Loving you is so lovely
Aubrey's Pov
I sat beside a wall of glass that held all of New York within it — restless, radiant, breathing beneath the night like something untamed. The city glittered endlessly below, lights spilling into one another in the careless, luminous way of things that have never once considered going dark. Alive in a way that felt almost defiant. Almost arrogant.
She was coming.
I knew she was on her way.
Still, my gaze lingered on the entrance longer than necessary — out of habit, not doubt. There was a difference, even if no one else in this room would have been able to see it.
This place was exactly as promised. Excessive in the quietest, most deliberate way — the kind of excess that never raises its voice because it has never needed to. Gold lived in every detail, unhurried and absolute. Chandeliers hung like suspended constellations, their light melting down into polished marble and crystal, pooling softly at the edges of everything. Candles flickered across the room, soft and careful, as though afraid to disrupt whatever illusion of perfection the place had spent years constructing.
A slow melody drifted through the air — rich, unhurried, curling around conversations spoken just below the threshold of overhearing. Laughter was muted here. Even joy knew its register, its place, its limits.
Everything was curated.
Controlled.
Predictable.
Except her.
My fingers traced the rim of the glass in front of me — untouched, the chill of it grounding in a way I didn't need but allowed anyway. I leaned back slightly, watching the city instead of the door, though my attention was never fully where it appeared to be. Half anchored in the skyline. Half waiting for the particular shift in the air that would announce her presence before my eyes had the chance to find her.
Because it would come.
It always did.
Emma didn't arrive quietly. Not in the way people thought of noise — but in the way a room adjusted around her without knowing why, as though something essential had finally been restored to it. Conversations would falter almost imperceptibly. Glances would turn. The air itself would seem to pause, just briefly, just long enough to make space for her.
And I —
I would notice.
Before anyone else.
Every time.
A faint smile threatened at the corner of my mouth, gone almost as quickly as it arrived. She was late. Not enough to matter. Just enough to be entirely, unmistakably her. And somehow, in a room where everything ran on precision and curated perfection, that was the only thing that felt remotely real.
So I waited.
Not impatiently.
Not uncertainly.
But with a quiet, unspoken certainty that the moment those doors opened, this carefully constructed world of gold and glass would shift — and everything in it would feel, almost reluctantly, just a little more alive.
After she rejected me, Michael told me — quietly, like he was handling something fragile, something that might crack if he wasn't careful with it — that I should make her want me more. That I should become distant. Less available. That I should learn, for once in my life, how to hold myself back when it came to her.
"Don't melt so easily," he said.
And I agreed.
I remember the steadiness in my own voice when I said it. Composed. Almost convincing. As though I genuinely believed I could carve discipline into something that had never known it, that I could stand in front of her and remain — intact.
But even then, I knew.
I have never been untouched by her.
Not once.
Not even in her absence — especially not in her absence, because absence only made the shape of her more defined, more undeniable, more impossible to look away from inside my own mind.
Because the moment she steps into a room, something shifts. Subtle. Unspoken. The kind of thing you can't point to but can't unfeel once you've felt it. The air changes. Time bends just enough for me to notice the bending. And I know — without needing to look, before I've even turned — that she is there.
And when I do look —
God.
It is over.
Every practiced distance, every quiet promise of restraint, every fragile structure of control I have spent time and effort assembling around myself — it dissolves. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just quietly, completely, the way frost dissolves when warmth arrives, without ceremony and without mercy.
What am I supposed to do?
Turn away when her eyes find mine, soft and wholly unaware of the devastation they carry? Pretend I am not already hers when she says my name like it has always belonged to her mouth, like it was always meant to live there?
I have tried.
I have failed.
Because loving her is not something I do.
It is something that happens to me — something that exists within me unbidden and unrelenting, woven into whatever I am made of at the level below thought, below choice, below anything I could reach in and undo if I wanted to.
One word from her —
And I would die for her.
Not in the careless way people throw that phrase around, as though love were light, as though devotion were easy. I mean it in the way my entire being constricts at the thought of her in pain. The way the world narrows to a single, fragile point where only she exists and everything else becomes irrelevant noise. I would give my life the way one gives in to gravity — inevitable, unquestioned, without the indignity of resistance — if it meant she could remain untouched by harm.
One word from her —
And I would kill for her.
And there is something that should terrify me in how naturally that truth settles within me. How familiar it already feels. There would be no hesitation. No pause to consider consequence or cost. Only her. Only the quiet, consuming need to protect what was never truly mine to begin with — but which I would burn the world to keep safe regardless.
And if the universe itself stood in her way —
if fate dared to deny her —
I would unmake it.
I would tear open the sky if it refused to shine for her. I would gather the stars in my hands and lay them at her feet, just to watch them catch in her eyes. I would bend time, rewrite whatever had been written, dismantle every law that ever dared to place distance between us.
For her.
Always for her.
One word from her —
And I would fall.
Not out of weakness.
But out of a devotion so vast, so consuming, it leaves no architecture standing inside me for anything else.
I would kneel before her — not because she asked it, not because she ever would — but because loving her has always felt like something that belongs in the category of the sacred. Something that was never meant to be resisted. Something I stopped being able to argue with a long time ago.
Just to love her.
Just to remain in the quiet ruin of it —
knowing that even in my undoing,
I was still, irrevocably,
hers.
Again — who was I kidding?
Today was supposed to be different. I had a plan. A precise, almost laughable attempt at control. I would be distant. Composed. I would let her arrive in my world and feel the absence of me for once — let her search, let her wonder, let her reach for something that wasn't immediately, eagerly there.
Let her yearn.
The irony is almost cruel enough to be funny.
Because from the very beginning of the day, it was never her who was left wanting.
It was me.
I was there when she stepped into the boutique — sunlight catching in the soft fall of her hair, turning something as simple as a woman walking through a door into something that had no right to affect me as deeply as it did. I shouldn't have lingered. I shouldn't have watched. And yet I stood there, hidden in plain sight, memorizing the way her fingers brushed fabrics she didn't even need, the way she tilted her head slightly as though the world existed primarily to be admired at a gentle angle by her.
I was there when the musicians played for her.
I watched her from a distance I had promised myself was strategic, and she stood there completely unaware that somewhere behind it, I was watching her the way a man watches something he has no name for yet — something he isn't ready to name, because naming it would make it too real to survive.
I was there when she stepped into the carriage.
The door closed, and for a moment — one honest, unguarded moment — I almost followed. Almost abandoned the entire performance of restraint and simply went to her, because the space between us felt suddenly absurd, suddenly unjustifiable.
But I held.
Barely.
I wasn't there when she dressed for me.
And somehow, that absence is the loudest thing about this entire day. Because I can imagine it — too clearly, too specifically — and the thought of her preparing herself knowing she was coming to me does something I have no composed, dignified language for.
Something dangerous.
I had to leave before the day unravelled entirely beneath the weight of her existing in it. So I came here, to this place of gold and glass and orchestrated beauty, and told myself that distance would finally give me the upper hand. That tonight, I would be the one she reached for first. That I would be in control of at least that much.
Even as I thought it, I didn't quite believe it.
And I was right not to.
Because even now — sitting here, the glass untouched in my hand, the city glittering outside and the room glittering within — I can feel it. That same pull. That same quiet, patient undoing that begins the moment she enters my awareness and doesn't stop until she leaves it.
Michael would have looked at me and shaken his head slowly. Maybe laughed. Maybe dragged me back into something resembling self-possession with the particular efficiency he reserved for moments when I needed it most.
Or maybe he would have simply slapped me and told me to get up.
Because I am gone.
God, I am completely gone.
I never thought I would fold like this. Not for anyone. Not this easily, not this completely, not with this particular absence of resistance that makes the whole thing feel less like weakness and more like something I simply never had a defence against.
And yet —
For her,
it wasn't even a fall.
It was a surrender.
The slow, silent kind. The kind that happens in increments so small you don't notice them until one day you look at yourself and there is nothing left to hold onto. Nothing left to protect. No part of yourself that hasn't already, quietly, been given over.
Only her.
Only the aching, unshakeable certainty —
that before she has even walked through that door,
I am already hers.
And then —
She walked in.
And God help me —
She was ethereal.
The doors opened, and the night itself seemed to pause — just briefly, just enough — to let her pass. The light in the room found her immediately, as though it already knew where to go, settling against her like something that understood she was meant to be seen in it. The room didn't fall silent — not entirely — but something shifted in the quality of it. Conversations blurred into the periphery. The music receded into something distant and beside the point. And all that remained — all that my eyes would allow to remain — was her.
I didn't look away.
I couldn't have.
She moved with a quiet grace that didn't announce itself, each step unhurried and effortless, as though she had never once in her life needed to try for a room. Her hair was swept softly upward, strands escaping at the edges to frame her face in a way that caught the candlelight and held it — warm, luminous, devastating in its simplicity. She looked untouchable. Like something you admired from a careful distance, knowing you had no right to reach.
And yet —
She had come here.
For me.
The necklace I had chosen rested against her collarbone — the fine chain glinting faintly with each breath she drew, the sapphire catching the light in the deep, unhurried way of something that understood its own value. My gaze settled there longer than it should have, something tightening slowly in my chest at the reality of it. That she had worn it. That she had stood in front of a mirror somewhere across this city and clasped it at the back of her neck and carried it here.
That she had let something of mine rest against her skin.
The gloves — delicate, elegant — covered her hands, completing something in the image of her that I hadn't known needed completing until I saw it. And the dress —
God.
The dress.
It fell over her like it had been made with the specific knowledge of her, flowing in a way that was at once restrained and entirely devastating. It revealed nothing. It concealed nothing that mattered. There was a softness to it, a modesty that only deepened the effect of her rather than diminishing it — as though the dress understood that she required no embellishment, only framing.
No one else could have worn it like that.
No one else could have made something so considered feel so effortless.
I hadn't known what she would like. That uncertainty had stayed with me longer than I cared to admit — because she was not someone you could predict or easily read, and I refused to risk getting it wrong. Not with her. Not with something that was meant to be for her.
So I went back to the only certainty I had.
The night of my play. The way she had looked then — quiet, composed, unforgettable in the particular way that doesn't announce itself and doesn't need to. I chose something that carried the same spirit. The same softness. The same restraint that, on her, always managed to feel like the most compelling thing in the room.
Hoping she would step into it again.
She had.
She had surpassed it entirely.
My jaw tightened slowly — a shift so slight it was almost imperceptible — because they were looking at her.
Other men.
Their eyes had found her the moment she walked through the door and had not moved on the way eyes are supposed to. They were watching her with the particular, unhurried attention of men who believed they were being subtle and were not. Taking her in. Admiring her without knowing a single thing about her, without understanding even the surface of what they were looking at.
Something sharp moved through my chest.
Possessive.
Instinctive.
Uninterested in being reasoned with.
Emma —
My Emma —
It was breathtaking in a way that made the word feel insufficient. But she was not theirs to look at. Not theirs to admire in that slow, presumptuous way. Not theirs to hold in their thoughts even for the length of a second.
She was —
Mine.
The word arrived with the quiet, absolute certainty of something that had always been true and had simply been waiting for me to stop arguing with it. It didn't ask for my agreement. It had no interest in my resistance. It settled into me — deep, immediate, irrevocable — and stayed.
Ah, fuck.
I stood before I could think better of it.
Not hurriedly. Not with any visible disruption to the composed surface I had spent the better part of this evening constructing. But deliberately — each step carrying the particular, unhurried certainty of a man who has made a decision and is no longer interested in unmaking it.
She was speaking to a waitress when I reached her, her voice soft and composed, asking about a reservation with the quiet ease of someone entirely unbothered by the fact that the room had quietly rearranged itself around her arrival. As though she hadn't noticed. As though she never did.
I stopped beside her.
Close.
Close enough to catch the edge of her perfume — something soft and warm that didn't announce itself, that simply existed at the very perimeter of my senses and made the distance between us feel, suddenly, like something I had no patience for.
"Emma," I said.
Her name left me quieter than I had intended. Quieter than this room, quieter than the music, quieter than anything around us — and yet somehow heavier than all of it. Like it carried everything I had spent the entire day carefully not saying.
She turned.
And when her eyes found mine —
the city beyond the glass, the gold-lit room, the music, the people, every carefully constructed detail of this carefully constructed evening —
all of it fell away.
There was only her.
And the quiet, absolute, devastating certainty that I had lost this particular battle long before she ever walked through that door — that I had, in all honesty, lost it the moment I first saw her, and had simply been too proud to admit it until now.