If we don't try, we will never know
Ayah's Pov
Aubrey stood beneath the spill of chandelier light like he had been carved into the evening itself — impossible to ignore, impossible to look at without feeling it somewhere deep and inconvenient.
God... he was beautiful.
The crisp white of his shirt caught the glow with a sharpness that made everything around him seem slightly less defined, as though the room existed to frame him and had accepted this purpose without complaint. The darkness of his suit gave him contrast — light and shadow held in the same body, restraint and something that felt dangerously close to its opposite. His hair fell the way I had already quietly memorized — untouched, natural, soft waves slipping across his forehead as though they simply refused to be otherwise. I had always thought there was something almost sinful in that. How effortlessly, unapologetically perfect it looked. As if it knew exactly what it was doing.
And his eyes —
Those emerald eyes glinted beneath the chandeliers, catching fragments of gold and warmth and everything I had no business feeling. They didn't simply look. They held. They pulled. They made staying away feel like a lie I had been telling myself — convincingly, until this exact moment.
My gaze drifted lower, betraying me entirely.
The faint shadow of stubble along his jaw sharpened him, gave him an edge that hadn't been quite so visible before. It made him look older. Colder. More dangerous in the particular way of things that are still beautiful, while they are dangerous. And somehow — God help me — it made him look more mine.
On his left wrist, the gleam of his Cartier watch caught the light with every subtle shift of his hand, resting against the quiet lines of veins that traced beneath his skin like something I had no business noticing as carefully as I was. I swallowed. My breath had caught somewhere between my ribs and my pride and showed no signs of being released.
I realized then — I hadn't looked away.
Not once.
And neither had they.
The room had noticed him. Women watched him with the particular quality of attention reserved for things you already know you cannot have — slow, thorough, committing the details to memory. Men glanced with something sharper: envy, quiet and bitten-back. It should have meant nothing to me. It should have been expected, unremarkable, something I registered and filed away without feeling.
But it wasn't nothing.
Something rose inside me — sudden and hot and almost embarrassing in how quickly it arrived, how little warning it gave.
Possessiveness.
Raw and irrational and entirely unwilling to be reasoned with. It rose before I could stop it, before I could think better of it, before I could remember who I was supposed to be standing here and what I was supposed to feel.
My hand moved before I had consciously decided anything.
I slipped my arm through his — fingers brushing against the firm line of his sleeve, anchoring myself to him in a way that felt dangerously, treacherously natural. My heart stuttered the moment our bodies aligned, closer than we had ever allowed, closer than I had ever permitted myself to get. The warmth of him was immediate. Undeniable.
And then I smiled.
Soft.
Certain.
Victorious — in the way of someone who has just claimed something they had been pretending wasn't already theirs.
His reaction was instant.
Aubrey stilled. Not completely — he was too composed for completely — but just enough. That subtle, almost invisible shift. The quiet surprise moving through him, there and gone, legible only to someone paying the kind of attention I had apparently been paying without admitting it.
Of course, he was shocked.
I was, too.
Because for once, it wasn't him crossing the distance.
It was me.
"So... where is our seat?" I asked lightly, my lips curved into something that resembled ease, my eyes moving through the room with a deliberateness I allowed to show — skimming over polished glasses and whispered conversations and the women who had been lingering a beat too long on him.
When I caught them — those glances — I didn't look away.
I held them.
Just long enough to mean something.
Just long enough for it to be understood.
We moved through the room together, arms linked, bodies aligned in a statement that required no words. Midnight had settled into the evening like a secret — soft and dim and intimate, the kind of hour that makes everything feel slightly more dangerous and slightly more honest than it did before. And I could feel it with every step, every breath.
Him.
The solid, warm, entirely destabilizing fact of him beside me.
When we reached the table, Aubrey gently slipped his arm from mine — the absence of it felt immediately, registered before I had time to hide that I had noticed. Before I could react to that either, he pulled out my chair, smooth and unhurried, as though this was simply instinct. As though taking care of me was something his hands already knew how to do.
I paused for half a second.
Then inclined my head, graceful and composed, and let him have it.
"Thank you," I murmured, my voice quieter than I had intended it to be.
I sat, smoothing the fabric of my dress, gathering myself back behind something that at least resembled composure. Reaching for the version of myself that knew how to be still and steady and give nothing away.
Or at least — something that looked like her.
Aubrey took his seat across from me, settling into it with that particular quiet confidence that always seemed to simply accompany him. Not performed. Not constructed. It just existed, the way certain things exist — without effort, without apology.
Which, somehow, made it worse.
"You look stunning tonight," he said, a slow smile moving across his lips — one that didn't stay there politely but reached his eyes, softened them, made them do something I was choosing not to name.
As if that wasn't enough on its own.
As if his presence hadn't already been doing damage since the moment I walked through that door.
As if he didn't know precisely, perfectly what he was doing.
I held his gaze and refused to let it move me. Or refused to let it show that it had.
"You don't look quite bad yourself," I replied, tilting my head just slightly, enough to let the words carry the tease I intended, the trace of defiance I needed.
A pause.
Then, softer — and sharper for it —
"But I must say... You made me work hard to meet you here tonight."
And there it was.
The truth, laid down gently, laced beneath something that sounded like lightness. Because nothing about him had ever been easy. And somehow — despite every rational argument I could have made to myself — I had come anyway. Through a letter, a child's hand, a boutique, a carriage, a dress chosen by someone who had no right to know me as well as the choosing suggested he did.
I had come.
He chuckled — low and warm, the sound moving through the space between us like something that had been given permission to stay.
It shouldn't have affected me.
But it settled somewhere close to my chest, in that particular way of sounds you want to keep hearing, and I had to actively resist the thought that followed — the selfish, embarrassing, entirely honest thought that I wanted that sound to belong to me. That I wanted to be the only one who heard it in exactly this register, this quiet, this close.
"I mean," he continued, that curve at his lips just enough to give him away, "after the rejection, I was heartbroken... so consider it a little punishment?"
I blinked.
Heartbroken.
The word landed differently than it should have. It should have been something I processed and moved past. It should have been easy — charming, perhaps, the kind of thing a man like him would say with precisely calibrated lightness.
But something in the way he said it made it land like it meant exactly what it said.
And something in me — quietly, involuntarily — faltered.
Just slightly. Just enough.
Because Aubrey Ardel did not look like someone who broke. He looked like the kind of man who moved through the world at his own particular pace and left everything else to arrange itself accordingly. Unreachable. Untouched. The kind of beauty that protected itself simply by existing.
But this —
This sounded almost real.
Too real.
My fingers tightened almost imperceptibly against the edge of the table. I gathered myself. Forced the composure back into place the way you press a loose seam — firmly, invisibly, hoping it holds.
"Oh?" I leaned back, crossing one leg over the other, letting a small and knowing smile find my lips. "Heartbroken, were you?"
Light.
Playful.
As though the word hadn't already lodged itself somewhere it wasn't supposed to reach.
I held his gaze — steady, unwavering — because looking away would be surrender, and I was not ready to surrender.
"Well then," I added, softly, tilting my head just enough, "I suppose I should apologize."
A pause. Deliberate. Measured.
"But something tells me... You enjoyed the suffering a little too much."
His eyes flickered.
Once. Just once. But I caught it — that shift, the way the light inside them changed quality, deepened into something that was no longer even attempting to be light. It was subtle. Almost invisible from any other angle. But I felt it the way you feel a change in air pressure — the particular heaviness that arrives just before something breaks open.
He was holding himself back.
For me.
"I would suffer a thousand years," he said, his voice no longer carrying the warmth of teasing — stripped of it entirely, quiet and direct and entirely certain, "if it means I can stay beside you... and have you right where I want you to be."
My breath hitched.
Not loudly. Not enough to be seen. But inside me, everything went still at once — the way things go still when something lands with more weight than you were braced for.
Because there was something in the way he said it. Not entirely a declaration. Not entirely a confession. Something in between — something that had truth moving through it the way current moves through water, not visible from the surface but undeniably present, undeniably real.
A thousand years.
It should have sounded like hyperbole. It should have been easy to hear and easy to set aside.
But coming from him, in this voice, at this particular distance across a table in a room full of gold and candlelight —
It felt like a promise.
My fingers curled in my lap, grounding myself in the fabric of my dress, reaching for steadiness, for the version of myself that didn't let things reach her.
"You speak in extremes," I murmured, my voice quieter now — dangerously, revealingly quieter.
I held his gaze. I had to.
"And you assume," I added, forcing a thread of control back into my expression, tilting my head with the careful precision of someone who is managing something, "that I would let you keep me exactly where you want."
A pause.
A heartbeat, stretched thin and trembling.
Then, almost gently — almost like a secret given rather than spoken —
"Maybe I'm not the one who stays."
But even as the words left me —
even as I placed them carefully between us like something I meant —
something underneath them whispered the truth I would not say aloud.
I already was.
The air had changed. I could feel it in my skin — thick and charged and trembling with something that neither of us had named and both of us could feel. The distance between us had stopped being space. It had become something else. A thread, pulled so taut it was almost painful.
This version of him — this unguarded, unpolished, entirely present version — undid something in me I had been keeping very carefully together. He had set down the polish. Not out of carelessness, but out of something that felt like offering. Like he had decided, quietly and without making a performance of it, to simply be seen.
The darkness in him.
The restraint.
The devotion beneath all of it — aching, relentless, enormous in a way that didn't announce itself and somehow hurt more for that.
As though he was asking, without asking — if you love me, love me like this too.
My breath was unsteady. I didn't entirely trust myself to speak.
Because I didn't know, honestly and frightened, whether what I was looking at made him more dangerous —
or more divine.
"Even if you are not the one who stays," he said, his voice low and steady and laced with something that felt less like feeling and more like fact, "then let me be the one who remains. Let me be the quiet constant at the edge of your world—the one who waits, not out of obligation, but because there is nowhere else I would rather be."
The words didn't arrive quickly.
They unfolded.
Unhurried. Certain. The words of someone who has already decided and is simply, finally, saying so.
"My reverence for you," he continued, softer, his gaze holding mine with the steadiness of something that had already chosen and would not be moved, "stands equal to the love I carry. And so I will come to you—again and again—no matter how far you wander, no matter how often you turn away."
His fingers were still against the table. Even they seemed to be listening.
"I will endure the distance," he said, quieter now, the edges of his voice roughened by something too real to smooth over, "I will bear the longing, the silence, the absence of you... and still, I will return."
A breath.
Measured.
Almost breaking beneath its own restraint.
"I will yearn for you in ways I cannot speak of without losing myself to them. I will ache for you in the quiet, in the in-between, in every moment where you are not beside me—"
His voice dipped.
Not weaker. Deeper.
"But never will I lay claim to you without your consent. Never will I take what is not given to me freely."
That —
That was where it shattered me.
Because restraint, worn like devotion, is so much more devastating than possession. Because a man who wants you completely and still chooses to wait — still chooses to hold the door open rather than walk through it — is doing something that has no defence against it.
I had no defence against it.
"And yet..." he added, his gaze darkening — not with force, but with something that wanted entirely, quietly, with the patience of something that has never considered giving up, "every fragment of me will still reach for you. In thought, in breath, in the very marrow of my being... I will belong to the wanting of you."
The silence that followed was not empty.
It was full. Overflowing with everything neither of us was saying.
My fingers were pressed tight in my lap. My pulse was doing something I had no name for and no interest in examining too closely. Every careful, practiced wall I had spent years building — and weeks reinforcing, specifically because of him — felt, in this moment, entirely beside the point.
Because this —
This was not desire with nowhere to go.
This was something sacred. Something that had no interest in being manageable.
Devotion laced with restraint.
Longing made into something almost beautiful.
And somehow, precisely because of that —
Unbearable.
I swallowed. My composure was slipping at the edges in ways I could feel but could not stop. Because the truth — the quiet, terrifying, entirely inconvenient truth — was that I no longer knew with any certainty whether I wanted to escape what he was doing to me —
Or surrender to it so completely that there would be nothing left to escape from.
Before I could gather enough of myself to form a response worthy of everything he had just laid in front of me — before I could find the words or the composure or the breath — the moment was gently interrupted.
A waitress appeared at the edge of the table, soft and unobtrusive, placing menus before us with the careful discretion of someone who understood she was stepping into something and was choosing to be invisible about it.
Reality, arriving quietly.
"Please, order whatever you wish... Emma."
His smile followed the name.
Warm. Easy. Entirely unknowing.
And that —
That single, gentle, perfectly innocent thing —
was what undid me completely.
Emma.
The name moved through me differently than it ever had before. Not like a disguise. Not like a precaution I had made my peace with. It felt, in this moment, like the specific shape of what I was withholding from him — a wall I had built so early and so naturally that I had almost forgotten it was a wall at all.
A man who had just offered me everything he was —
And I had given him a name that wasn't mine.
He was loving someone I had constructed. Choosing someone I had placed in front of myself like a shield. Every word he had just spoken, every careful and devastating thing he had laid down between us — he had aimed all of it at Emma.
And Emma was not entirely real.
My smile returned by instinct, by years of practice, by the particular muscle memory of performing composure when composure was the last thing I felt.
But it wavered.
Just slightly.
Just enough for me to feel the waver, even if he couldn't see it.
I lowered my gaze to the menu, letting its polished pages give me something to look at that wasn't his face, that wasn't those eyes, that wasn't the man who had just said I will belong to the wanting of you and meant it — to someone who wasn't fully me.
The dishes were familiar. Comfortingly, almost painfully so — the kind of menu I had grown up alongside, in rooms where this level of elegance was simply the expected register, where luxury didn't need to introduce itself because it had always been present. The prices would not have startled me anywhere else.
But here, I had to be someone else.
So I let my eyes widen. Just slightly. Just enough. Let my fingers pause over the page as though absorbing something impressive. Let a soft, carefully measured breath leave my lips in a way that suggested wonder.
A performance.
A careful, deliberate, exhausting one.
And when I glanced up —
He was watching me.
Completely.
With the particular quality of attention that belongs to someone who finds the thing they are looking at genuinely, helplessly, unguardedly wonderful. Smitten — not performing it, not using it, simply experiencing it, openly, in the way of someone who has decided they are not going to hide it anymore.
As though my reaction alone had been worth every single thing he had arranged tonight just to produce it.
"As if this could impress me more than you already have," I thought — but I closed the thought before it reached my lips, tucked it away with everything else I was keeping from him.
"What would you usually have?" he asked, his tone easy, curious — open in the way of someone who wants to know without needing to possess the knowing.
Or at least —
the version of me he was being allowed to know.
I answered carefully. Lightly. Giving him just enough truth that it felt real, never quite enough to reveal the whole of it. The performance of a woman discovering something rather than recognizing it.
And he listened.
Of course, he listened.
He always did — with the kind of attention that made you feel like the only thing in the room worth hearing, the kind you wanted to lean into even knowing it was dangerous to lean.
Then, unhurried and assured, he began to order. His voice calm, moving through the menu with the quiet confidence of someone who knew what he was doing, pausing occasionally to look up at me and ask, "Is this alright?" before continuing — not as a formality, not as a performance. As though my answer genuinely mattered. As though he would have changed course if I had asked him to.
Each time, I nodded.
Each time, something in me softened in a way I could not afford.
Because there was no arrogance in it. No assumption that he knew better, no desire to demonstrate authority over a moment that didn't belong to him. Only consideration. Only the quiet, unhurried effort of someone paying attention to another person because they wanted to, because it mattered to them, because they had already decided you were worth that particular quality of care.
Such a gentleman.
And yet — that word felt too small. Too easy. Too easily given to men who held doors and pulled out chairs and said polite things in polished rooms.
Because Aubrey didn't simply order for me.
He curated.
He observed.
He remembered the small things — the pause I had made over one dish, the way my eyes had moved — and he incorporated them without comment, without making a point of having noticed.
And in doing so, he made me feel less like someone he was dining with —
and more like someone he had already decided to understand.
Someone, he was already, quietly choosing — again and again, in every small and careful thing.
And God —
That made the pretending so much harder.
Because the distance between what he was giving and what I was giving him back —
was beginning to feel less like protection —
and more like something I would one day have to answer for.