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The elevator doors open. We walk down the hallway holding hands. Neither of us speaks, and the silence isn’t awkward or heavy. It’s full. Charged. Like the air before a storm when you can feel the electricity circling.

Aiden opens the door. Holds it for me. Because, of course, he does.

The room is dim. Just the light from the window—vineyard moonlight, bluish and soft. The bed is still made from this morning, crisp and white and enormous, and right there.

I set my clutch down. Stand in the middle of the room. My heart is doing something it hasn’t done in a long time—beating fast not from anxiety or fear but from want. I’d almost forgotten what want feels like. It’s been so long since I wanted anything that wasn’t survival.

Aiden closes the door behind us and stops. He’s looking at me the way he’s been looking at me all night—steady, warm, full attention—but there’s something different in it now. A heat that wasn’t there before, or that was always there, and he’s stopped trying to regulate.

His eyes move to the bed. To my toiletry bag, unzipped and open, with the vibrator sitting right on top because apparently past Ruby decided future Ruby didn’t deserve dignity.

“Ruby,” he says. “I can leave if you’d like privacy for your—” He pauses. “Personal pleasure routine.”

I almost laugh. Almost. But the sound gets caught somewhere between my throat and my chest because he’s standing by the door, genuinely offering to leave, genuinely thinking that’s what I want, and the earnestness of it does something to me that I wasn’t ready for.

“Don’t leave,” I say.

He stays very still. “Okay.”

“Aiden.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want the vibrator.”

The room is quiet. He processes this—I can see it, the slight pause, the micro-shift in his expression—and then his eyes come back to mine, and they’re darker than usual.

“I could help you,” he says. His voice is lower. Rougher. Like the words had to travel through something new to get out.

“Yeah,” I say. “You could.”

Neither of us moves for a beat. Two beats. The moonlight shifts on the floor.

“I should mention,” he says, still by the door, “that I’m significantly larger than the toy. But based on what I’ve studied, we can make that work.”

I press my hand over my mouth. Because if I don’t, I’m either going to laugh or moan, and both feel dangerous right now.

“Aiden?”

“Yes.”

“Stop talking and come here.”

Then he crosses the room. Not fast. Deliberate. Three steps, and he’s standing in front of me, and he’s close—close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him through his shirt, close enough that I have to tip my chin up to look at his face.

“I’ve never done this,” he says. Quiet. Matter-of-fact. No embarrassment, no apology. Just information. “I have extensive theoretical knowledge, but I’ve never—”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to do it wrong.”

“You won’t.”

“How do you know?”

I reach up and put my hand on his face. His jaw. The skin is warm and smooth under my palm, and I feel him lean into the touch—barely, just a fraction—and the lean is what undoes me. Because it’s involuntary. He didn’t decide to do it. His body just tipped toward my hand like a plant toward light, and the gesture is so human and so raw that my breath catches.

“Because I’ll show you,” I say. “Just like everything else.”