Oh, to be loved by YOU
Ayah's POV
After the incident, I couldn't bring myself to move.
I sat on the bench at the rink's edge and watched Aubrey skate, and I let myself do it openly this time — without the usual management, without the careful rationing of attention I had taught myself to practice around him. He had insisted he was fine. He had said it so easily, so immediately, the way people say things they mean without thinking about whether to mean them. And physically, yes — no damage, nothing broken, nothing that would show by morning. But the moment his body had taken the ice instead of mine, something had cracked open in my chest that I was still quietly trying to press closed.
I was trained for falls. For impact. For the particular physics of a body failing and how to manage it. That was not the problem.
The problem was that in the half-second before I fell, I had not calculated. I had not assessed. I had simply trusted him — instinctively, completely, without consulting any part of myself that might have advised otherwise — and he had caught me, and now I was sitting on a cold bench in an empty rink trying to understand what to do with the fact that I had let him.
I was lowering my guard.
I could not afford to lower my guard.
But then he moved, and the thought dissolved.
He skated the way he occupied most spaces — with a kind of unhurried authority, the ease of someone wholly at home in his own body. Unhurried. Eyes sometimes open, tracking the curve of the ice ahead. Sometimes closed — just for a moment, just a breath — his face turned slightly upward, like he was listening to something the rest of us couldn't hear. Those were the moments that made me rise slightly from the bench, heart catching, ready to call out. And then he would open his eyes and find me across the ice without searching, and give that small, single nod — I'm fine — and I would sit back down and pretend I had been composed the entire time.
I had never seen that expression on him before.
I had seen him polished, and I had seen him careful, and I had seen him laughing, and I had seen him, in the car not so many hours ago, leaning toward me with three inches of charged air between us and his eyes very dark and very sure. But I had not seen this — this particular quality of peace. Like something that lived underneath all the other versions of him, something that didn't often get air. The ice had found it. He looked, skating alone in the empty rink with the overhead lights catching the edges of his movement, like a man breathing for the first time in a long while.
He looked majestic. He looked at peace.
I thought the word and then sat with it, and decided I wasn't going to take it back.
The date had started in the morning and was ending now, the city shifting around us into its night version as Aubrey drove — the lights multiplying, the streets thinning, everything taking on that particular quality of a world settling into itself after a long day. I was in the passenger seat where I had spent the morning, and the car felt different now than it had then. Smaller, somehow. Or perhaps we were both more aware of how small it was.
The near-kiss lived in here.
It was still in the upholstery, still in the air recycled through the vents, still in the precise location above the console where three inches had once become two and then almost less — where his face had been close enough that I could have counted his lashes, where I had made a decision I was still not entirely prepared to examine. I had not moved away. I want to be precise about that. I had stayed, and I had waited, and I had wanted — clearly, undeniably, without the insulation of reasonable doubt — to feel his mouth on mine.
The horn had saved us.
I was not sure saved was the right word.
I looked out at the city lights instead. They were extraordinary tonight — or perhaps they had always been extraordinary, and I was only now paying the kind of attention that comes when the rest of your defences are already occupied. Ribbons of gold and white against the dark. Shopfronts blurring into headlights blurring into the lit windows of buildings where other lives were happening, quietly, at a distance.
The music moved through the car like something with its own warmth.
And without deciding to, I turned.
He was already there, the way he was always already there — like he existed slightly ahead of wherever my attention arrived, as the world arranged itself so that whenever I finally looked, he was simply present and inevitable and entirely, devastatingly himself. The green of his eyes caught the city light and held it. His profile — the clean line of his nose, the jaw I had traced the shape of with my gaze more times than I would ever admit — was turned toward the road, unaware, or pretending to be.
His hair.
I had wanted to touch it since the first time I saw him, and I had not, and the wanting had not diminished even slightly with time.
"Like what you see?"
He said it without turning. Just that quiet, slightly ruined smile at the corner of his mouth — the one that knew things, the one that I was fairly certain he deployed deliberately and unfairly.
I pulled my eyes away. Settled my chin into my left hand and considered the windshield with great thoughtfulness.
"Could be better," I said. "Don't you think?"
He laughed. Low and genuine, the kind that came from somewhere real — shaking his head once, slowly, the way people do when they've decided to find something charming instead of challenging.
The silence that followed was the comfortable kind. The kind that had weight and warmth to it. Outside, the city continued its quiet spectacle. Inside, the music held us in something I did not have a clean word for.
I was still looking at the road.
He was quiet for long enough that I had almost convinced myself the conversation was over — that we would simply drive the rest of the way in this full, warm silence, and I could continue pretending that I was not becoming something I hadn't intended to become.
Then he spoke.
And I was not prepared.
"To me," he said — quietly, like a confession meant only for the interior of this car, for the space between us, for the particular night we had made together — "you have become my paradise."
I didn't move.
"The veins that carry my heart when it forgets how to beat on its own. The marrow inside the bones of me. The place my soul returns to when it has nowhere left to go."
His voice didn't rise. It didn't perform. It had that quality that the most devastating things always have — the quality of simply being true, spoken plainly, without decoration, the way you say the name of something you have known for a long time and are only now saying aloud.
"You are not something that happened to me, Emma. You are what I am made of, now. I don't know when it happened, and I don't know how to undo it and—" a breath, the smallest pause, the kind that holds everything a person has decided to stop protecting — "I don't want to."
The city moved past the windows.
The music played on, unbothered.
And I sat very still, which was the only thing available to me, because something had just shifted in my chest — not broken, not collapsed, but moved, the way tectonic things move, slow and permanent and impossible to reverse — and my throat had closed around whatever I might have said in response, and my eyes were doing something I was not going to acknowledge, and my hand, the one resting in my lap, had curled slowly, quietly, into a fist around nothing.
I felt him glance at me.
I did not look back.
Not because I didn't want to. Because if I looked at him right now, with the city lights painting him gold and his voice still sitting warm in the air between us, I would not be able to keep a single thing inside its box. Everything I had been suppressing — carefully, deliberately, with both hands — would simply rise to the surface and be visible, and I would not be able to call it back.
So I looked at the road.
And I let the words live in me — paradise, marrow, the place my soul returns to — and I did not speak, and I did not look, and I pressed my fist a little tighter around the nothing in my palm.
Because the truth was this:
He was not the only one who didn't want to undo it.
Aubrey waited.
I didn't know he would. I hadn't let myself expect it — had walked through the lobby and into the lift and pressed the button for my floor with the practised composure of someone who was absolutely, entirely fine, who was not replaying the sound of his voice in the car, who was not still feeling the phantom weight of his hands at her waist from when we fell. The lift doors closed. I watched the numbers change. I was fine.
I was completely fine.
I was also moving through my front door faster than was strictly dignified, dropping my bag somewhere in the vicinity of the entryway without looking, crossing the apartment in the dark without turning on a single light because the balcony was ahead and I had approximately four seconds before the composure gave out entirely and I needed — just once, just one more time, only for a moment — to see him.
The night air met me at the glass door. Cold and clean, the kind that clarifies things.
I stepped out.
And there he was.
Still. Leaning against the car with his arms loosely crossed, his face tilted upward, looking directly at me as though he had known exactly which window to find, as though he had been standing there in the particular patience of someone who was prepared to wait as long as it took, as though leaving had never genuinely been his intention.
The blush arrived before I could do anything about it.
It was the being-caught of it — the particular humiliation of wanting something privately and discovering it had never been private at all. I had climbed four floors and crossed a dark apartment and told myself an entire story about simply wanting some air, and he was standing down there in the glow of the streetlight with that quiet, knowing stillness, looking straight into me from the pavement below, and every thread of that story came apart at once.
I thought, briefly, about stepping back inside.
I did not step back inside.
For a moment, we simply existed like that — him below, me above, the night sitting between us like something that had been saving this particular arrangement for exactly the right time. The city breathed around us, indifferent and amber-lit, and the cold moved through my hair, and the distance between us was measurable in metres and yet somehow felt like the smallest it had been all evening.
Then he raised his hand.
Slowly. Unhurried, the way he did most things. A wave that wasn't really a wave — more like an acknowledgement, like the quiet punctuation at the end of something that had no clean ending. And his mouth moved, two syllables, no sound reaching me from this height, but I understood them the way you understand things that don't require hearing.
Good night.
Something turned over in my chest.
I raised my hand back. Felt my own mouth curve in a way I couldn't help and wasn't trying very hard to. And I leaned slightly against the railing, the cold metal grounding me in the present moment, in this specific night, in the fact of him standing down there not leaving — and I let myself have it, just for these few seconds. The looking. The being looked at. The city around us was going about its ordinary business while something thoroughly unordinary hung in the air between a balcony and a pavement.
"Good night," I whispered.
To the dark. To the cold. To the four storeys of night between us.
He stayed a moment longer than he needed to.
Then, finally, unhurried as always, he pushed off from the car. One last look upward — and even from here I could see the edges of it, that quiet, private smile, the one I was fairly certain he didn't give to very many people. He got in. The door closed. The car eased away from the kerb with no urgency, as though even the leaving was something he was doing at his own pace, on his own terms.
I watched until the taillights disappeared around the corner.
Then I stood on the balcony for a while longer, alone in the cold with the city spread out below me, my hand still resting on the railing, the ghost of a wave still living somewhere in my palm.
Paradise, he had said.
The place my soul returns to.
I pressed my lips together and looked at the empty street where his car had been, and I thought about guards I was supposed to be keeping, walls I had spent considerable time building, and the precise structural integrity of a chest that had tonight been moved by a man on ice skates and a whispered goodbye from a pavement.
I stayed until the cold finally decided for me.
And even then, going back inside, I left the balcony door open.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
Oh, to be loved by him.