Six More Days Of Us
Aubrey's Pov
How ethereal could one person be?
I had never been a believer — not in fate, not in divinity, not in anything that couldn't be reasoned, measured, held up to the light and examined until it surrendered its logic. I had built my entire existence on the premise that everything had an explanation if you were willing to be precise enough in the asking.
And yet —
if someone were to ask me, with complete sincerity, to offer a logical explanation for how a woman like Emma could exist — so composed, so captivating, so entirely, impossibly herself —
I would find myself at a loss.
Not a polite loss. Not the kind dressed up as humility. A genuine, disorienting loss — the kind that arrives when you reach for the framework you have always relied on and find it simply isn't there anymore. Like stepping onto ground that was solid yesterday.
Because there was nothing rational about her.
Nothing that yielded to precision, to analysis, to the particular kind of scrutiny I had always used to keep the world from surprising me. She moved through the evening the way light moves through water — familiar in principle, impossible to hold.
If I were truly forced to answer —
I suspect I would have to abandon reason entirely.
And say —
that she was not something meant to be understood.
But something borrowed.
A fragment of something untouched by whatever it is that diminishes people over time — that grinds them, slowly and without ceremony, into smaller, harder, more defended versions of themselves. She had escaped that erosion. Or she carried it differently, privately, in the places she had not yet allowed me to reach.
Something unearthly.
As though she were a piece of a world that had no business intersecting with this one — with this restaurant, with these chandeliers casting their amber geometry across polished surfaces, with a man like me sitting across from her watching the candlelight catch in her eyes and finding it difficult to remember what composure felt like from the inside.
There was no possibility of remaining unaffected.
Not when she sat across from me like that — real and present and close enough that I could have reached across the table and touched her, and the only thing preventing me was the same restraint I had spent the entire evening quietly losing my grip on.
Emma.
Here.
With me.
We were sharing a table, a conversation, a bottle of champagne, a moment that by every external measure should have been unremarkable — and yet the room had arranged itself around her from the moment she entered it. The light found her. The music seemed to slow. And I, who prided myself on the ability to remain unmoved by almost anything, had been watching her all evening with the focused, helpless attention of a man who has run out of reasons to look away.
I had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere between the blush I'd watched rise in the delicate line of her throat and the fork she had extended toward me with the quiet authority of someone who had made a decision and was no longer interested in undoing it.
And for the next six days —
I would see her again.
The realisation moved through me like a slow current, settling somewhere deep and warm and entirely unwelcome in its effect. Six days. Six more evenings where the shape of her would enter my awareness and rearrange everything around it. Six more opportunities to gather the pieces of herself she offered and concealed in such equal, deliberate measure — a woman who gave you just enough to make the withholding unbearable.
It should not have affected me the way it did.
And yet —
The thought alone was enough to leave me intoxicated. Quietly. Dangerously. The kind of intoxication that doesn't announce itself until you try to think clearly and discover, with some alarm, that you cannot.
Somewhere beneath the ease of the evening, something in me had been quietly resisting.
Not enough to alter anything visible — not my expression, not the pace of my voice, not the controlled ease with which I had moved through the meal. But present, beneath all of it. A friction. A question I had been carrying since she first lifted her glass with that particular, unconscious grace, and I had thought — before I could stop myself — that is not something learned.
How could a woman who worked in a café move through a room like this without a single moment of uncertainty?
I had spent enough time in rooms like this one — in the company of people who had practised their composure in front of mirrors, who had learned the grammar of this world through careful observation and painful social education — to recognize the difference between acquired ease and native ease. They looked nearly identical to the untrained eye. To me, they were entirely distinct.
What she had was native.
The way she held her glass — fingers positioned with an elegance so automatic it had never been a decision. The way she moved through the table setting, each piece of cutlery reached for without a fraction of hesitation, as though the weight and placement of formal silverware was something her hands had understood since childhood. No pause. No flicker of the subtle self-consciousness that even the well-practised sometimes failed to fully suppress.
She inhabited this space the way you inhabit somewhere familiar.
Not arrived at.
Returned to.
The thought sat in me, heavy and persistent, long after I had made several attempts to set it down. Because it didn't align. Not with what I had been told. Not with the version of herself she had offered me. And I was a man who had spent years building his existence around the practice of noticing misalignment — who had survived by noticing it, in fact — and I could not make her fit the frame she had constructed.
For a moment, I let the possibility surface, quiet and without judgment: that there was more to her than what I had been shown. Far more. That I had been permitted to see only the outer edges of something I hadn't yet been given permission to understand — a carefully curated perimeter, and nothing beyond it.
And then, just as quickly, I let it go.
Or attempted to.
Because the alternative required questions, I wasn't certain she would answer. Answers I wasn't certain I wanted yet — not out of fear, but because there was something about this specific, fragile thing between us that I didn't want to disturb before it was ready. Before she was ready.
I returned my attention to her.
She was eating.
Without restraint. Without the particular brand of self-monitoring that so many people brought to rooms like this — the quiet, exhausting performance of not wanting too much, not enjoying too visibly, not letting anyone see the fullness of their appetite. She had none of that. She ate with the complete unconsciousness of someone who had simply forgotten to monitor herself, where pleasure had briefly and entirely outranked presentation.
The candlelight moved across her face as she reached for another bite. The gold of the room reflected softly in the dark of her eyes. And she was smiling, slightly — not at me, not for anyone — just smiling in the private, involuntary way of someone experiencing something that requires no audience.
Something shifted in my chest. Warm. Uninvited. Settling there with the permanence of something that had found the right place and had no intention of moving.
Absurd — to be undone by something this small. To feel the careful architecture of my composure develop new fractures because a woman was enjoying her dessert without apology, without performance, without any awareness at all that she was being watched.
And yet.
As though her unguarded contentment was answering something in me I had never thought to ask aloud. As though the simple fact of her being present and real and exactly herself was filling a particular silence I hadn't known was there.
I considered suggesting she take more with her. The thought arrived easily, reaching past reason — some instinct that wanted to extend the evening, to ensure she left with something tangible of it. I didn't voice it. Some impulses, I had learned, reveal more about a man than he is prepared to defend.
Especially when he hasn't yet determined whether they belong to reason —
or to something far more dangerous than reason.
Emma felt like something I had quietly, gradually stopped believing was still available to me.
Not through any single decision. Not with the clean deliberateness of a man who understood what he was refusing. But in the accumulated way — the slow, almost imperceptible way — of someone who had simply, over the years, adjusted his expectations downward until certain things no longer seemed like possibilities at all.
Being near her was like taking a breath I had forgotten I'd been withholding. Unsteady and unfamiliar and necessary in a way that arrived before I could prepare myself for it.
And with that came something I was wholly unprepared for: the quiet, unasked-for understanding that there was still beauty left in the world. Not the abstract kind. Not the cold, architectural kind I had trained myself to appreciate from a safe distance. But something alive. Something that ate chocolate cake and laughed without permission and turned its face toward candlelight and made the whole room rearrange itself without knowing it was doing so.
It was not a thought I trusted.
I was not someone who believed in such things anymore.
Not after him.
The memory never arrived with warning or courtesy. It never softened. It simply appeared — sharp and complete and entirely unwilling to be managed — threading itself through the stillness between one breath and the next, the way cold enters a room through a crack you cannot locate. Present before you can trace it back to its source.
Michael.
I had failed him.
There was no version of that truth I had ever found a way to carry without feeling the full weight of it. No revision, no distance of time, no moment of sufficient distraction. I had not been there when it mattered. Had not seen what I should have seen, understood what should have been clear, and moved when movement might have changed the outcome. And that absence did not diminish with repetition. It deepened. Turned inward. Became something constant, something I carried at a cellular level now — beneath everything, always.
The dining room was all gold light and low music and the quiet murmur of other people's conversations. Beautiful, controlled, entirely indifferent to the thing moving through me as I sat there.
There were moments when I resented the memory. Resented its sharpness, the way it inserted itself without invitation, the way it had shaped everything that followed into something slightly colder, slightly more armoured, slightly less willing to be open. But the resentment always gave way to something quieter and more honest: a guilt that had no bottom. That simply continued downward, no matter how deep I had already gone.
And yet — buried somewhere I visited only when I couldn't prevent it — something else remained. Small. Reluctant. A quiet desire to put the weight down. Not to forget him. Never that. But to stop performing grief as loyalty, as though the suffering was the evidence of how much he had mattered.
I couldn't.
Not yet.
Not until I had answers. Not until whoever was truly responsible for his death had been found, and I had done something about it that could not be undone. Only then would I allow myself to consider what came after. Only then would the question of living differently become one I had earned the right to answer.
Until that moment, I would carry it. All of it. Without negotiation. Without mercy toward myself.
Because anything less would mean I had failed him twice.
And yet —
The very thing that should have kept me anchored to the past sat across from me in royal blue, licking chocolate from the edge of her fork, entirely unaware of any of this.
She was luminous. Quietly, completely luminous — the way certain things are luminous not because they demand attention but because they simply cannot help receiving it. She carried something untouched about her. Not naive. Not unformed. But protected, somehow — some essential part of her preserved against whatever accumulates in a person over years of loss and consequence.
She felt like morning.
And I had grown so accustomed to the night — to its specific silence, its specific demands — that I had almost forgotten what morning looked like up close.
She was a fallen star in slow descent — beautiful in a way that already carried the knowledge of its own brevity, that burned all the brighter for being finite.
And I —
I was something that burned too. But differently. With a heat that had long since stopped being useful and had simply become the temperature at which I existed.
The distance between us was vast.
And the most dangerous thing about the evening —
It was that I had spent all of it, not caring.
By the time we returned to the limousine, the night had deepened into something colder. Denser. The city pressed against the windows in ribbons of amber and white, the skyline a burning silhouette against a sky too dark to be simply black — more like the absence of something, like a held breath the colour of midnight.
Inside the car, the warmth we had shared over dinner existed still — but thinner now. Changed in quality. The ease of the restaurant had given way to something more fragile, more aware, the way a conversation changes when two people realize they are nearly at the end of it.
Not distance.
Not silence.
Awareness. The particular, weighted awareness of two people sitting in the same small space, in the same darkness, with the same unspoken things hovering in the inches between them.
The city scrolled past the glass — lights dissolving into trails, headlights bleeding into amber, the great indifferent machinery of New York moving through its night completely unbothered by what was happening in the back of a single limousine. I watched it without seeing it. My attention was elsewhere. It had been elsewhere all evening.
At dinner, words had come with a freedom I rarely allowed myself. I had spoken more than I intended to — about things that mattered, about the shape of my days, about the silences I had grown accustomed to. And she had met me there, not fully, never fully — always that final careful distance preserved — but with enough honesty that it had left marks.
An older brother. A younger sister. New York.
"I always wanted to be away from home and do something that makes me go crazy with passion."
The longing in her voice when she said it had been entirely unguarded — the kind that escapes before composure knows to catch it. Real in a way that the careful, managed version of herself so rarely allowed.
"So... a café makes you go crazy?"
She had scoffed — immediate and instinctive — and then laughed. Freely. Without architecture. The kind of laughter that belongs to someone who has briefly, completely forgotten to be anybody other than themselves.
For that specific, brief, irretrievable moment — everything between us had felt like it cost nothing.
Now, that ease was already becoming a memory.
The car slowed. The city outside narrowed to a single building, to her building — its facade lit from below, the entrance casting pale light onto the wet pavement. Uncle Gren stepped out. The door opened. Cold air entered, slipping across the warmth remaining between us, thinning it with the efficiency of something that doesn't know it's interrupting anything.
She didn't move.
The city hummed beyond the glass. Somewhere distant, a siren rose and fell. The engine idled beneath us, patient and low.
She turned toward me.
And in the particular quality of the dark inside the car — the city's diffuse glow coming through the windows, catching the line of her jaw, the edge of her collarbone, the faint shimmer of the sapphire at her throat — she looked exactly as she had looked all evening.
Like something borrowed from somewhere better than here.
"So... when do we meet again?"
Her voice. Softer now — stripped of the lightness she used as insulation, carrying something more fragile beneath it. Not uncertainty. Something closer to hope. The kind that hasn't fully decided to be itself yet. The kind that watches you carefully while it waits.
I hadn't anticipated the question.
Not the question itself, which was simple enough, which should have had a simple answer. But the fact of being caught without one, of having spent the entire evening so entirely present with her that I had forgotten to remain prepared. She had done that. She had this specific, particular ability to make the calculation feel beside the point, to make the careful management of myself seem like a less interesting option than simply being here.
I looked at her for a moment in the dark.
The city behind her. The night between us. The space she had created by asking felt smaller now than it had before.
"Whenever our schedules align," I said. Measured. Composed.
The words felt insufficient the moment they left me. Too assembled. Too much like the version of myself I had spent the entire evening quietly shedding and had now, at the last possible moment, pulled back on like a coat I didn't need.
She held my gaze — long enough for something to pass between us, unnamed and unhurried — and then a faint smile found her lips. Small and decided and privately hers.
"I like that," she said quietly. "Let's meet for the next six days... when we can. Not in a rush."
I inclined my head.
"Take care."
Two words. Arriving with far too much ease, carrying none of the weight I was actually holding behind them. A closing. A courtesy. The kind of phrase that fits in the gap between wanting someone to stay and not saying so.
Because I did not want her to leave.
That was the simple, unglamorous truth of it — the kind that doesn't arrange itself into anything elegant, that just sits there in its full, plain, inconvenient weight. The night still held something I hadn't finished with. The evening had given me something I hadn't expected and wasn't prepared to release back into whatever ordinary thing would follow it. And she was already gathering herself, already stepping back toward the version of herself that existed outside this car, outside this night, outside the specific gravitational field of what we had been to each other for the past few hours.
She smiled.
But something in her eyes was somewhere else.
A reluctance, quiet and unmistakable — mirroring mine with such precision that for a moment the symmetry of it was almost more than I could hold without saying something.
We were both, in our separate, careful ways, standing at the same edge.
And neither of us was speaking.
Then she turned. The door was there. The cold was there. The city was there, indifferent and enormous and continuing in every direction without pause.
She stepped out.
The door closed.
A sound so small for something so final.
And she was gone.
I didn't move. The city carried on beyond the glass — its lights unchanged, its rhythm uninterrupted, the great impersonal machinery of New York proceeding through the night with complete indifference to the fact that something had just shifted in the back of a limousine parked outside a building on a street it would forget by morning.
The seat beside me held her shape in the particular way empty spaces hold the recent memory of presence — not quite void, not quite full. Something in between. Something that required a moment before it could be simply absent.
I looked at it.
I let it be what it was.
Outside, the first few flakes of snow had begun to fall — barely visible, just present enough to be real, drifting through the amber of the streetlights like something the city was exhaling. They settled against the glass and dissolved. Settled and dissolved. Patient and indifferent, and quietly, ceaselessly falling.
Something in me had altered tonight.
Not dramatically. Not with the ceremony, such things tend to be remembered. But in the quiet, irrevocable way of things that finish happening before you understand they were happening at all. A fundamental rearrangement. The kind that doesn't ask permission and doesn't offer a way back.
If I allowed myself the full honesty of it — if I sat alone in this dark and set down every last piece of restraint for just a moment — I knew, with a precision that required no argument, what I would have given her.
Everything.
Not in portions. Not with the careful rationing I had spent years perfecting — the art of wanting without visibility, of caring without exposure. Without the architecture of restraint I had worn for so long, it had begun to feel like my own skin.
Everything. Freely. Without the particular performance of not meaning it too much.
I would have rebuilt the world in her favour. Named the moon after her if she had wanted it. Built something that would survive both of us and placed it before her without ceremony or expectation, simply because the thought of her having it was sufficient reason.
And yet —
I did not know where I stood.
Not truly. Not in the way that matters.
I did not know whether she was slowly, imperceptibly becoming mine — in the accumulating weight of shared evenings and unguarded moments and things said and unsaid between us — or whether she was simply passing through. Leaving something behind that I would spend a very long time trying to name properly.
The snow continued to fall against the glass.
The city continued its indifferent, brilliant burning.
Would she ever step toward me — not because the distance had been closed from my side, but because she had chosen to close it from hers? Would she ever say whatever the word was for what had been building between us, unburdened by whatever she carried that kept one part of herself always, carefully withheld?
I didn't know.
The car remained still. Uncle Gren was patient and silent in the front. The city was pouring its light through the glass and onto the empty seat beside me.
But I found — with a clarity that had not asked for my permission and did not require it — that I was willing to wait.
For as long as it took.
Through every careful, half-offered version of herself, she was willing to extend in the meantime. Through the distance and the moments, it briefly dissolved. Through every evening that ended with the door closing and her on the other side of it, and the particular silence that followed.
Because if she ever truly chose me —
if she arrived at that choice without reservation, without the weight of what she protected herself from pressing its thumb on the scale —
It would render every moment of the waiting not only worthwhile, but necessary.
The snow fell softly against the glass.
And the city burned on, the way it always had —
entirely unaware that something, tonight, had changed.