Chapter 3: 3 A.M.

I wake up at three in the morning with his body curved around mine and his hand resting open and warm on my stomach and for a disoriented half-second I don't know where I am.

Then I remember.

Wrong room. Right man. An evening I cannot explain to anyone.

He's asleep. Deep asleep. Breathing slow and even against the back of my neck, face relaxed, all the confidence and the intensity and the low commanding voice quieted down to just this: a man sleeping peacefully with his arm around a woman he met four hours ago.

I should leave.

The thought arrives clean and practical and fully formed. I should ease out from under his arm and find my clothes in the dark and slip out and take the elevator to my actual floor and my actual room and my actual life and process this whole night from a safe, responsible distance. I should leave before it gets any more complicated than it already is. Before feelings get involved. Before this starts to mean something it shouldn't mean, because we are strangers and this was spontaneous and beautiful and reckless and it needs to end the way these things are supposed to end: cleanly, without expectations, with nothing owed.

I don't move.

Instead I lie there and I listen to him breathe and I think about things.

I think about the last man I slept with. Daniel. Eight months ago. A perfectly nice man from a perfectly nice dating app who took me to a perfectly nice restaurant and kissed me goodnight at my door with his hands politely at his sides and never once made my pulse do what Garry's voice alone did to it from across the room tonight.

I went on four dates with Daniel. He was kind and reliable and entirely forgettable and I felt nothing. Not dislike. Not attraction. Just... nothing. A blank space where a feeling should have been. I let it end without a conversation because there was nothing to have a conversation about.

Before Daniel there was Michael. Eight months of careful, scheduled, temperature-controlled relationship that looked perfect on paper and felt like wearing a coat that almost fits but never quite. We broke up over text on a Wednesday and I was fine by Thursday and I think that tells you everything you need to know.

Before Michael there was university, where I slept with two people, both of them pleasant, both of them unmemorable. And before that there was nothing because I was busy being top of my class and building the kind of life that looked exactly right from the outside and felt exactly nothing from the inside.

Twenty-six years old. Four sexual partners including tonight. A management consultancy job I'm good at and mostly enjoy. A flat in London with a mortgage I'm ahead on. A pension. A savings account. A life that is structured and organised and dependable and completely, devastatingly, soul-numbingly safe.

And then a keycard opened the wrong door and a stranger turned around and said "wrong room?" in a voice that went straight through my sternum and I stayed.

I stayed.

That's the part that keeps circling. Not the sex, although the sex was the best of my life by a margin I'm not prepared to calculate. Not his body, although his body is going to feature prominently in my private thoughts for the foreseeable future. The fact that I stayed. That some part of me I didn't even know existed looked at a locked door and a naked stranger and chose to stay instead of run and that part of me felt more like the real me than the version who files taxes early and sets two alarms.

Garry shifts in his sleep. His arm tightens around me, pulling me closer, and he makes a low sound against my hair. Something between a sigh and a murmur. Not words. Just warmth. Just the unconscious reaching of a body that knows someone is there and doesn't want them to go.

My throat tightens.

I don't want to feel this. I am not supposed to feel this. This was supposed to be one reckless night with a beautiful stranger, a story I'd tell my best friend over wine and never repeat. A deviation from the plan. Not a feeling. Not this feeling. Not the way my chest aches when his arm pulls me closer. Not the way I want to turn around and look at his sleeping face and memorise it because I know in a few hours I'm going to walk away and I might never see it again.

I am not this woman.

Except right now, at three in the morning, in a hotel room that doesn't belong to me, I am exactly this woman and she might be the truest version of myself I've ever met.

I turn over carefully. His arm adjusts but doesn't let go. And now we're face to face in the dark, his features softened by sleep, and I look at him.

He's beautiful. Not in the polished, symmetrical way that photographs well. Beautiful in the way that real things are beautiful: interesting, specific, slightly imperfect, entirely himself. The tattoos that start at his shoulders and bleed down his arms, abstract shapes and fine lines that I want to trace with my fingers in daylight. The slight crook in his nose that suggests it's been broken at least once. The way his mouth sits when he's relaxed, softer than when he's awake, less certain, more vulnerable.

I reach out and touch his jaw. Very lightly. Just to feel the warmth of his skin under my fingertips.

His eyes open.

Not startled, but slow. Like he was already half-awake and waiting for a reason to surface.

"Hey," he says. His voice is rough with sleep and quiet and warm and it still does things to the backs of my knees even lying down.

"Hey."

"What time is it?"

"Three something."

He looks at me. Studies my face in the dark with those grey eyes that seem to work just fine without light.

"You're thinking," he says.

"I'm always thinking."

"You're thinking about leaving."

I don't deny it.

His thumb traces the line of my jaw. Slow. Like he's memorizing the shape of it for later.

"What time's your train?" he asks.

"Nine."

"What city?"

"London."

"I'm in London," he says. "Hackney."

My heart does something genuinely inconvenient.

"I'm in Bermondsey," I reply, which is not information he needs and is exactly the kind of information that turns a one-night stand into something with a postcode and a potential future and I cannot believe I just said it.

Something shifts in his expression. That almost-smile again, the one that sits at the corner of his mouth like a promise he hasn't made yet.

"Bermondsey to Hackney," he says. "Overground. Forty minutes."

"You're calculating commute times right now?"

"I'm calculating everything right now." His eyes hold mine. "I have been since you walked through that door."

The air between us changes. Not charged the way it was before, when everything was electric and urgent and heading toward the inevitable. Something quieter than that. Something that feels less like want and more like recognition. Like two people looking at each other in the dark and realizing simultaneously that this might not be just a night.

"Garry," I say.

"Dara."

"This is insane."

"Completely."

"I walked into the wrong room."

"Best wrong room of my life."

"I don't know your last name."

"Ashworth. Garry Ashworth. Structural engineer. Thirty-one. Hackney. Sister in Edinburgh. No pets because my hours are unpredictable. Favourite book changes weekly. Currently halfway through a thriller I don't like but refuse to quit because I'm stubborn about finishing things."

I stare at him.

"I make a very good omelette," he continues. "I cannot fold a fitted sheet. I was in a serious relationship that ended fourteen months ago because she wanted to move to Toronto and I didn't and neither of us was wrong but it hurt anyway. I sleep on the left side. I'm told I don't snore. I have never once in my life had a stranger walk into my hotel room and I have never been this glad to be wrong about something."

The crack in my chest from earlier splits wider. Air rushing in. Light.

"Why are you telling me all this?" I ask. My voice is doing something it shouldn't be doing. Getting thick.

"Because you said you don't know me." His hand moves from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers warm against my skin, holding me gently in place. "And I'd like you to."

"We had sex. People have sex. It doesn't have to mean..."

"It doesn't have to," he agrees. "But it does. You know it does. That's why you're still here at three in the morning instead of three floors up in your own bed."

I have no answer for that because he's right and we both know it.

"I'm not asking for anything," he says. "I'm not asking you to change your plans or miss your train or rearrange your sensible, organised, carefully built life. I'm just telling you who I am so that when you decide, you're deciding with information."

"Deciding what?"

"Whether this ends at checkout. Or whether it starts."

The room is very quiet. The city hums below. Forty floors of glass and steel and a million people sleeping and two of us awake and looking at each other with something building between us that has no business existing after four hours and is absolutely, undeniably, inconveniently real.

"I need to sleep," I say finally.

"Okay."

"I'm not deciding anything at three in the morning."

"Okay."

"Stop being reasonable. It's making it worse."

He laughs. Quiet. Real. The sound of it travels through his chest into mine because we're that close and I feel it settle somewhere warm.

"Go to sleep, Dara," he says.

I close my eyes. His hand stays on the back of my neck. His breath evens out before mine does.

I lie there in the dark and I think about forty minutes on the Overground and a man who can't fold a fitted sheet and the fact that my chest hasn't felt this open in years.

I fall asleep.

I don't dream.

I don't need to.