CHAPTER 3: The Only Thing I Chose Myself

ARIA POV

I slowly climbed out of my own window hoping that I wouldn’t get caught just the same way a teenager might do.

Not because the front door was locked, because it wasn’t. But heading out through the front door meant passing Silas’s study, and Silas was the kind of man who would look up and ask where I was off to at eleven in the night. Honestly, I just didn’t have the energy in me anymore to explain myself again to someone who already thought he knew everything about me. So instead, I chose the window. I dropped down onto the side lawn and started to walk, my pulse still hammering too fast over something as ridiculous as leaving my own house without permission.

The night city wasn’t mine. It never had been if I’m being for real. I was used to being driven to places, dropped off, picked up, and accounted for. But walking down a sidewalk without anyone tracking me felt wrong in some ways. It was exhilarating and disorienting at the same time. The streetlights illuminated my path, the sound of cabs honking echoed through the dark night air, and a couple near a bar was laughing way too loudly it almost made me wince and shrink back into myself. All of it felt so ordinary and yet so unfamiliar to me that I could have cried from the relief of simply being there. No one had asked where I was going. No one was waiting to decide when I should come back. I was simply just walking because I wanted to.

Eventually, I found myself at a hotel bar. It was warm and noisy, and packed with strangers who had no clue of who I was.

“You look like you’re either celebrating something or about to cry,” a voice came from two stools down. I hadn’t even noticed him sitting there.

“Neither,” I replied. “Maybe both.”

“Great. That’s my favorite category.” He said and signaled to the bartender for another drink, looking relaxed and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world. “I’m not going to ask what you’re feeling.”

“Good. Because I was not feeling like telling you anything.”

“Deal.” He said, almost smiling, but it was more restrained than anything, if there was such a thing as a cautious smile. “Can I move closer, or is two stools the perfect amount of distance for a stranger having a crisis?”

A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it. I hadn’t been expecting that at all. “You can move closer.”

With that, he shifted down one stool. He had dark hair and a jaw that suggested to me that he was used to being in control, but his eyes didn’t seem to measure me the way men often did. He looked at me like I was simply a person, not a problem he needed to solve, and something about that made it easier for me to keep sitting there.

“So,” he said, “what should I call you?”

“Does it even matter?”

Something changed in his expression for a moment. He tilted his glass slightly in my direction, probably thinking it over.

“No,” he finally said. “I don’t think it does.”

He never asked again, and the relief of it loosened something inside me. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I would have put on a mask and lied or simply said my name. Not having to make that choice was its own kind of comfort. For once, I could just sit somewhere without immediately having to explain who I was or where I belonged.

For the next hour, we chatted about nothing particularly serious, nothing that would hold any significance the next day. We exchanged opinions on jazz, his were terrible, mine were worse, and somewhere in the surface level banter we were having m, the bar noise began fading into the background. It became only his voice and the slight space between his knee and mine, a gap neither of us crossed. It stayed there, small enough to be meaningless, except I couldn’t stop noticing it. Every time he shifted, my attention followed before I could help it. And every single time I moved, I became painfully aware of how close he was.

“You keep glancing at the door,” he said quietly at one point. It didn’t sound like an accusation, but more of just an observation.

“Well… It’s a habit.”

“Is somebody waiting for you?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “Nobody’s really ever waiting for me.”

He didn’t say anything in response to that. He just looked at me for a second longer than I would bet strangers usually did, and the silence between us lingered into something else. Not uncomfortable. Just heavier somehow. I suddenly became more aware of the warmth in my cheeks and looked down at my drink instead hoping that my cheeks hadn’t betrayed me by turning woefully pink.

Then he set his glass down and said, “Come upstairs with me.”

My entire body immediately went still. It felt as though some part of me had been waiting all night to hear exactly that, and now that he had said it, I couldn’t pretend otherwise. The thought should have frightened me more than it did. It was dangerous. I barely knew him. And I knew nothing about the man sitting beside me beyond the way he spoke, the way he watched me without pushing, and how much more difficult it had become to ignore the pull that was between us.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I pointed out.

“Well, that’s true. But I know you came in here alone, and you’ve been trying to pretend like you’re not somewhere else in your mind all night.” He said, his voice dropping, not dramatically, but enough that I felt the difference. “I’m not going to ask what you’re running from. Just tell me you want me to stop if that’s what you want.”

My breath caught between my teeth.

No, I didn’t want him to stop. The realization came with such startling clarity that I almost pulled away from it. I hadn’t felt so certain about anything in a long time. Four days from now, my name would be linked to a man I had never met, in a life that had already been shaped by someone else before I had been given the chance to decide what I wanted from it.

But tonight, it was mine. That small, persistent voice inside my head kept trying to remind me that this was dangerous. That I barely knew him. That wanting something didn’t automatically make it wise. I heard it and I clearly understood it. But beneath all of that was something louder. It was the need to have one thing that was entirely mine. One decision no one had ever made for me. One choice I could never be told I had simply accepted because someone else knew better.

I looked at him from the feet up to his head again, and the distance between us suddenly felt different. It’s still there, it’s still small. My body noticed it before I could stop myself, every part of me becoming suddenly and extremely aware of his closeness and the possibility of closing that space.

“No,” I said, my voice coming out firmer than I expected. “Don’t stop.”

He held my gaze for just a moment longer, as if making sure the choice remained mine. He didn’t move toward me, he didn’t assume. He simply waited.

And something about that and the way he was looking at me with so much need in his eyes made my chest tighten.

Then he stood and extended his hand for me to take. I looked at it for a second. The cautious part of me was still there, still whispering that I could walk away. That I could leave this bar and return to the life waiting for me. And honestly, maybe I should have listened. But mistakes were choices too, and I was tired of living a life where everyone else got to decide which choices I was allowed to make. So I placed my hand in his. His fingers closed around mine, warmly and steadily, and for once, the decision didn’t feel like something being taken from me.

He walked us over to the elevator and when the doors opened, we entered together, his hand still wrapped around mine. I could feel the warmth of his palm against mine, and when he stepped closer so someone could pass behind us, my breath caught before I could control it. He didn’t let go.

As the doors slid shut, I caught one last glimpse of the bar receding behind us, all that noise and light fading into a narrow sliver before it disappeared completely.

His grip tightened slightly around my hand as I felt him bending down into my side.

"Tell me to stop," he murmured against my ear, quieter this time, making me turn my head to face him only to see he was already looking at me with hooded eyes and the way his breath fanned against my ear made my stomach knot. "Or don’t say anything at all."