All Chapters of SHE WAS NEVER HIS MISTRESS : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

ARIA'S POVI made tea at 2 AM and sat with it until it went cold.I didn't try to sleep after the first hour of lying in the dark staring at the ceiling with my brain running around with feelings that needed to be sorted. I sat at the table with the cold tea and laid it all out like canvases. That was how I'd learned to think through hard things, in the studio, each piece separate, each one getting its own wall in my head before I looked at the whole arrangement.Number one, he knew before he ever met me. That was a fact. He'd confirmed it with a yes that had taken nothing away from him and everything from the thing I thought we'd been from the beginning.Number two, he'd planned the meeting. He designed and manipulated things to get close to me.Number three, he said him falling in love with me was real. That by the third week it had stopped being about Flynn and become about me.I actually believed him.That was the thing I kept arriving at when I laid it out like this. I believed

ARIA'S POV I chose the location deliberately. I sat with myself for a week before I called him. For one week, I kept taking the ring off while I showered, then putting it back on because I hadn’t made a decision yet. Putting it away for good felt like too big a choice. I chose to meet him at the coffee shop on Morrison. The one where it all started. Not because I wanted to be cruel but because I needed somewhere with an exit that belonged to neither of us and because I needed, for this conversation, to be able to see the door from wherever I sat. He was already there when I arrived. I saw him through the window before I went in. He was sitting near the window with his jacket on, hands around a cup he hadn't touched the contents in. He'd chosen a different table from the one where we'd first talked. A different one, it was smaller and closer to the center of the room. I noticed this. I didn't know what to do with it but I went in anyway. He stood up hastingly when he saw me but

Aria's POV I was up before the sun decided what it wanted to be. I didn't wait for motivation. I had stopped waiting for motivation sometime around month four of this year, when I figured out that motivation was a guest that showed up whenever it felt like it and left without saying goodbye. The body needed instruction. That was the whole thing. So I gave myself one: *go to the studio, pick up the brush, and make something.* I was standing in front of the large canvas by six. It had been building this piece for two weeks. I could feel the weight of it every time I walked into the studio, the way it sat there asking me a question I hadn't been able to answer yet. I'd been circling it, adding small things at the edges and letting the centre stay empty because the centre wasn't ready. This morning I decided the centre was ready. I mixed colour with the kind of care that felt almost ceremonial. Burnt sienna warming into something closer to rust and little raw umber to pull it

Aria's POV The bar on Hawthorne has no memory of me.After looking at it for a while, I go in.I have walked past it a hundred times and never once stepped through the door and that is exactly the qualification it meets tonight. No version of myself I have to maintain inside it. No associations or corner booths where anyone knows me. Just dark wood, low lighting and the particular mercy of a room full of people who are all separately minding their own business.I take a stool at the bar and order a whiskey sour.The bartender makes it without asking anything. I appreciate this more than I can explain. I wrap both hands around the glass and take the first sip and let the taste of it sit on my tongue. My mother's drink. I don't know why I ordered it tonight except that I want to be inside someone else's history for a little while. Someone who is not me. The bar does its evening thing around me. Conversations I can hear without understanding. A couple arguing quietly near the window, t

FLYNN’S POV The first thing I register is the ceiling.I stare at it for three full seconds before the rest of it assembles. The sheets, the dark, the particular silence of a room that is not my apartment.I look down at myself.“Oh shit”.I scrub a hand over my face and reach for my phone on the nightstand. 5:04 AM. The room is the grey colour of very early morning, the kind of light that shows you just enough. I swing my legs to the side of the bed I sit up slowly and the night comes back in pieces, the bar, the scotch, the rain outside and the woman. I remember her body the way you remember something that surprises you, completely, every detail. I drag a hand down my face and exhale.I turn to look at her.And the bottom drops out of everything.She is lying on her side facing me, red hair across the pillow, lips slightly parted, one hand curled under her cheek. Asleep like she was in total surrender, her whole body just done. “Oh No” I whispered. The recognition doesn't cree