“That long, huh? We should order something.” Miller reached for the room service menu on the nightstand, then hesitated, her hand hovering. “Is that— I mean, if you want to. I know these places are expensive.”
There it was. The telltale hesitation Astoria had started noticing, the way Miller calculated costs in a way Astoria had stopped doing years ago, the gap between their worlds visible in small moments.
“I’ll get it,” Astoria said. “Order whatever you want.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“Miller.” Astoria caught her hand. “The room is already on my card. Let me.”
Something crossed across Miller’s face, not quite discomfort but something adjacent. It was the same expression she got when Astoria mentioned the thread count of the hotel sheets or the wine she preferred.
“I’m not trying to—” Astoria stopped, unsure how to navigate this. “It’s just dinner.”
“I know.” Miller’s smile was a little too cautious. “It’s fine, really.”
It wasn’t fine, not entirely, but Astoria didn’t know how to fix it. She’d spent so long in a world where money solved problems that she’d forgotten it could also create them. Or at least create distances she didn’t know how to bridge.
She let it go for now. Miller ordered a burger and fries, the most modest thing on the menu, and Astoria ordered the salmon because she wasn’t hungry enough to care what she ate. They pulled on the hotel robes while they waited, and when the food came, they ate sitting cross-legged on the bed like teenagers at a sleepover.
The thought sent a spike of something through Astoria’s chest. Fear or hope, she couldn’t tell which.
It was almost midnight when Astoria finally made herself move.
“I should go.” But she didn’t want to. The words felt wrong in her mouth, a betrayal of the warm cocoon they’d built in this anonymous room, but she couldn’t stay until morning. They’d agreed on the early, an unspoken rule to protect them both. No overnight stays, nothing that could be construed as evidence if someone looked hard enough.
Miller nodded, but her hand lingered on Astoria’s hip beneath the robe. “Yeah, I know.”
They dressed in comfortable silence, retrieving scattered clothes from where they’d landed hours ago. Astoria caught Miller watching her as she stepped into her skirt, and something about the look made her chest tighten with something dangerous. At the door, they stood facing each other. Astoria reached out and straightened Miller’s collar, and it felt oddly intimate.
“Thank you,” Astoria said quietly. “For listening. For not—” She stopped, unsure how to finish.
“For not what?”
“For not making me feel like it was too much.”
Miller’s expression quirked, then she stepped forward and kissed her, slow and tender. When she pulled back, her hand cupped Astoria’s face.
“It’s not too much,” Miller said. “You’re not too much.”
Astoria didn’t trust herself to respond, so she kissed Miller once more, briefly, and made herself walk out of the door before she could change her mind about leaving at all.
The drive home was quiet. Astoria left the radio off, letting the silence fill the car as the city lights gave way to the darker streets of the Cliffside neighborhood. Her body still hummed with the aftermath of the evening—the sex, yes, but also the conversation, the tears she hadn’t meant to cry, the way Miller had held her.
She thought about Lindsey.
College, twenty-two years old, her first real experience with a woman. Lindsey had been electric: confident, beautiful, and utterly unavailable in ways Astoria hadn’t recognized until it was too late. They’d had three months of intensity before Lindsey graduated and moved to New York without looking back. No real goodbye, just a text: “It was fun. Take care of yourself.”
Astoria had learned something from it, that wanting someone meant watching them leave.
Then there was Valerie. Charming, attentive Valerie who’d pursued Astoria with a focus that felt like being chosen. Finally, someone who wanted to stay, someone who saw her. Except Valerie’s version of staying had come with conditions Astoria hadn’t really understood until she was too deep to see clearly. It had been years of learning that intimacy meant pain, that lovemeant being controlled, that the cost of having someone stay was slowly erasing herself until she disappeared entirely.
She’d always picked women who confirmed her worst fears: women who left or women who’d stayed but made her wish they’d left.
Miller didn’t fit.
Miller was present in a way that didn’t feel like surveillance, attentive without keeping score, and gentle in a way that made Astoria’s chest soften instead of brace for impact. Tonight, Astoria had shown her the worst of it: the poverty, the scar, the years of self-erosion. And Miller hadn’t flinched or pulled away. She just…stayed.
This was supposed to be a simple, physical release valve for the tension that had been building between them. Astoria had told herself she could keep feelings out of it, that she’d learned her lesson, that her walls were high enough now to let someone touch her body without touching anything else.
