We were.
And in that moment, with her in my arms, I let myself believe it could last.
Even if tomorrow brought hell.
18
MILA
Morning came softly.
Not with alarms or traffic or the rude insistence of the outside world, but with a pale spill of light across linen sheets and the low, steady sound of Connor breathing beside me.
For a moment, I didn’t move. I lay there suspended in that strange, luminous space between sleeping and waking, where the body remembers everything before the mind can interfere.
My skin still hummed.
Not just from sex—though, God, that, too—but from something deeper, something that felt structural, like the architecture of me had shifted overnight. As if parts of my nervous system had been rewired while I wasn’t paying attention.
I’d thought intimacy was something you did inside time.
What we’d shared felt like it existed outside it.
There had been moments—long, breathless stretches—where I couldn’t have told you whether seconds were passing orhours. Where sensation blurred into emotion, and emotion into something nearly spiritual.
I’d never been particularly mystical, never someone who talked about transcendence without irony.
But last night …
Last night felt like stepping into a current and letting it carry me somewhere my mind had never been allowed to go.
And once you surrendered to something like that, there was no pretending you hadn’t been moved. No climbing back onto the bank and convincing yourself the water hadn’t touched you.
I could feel it already—the quiet, irreversible shift. The woman who’d boarded a plane in the States with a camera and a list of careful intentions had been built on restraint, on distance, on the belief that if she stayed observant instead of participatory, she’d remain intact.
But Paris had dismantled that illusion piece by piece. Desire had stopped asking permission. Choice had stopped feeling theoretical.
Even if I tried—if I packed my bags, flew home, stood in the same rooms I’d once known—I wouldn’t fit back into that earlier version of myself. My body wouldn’t forget what it had learned. My eye wouldn’t unsee the way the world opened when I stopped shrinking.
I’d crossed something internal and unrepeatable, and there was a strange comfort in admitting it wasn’t a mistake or a detour.
It was inevitable.
I turned my head slightly, watching Connor sleep.
In the daylight, he looked different—not softer, exactly, but unguarded in a way that felt intimate. His lashes cast shadows against his cheeks. His mouth, usually set with restraint, was relaxed, almost vulnerable. One arm was thrown over the pillowwhere my head had been earlier, like his body had memorized where I belonged.
The thought made my chest ache.
Careful, I warned myself—not with fear, but with awe. This was how attachment snuck in. Not with declarations or promises, but with mornings like this. Quiet. Earnest. Dangerous in their simplicity.
As if summoned by the weight of my attention, he stirred.
His eyes opened slowly, unreadable for half a second—until they focused on me.
And then everything in his face changed.
“Morning,” he murmured, voice still rough with sleep.
