The Morning After
I woke to the sight of sunlight spilling across my old bedroom ceiling, illuminating the tiny imperfections in the plaster, my heart thudding against my ribs before my mind could even catch up to the day.
The kiss replayed in my mind in vivid, jagged fragments—the calloused weight of his hand on my cheek, the rough edge of his thumb against my skin, and the way he had murmured my name like it was both a warning and a holy confession.
It should've been a dream. It would have been so much easier to brush it off as a product of my own loneliness and grief, to laugh at myself for imagining something so reckless.
Except it wasn't a dream. It was a memory. I'd kissed Nick Harrison—my brother's best friend, the man fifteen years my senior who was never supposed to be more than a steady, silent shadow in the background of the Collins family history. And God help me, I'd wanted it.
Now, lying there in the absolute hush of the morning, a cold panic began to spread through me. What if I'd ruined the only stable thing I had left? What if he'd woken up and realized it was a mistake? Worse—what if Anthony found out?
I rolled onto my side, my gaze landing on the nightstand.
The strip of ultrasound pictures sat there, a silent reminder of the reality I couldn't escape.
Nine weeks. A tiny flicker of life that was already changing the chemical makeup of my soul.
My baby deserved stability, not a scandal with the man across the hall.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. The sound made my stomach drop, a sharp, physical jolt that felt like the universe was finally calling me out.
Nick: You awake?
I stared at the screen, my pulse quickening until I could hear it in my ears. My fingers hovered over the glass, hesitating, before I finally typed back.
Me: Yeah.
The three little dots appeared, vanished, then reappeared again. I imagined him on the other side of town, sitting at the scarred kitchen table with a mug of black coffee, Anthony probably rambling in the background about a call at the station while Nick carefully weighed every syllable.
Nick: About last night... we should probably talk.
My throat tightened. Talk. The word was a chameleon; it could mean a dozen different things—regret, an apology, a plan to erase what had happened. Or maybe something else entirely. I typed, erased, and typed again, settling on the only answer that didn't feel like a trap.
Me: Okay. When?
The dots blinked again, slow and agonizingly steady.
Nick: I'll stop by later. Just us.
I dropped the phone onto the blankets and stared out the window. My chest ached with a volatile mix of dread and something that felt dangerously close to anticipation. There was no taking the kiss back. Whatever came next would either break me wide open or change the course of my life.
I wasn't sure which prospect terrified me more.
By late afternoon, the July heat had become a physical presence, pressing against the house with a thick, unrelenting weight.
I'd spent most of the day pacing the small confines of the kitchen and my bedroom, picking up the ultrasound pictures only to set them back down again, as if moving the images might somehow calm the storm brewing under my ribs.
When the knock finally came, my chest clenched so tight it hurt to breathe. I opened the door to find Nick standing there, his broad shoulders filling the frame. He was a steady, solid presence that usually acted as my anchor, but today, he felt like the epicenter of the earthquake.
He didn't smile. He just tipped his chin in a quiet greeting, waiting for me to step back and let him into the house.
"Come in," I whispered.
The air between us was taut as we moved into the living room, vibrating with the unspoken memory of our lips touching.
Nick sat at the far end of the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, while I curled into the opposite corner, my legs tucked beneath me like a shield.
It felt safer with the physical space between us, though the silence made the room seem to shrink with every passing second.
Finally, he spoke. His voice was a low rumble, careful and measured. "About last night... that kiss."
Heat rushed to my cheeks, hot and sudden. I forced myself to meet his stormy gray eyes, even as my pulse thudded in my throat. "Yeah."
He dragged a heavy hand over his jaw, exhaling a slow, ragged breath. "It shouldn't have happened, Aubrey."
The words stung, hitting me with a sharp, cold precision even though I'd been expecting them. I looked down at my hands. "I know."
"You've got enough on your plate," he went on, his tone firm but not unkind.
"You don't need me making things messier than they already are.
You've got the baby to think about, your brother's temper, and figuring out what your life looks like now.
You don't need..." He stopped, searching for the right word, his jaw tightening. "Complications."
I swallowed hard, nodding my agreement. "You're right. I know you're right."
The truth was, I'd thought the exact same thing when I woke up. I had no room for this—no room for reckless kisses or the "dangerous maybes" of a man who belonged to my brother's world. My life was already in pieces, and Nick was a line I was never supposed to cross.
Still, the silence that followed my agreement was heavy, suffocating. His shoulders were tense, his hands balled into fists on his knees, as if he were forcing the words out as much for his own benefit as for mine.
"I shouldn't want this," I admitted quietly, my voice barely carrying across the room. "Not with everything going on. It's the worst possible time."
His gaze locked onto mine then—intense, gray, and burning with a truth he couldn't hide. "But you do."
The air thickened, sharp with the electricity of the unspoken. My chest ached, and for a long moment, neither of us breathed. Finally, I nodded, my voice breaking. "Yeah. I do."
Nick leaned back against the couch, dragging both hands down his face with a groan. "Christ, Aubrey."
"I'm not asking for anything, Nick," I said quickly, the words tumbling out in a rush. "I can't. I don't even know who I am right now, let alone what I want for the next five years. I'm just... I'm just being honest."
His gaze softened, though the rough edge of his voice remained. "Then we stop here. Right now. Before it gets any harder to walk away."
I nodded again, the agreement feeling like a lead weight in my chest. "We stop."
He stood up to leave, his presence towering over me one last time. But as he moved toward the door, the space between us remained electric, humming with the knowledge that we had just lied to ourselves.
We had said the right things. We had drawn the line. But as the door clicked shut behind him, I knew the truth we hadn't said aloud. Stopping wouldn't be as simple as we wanted it to be.