my face the whole time like he was waiting to see what I meant by it.
"I don't want to talk about Meridian tonight," I said.
"That's convenient."
"It's not convenient. It's honest. I have eight days to actually decide, and I am not going to make that decision standing in my kitchen at nine at night with you looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're already saying goodbye to something."
He flinched, small, barely there, and I knew I'd landed closer to the truth than either of us wanted out loud.
"I'm not saying goodbye," he said, low.
"Then stop looking at me like it."
"I don't know how else to look at you right now, Aria." His voice cracked slightly on my name, the same way it had the very first night, question and answer folded into one word. "I keep thinking about how much I have to lose and how little I actually get a say in it."
"You get a say. You've always had a say."
"Do I? Because it doesn't feel like the kind of say that changes an outcome. It feels like the kind where I get to watch."
The words hung there, sharper than either of us wanted, and I watched him catch himself, watched him decide not to chase them further, the same door swinging shut halfway that had scared me on the porch three weeks earlier.
I could have pushed through it. I could have demanded he finish the thought the way he'd once demanded I finish mine.
Instead I closed the distance between us and put both hands flat against his chest, feeling his heart going hard and fast under my palms despite how still he was holding himself.
"I'm right here," I said.
"Tonight. Right now. That part isn't in question."
"I know."
"Then stop looking so far ahead."
"I'm trying." His hands came up to cover mine, pressing them harder against him like he needed the proof of me solid under his palms. "It's not easy, some nights, keeping my eyes where they're supposed to be."
"Then don't try..."
He kissed me before I finished the sentence, or maybe I kissed him, the line between the two of us blurred by then the way it always got when neither of us trusted our own words anymore.
It wasn't gentle, not at first, more like something both of us had been holding back for three weeks finally given permission to move, his hands sliding into my hair, mine fisting in the front of his shirt like letting go might mean losing the thread of him entirely.
"Jake." I said his name into the kiss, not sure myself if it was a question or a plea.
"I'm here," he said, echoing me, his mouth moving to my jaw, my throat, every place that made my breath catch. "I'm not going anywhere tonight."
That single word sat there between kisses, smaller than it should have been, and I chose not to examine why it landed the way it did, choosing instead to pull him toward the stairs the same way I always did when neither of us had anything left to say, his hand rough and sure in mine.
We didn't make it up all the flight before he had me against the wall at the landing, his mouth finding the curve of my shoulder where my shirt had slipped, and I felt the low sound he made against my skin more than I heard it, something between relief and hunger.
"You're shaking," he said, pulling back just enough to look at me.
"I'm not."
"You are. A little."
"So are you."
He didn't argue that one, just kissed me again, softer this time, like he'd noticed the same tremor in his own hands and decided not to name it either.
We made it to the bedroom eventually, slower now, both of us trading the earlier urgency for something that felt more like an argument we'd decided to have with our bodies instead of our mouths, every touch a sentence neither of us was brave enough to say out loud.
His hands were careful with the buttons of my shirt, the same unhurried care that had been there from the beginning, except now there was an edge underneath the patience, something almost desperate in the way his fingers lingered at my collarbone like he was trying to fix the exact shape of me in his memory before he let himself move on.
"You're doing it again," I said, breath uneven. "Measuring."
"Can you blame me?"
"No," I admitted, quieter than I meant to. "Not tonight."
He laid me back against the pillows like something he intended to be careful with even now, even after everything, his weight settling over me warm and familiar and achingly known, and I felt the small catch in his breath when my hands found his back, when I pulled him closer instead of letting him keep any distance between us at all.
"Aria." My name again, rougher this time, less a question than something closer to a confession he couldn't quite finish.
"I know," I said, though I didn't, not the whole of it, not really.
"Do you?"
"Show me instead of asking."
He did, and the room went quiet around everything except us, his mouth finding mine again and again like punctuation, his hands moving over me with a kind of reverence that felt heavier than it ever had before, like both of us understood without saying it that this was not simply desire anymore, if it had ever only been that.
I arched into him and he met me there, unhurried and then not, gentle and then something rawer underneath the gentleness, both of us holding on a beat too long at every point where we could have let go.
When his forehead dropped to my shoulder, his breath ragged against my skin, I felt him say something into the curve of my neck too quiet to catch, and when I asked what he'd said he only shook his head and kissed me instead of answering, and I let him, because some nights the not-knowing felt safer than pushing for the words that might break the fragile thing we'd built out of touch instead of talk.
We moved together like people trying to outrun something neither of us could see clearly enough to name, slow in places, urgent in others, his hand finding mine at one point and lacing our fingers together like an anchor thrown out mid-storm.
I felt the exact moment he stopped holding anything back, and I met it with everything I'd been keeping folded up small for so long, every unspoken sentence poured into the only language that still felt safe between us.
Afterward, we lay tangled together in sheets gone warm, his heartbeat slowing gradually under my ear, one hand tracing slow, absent shapes along my spine, an old habit of his by now, except tonight the touch felt like someone trying to hold on rather than someone simply content.
"Stay a while," I said into the quiet, not quite a question.
"I wasn't planning on leaving."
"You say that like it surprises you."
"Maybe it does, a little." He pressed his lips to the top of my head, lingering there. "I keep waiting for the part where this stops feeling this good and starts feeling complicated again."
"It's already complicated, Jake."
"I know." His arm tightened around me, just slightly, just enough that I noticed. "I meant complicated enough to change what I do about it."
Neither of us moved to fill the silence that followed, the two of us breathing in the dark, and I thought about the eight days sitting out there past the bedroom window, waiting, patient in the way only deadlines ever are.
"Ask me again sometime," I said finally.
"About the decision. Not tonight, but sometime soon. I don't want you thinking I'm hiding from it."
"Are you hiding from it?"
"A little," I admitted. "The same way you're hiding from whatever you almost said into my shoulder ten minutes ago."
He went still against me, and for a moment I thought he might actually say it now, whatever it had been, the confession he'd swallowed halfway.
Instead he pulled me closer, his mouth finding my temple, my hair, and I felt him choose the same avoidance I'd just chosen myself, both of us evenly matched in the not-saying.
"Get some sleep," he said instead. "We'll figure out the rest of it."
"Will we?"
"We usually do."
I let that stand, because some nights a maybe dressed up as certainty was the kindest thing either of us had to offer, and I closed my eyes against his chest, listening to his heartbeat settle into something slower, something almost peaceful if I didn't look too closely at the tension still living underneath it.
Neither of us said it, the big one, the three words, but it sat in the room with us all night, close enough to touch.