Silence settled in again, pressing in on us from all sides.
His hand stayed where it was, steady against mine, like he hadn’t second-guessed the contact once since it started. I waited for him to fill the space. Or fix it. Or tell me I was wrong in a way that let me keep being right.
What I got instead was, “You don’t have to keep choosing sides in something that’s already over.”
The words didn’t hit all at once. They moved through me in pieces, catching on every loose thread of my past that they could find on the way down.
Already over.
There wasn’t anything to push against. No angle to twist it into something more comfortable. Just the truth of it, sitting there, uncomplicated in a way that made it harder to ignore.
I looked at him, searching for the catch. There had to be one. There was always one.
“You’re mad at your mom for staying and putting up with it,” he went on, quieter now, not backing off, not quite lecturing me either. “But you’re still living in it too. Just from the opposite side.”
The words scraped on the way in, and I swallowed hard.
“You ended up building your life around the same thing,” he said, thumb shifting once against mine. “Decided what it meant. Decided what you’d never be part of.”
My mouth opened, then closed again. I had nothing. Because every option sounded thin next to what he’d just put in the open. He watched me take it in, and let the silence stretch long enough that it stopped feeling like something that needed fixing.
“Look at what we would’ve missed out on,” he said then, the corner of his mouth lifting, just enough to take the edge off without dulling it. “If it weren’t for my striking good looksand winning personality breaking through your military-grade defenses.”
That did it.
A breath slipped out, uneven, something in my chest loosening whether I’d signed off on it or not. My eyes dropped for a second, then lifted back to him, catching on that slight shift in his expression. Not asking for anything back.
Which somehow made it worse.
Or better.
It was hard to tell.
I stepped into him before I could overthink it. Up on my toes, closing the small distance that had been doing entirely too much work between us. My hand found the front of his hoodie, fingers curling into the fabric, and I kissed him.
21
Aiden
Every other time with her came with edges. A push. A pull. Something held back just enough to keep it from tipping into something neither of us had to name.
This was different.
Her hand fisted in the front of my hoodie, pulling me down into it, and I let her. No hesitation. No second-guessing. Just the contact, the heat of her mouth, the way she stayed there instead of testing the distance like she used to.
I kissed her back, slower at first, feeling it out, making sure I wasn’t reading into something that wasn’t there. She answered by closing the gap further, pressing in, not giving me an inch to doubt it.
Right. That did it.
My hand slid up into her hair, fingers threading through, holding her there as the kiss deepened. Everything from tonight sat between us. The things she’d said. The way she’d said them. The fact that she’d said them at all.
To me, of all people. And without turning it into a joke halfway through.
Her lips parted under mine, and something in my chest settled, like a piece finally dropped into place where it should’ve been all along. That familiar rush of adrenaline coursed through me like it always did, but it was grounded in something steadier. Something like trust.
My thumb pressed lightly at the base of her neck, feeling the rhythm there, and it matched mine well enough that I stopped trying to figure out where one started and the other ended.
I pulled back just enough to look at her.
