All Chapters of CHASING HIS DEAD LUNA: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

ARIA’S POVHe pulled back just enough to breathe, his forehead against mine, and I could feel his chest moving, fast and uneven, and the room had gone completely still around us like it was holding its breath too. He circled his tongue over the roof of my mouth as his lips engulfed mine. My hands unconsciously settled around his neck for balance.He was slower this time, deliberate, his hand moving from my face into my hair, and I felt the shift in it, the way it went from something urgent and unplanned into something he was choosing, and it was worse, somehow, the choosing, because it meant he knew exactly what he was doing and was doing it anyway, and I grabbed his shirt with both hands and held on.His mouth was familiar in a way that six years hadn’t touched, the way he kissed, the familiar pressure of it, the way his tongue moved against mine like he was relearning something he’d never actually forgotten, and I felt it everywhere, the warmth of it spreading out from my chest, an

ARIAEli was awake and eating when I walked in, something that looked like soup, and he looked up and said “finally” with the relief of a five year old who has been waiting longer than he should have, I sat on the edge of his bed and felt the tight thing in my chest ease by one degree.“Where were you?” he sounded slightly demanding“Sorting something out.”“You’re always sorting something out.” He went back to his soup with resignation. “Jason said you’d be back soon and that was ages ago.”“It wasn’t ages.”“It felt like ages.” He looked at me sideways. “Are you okay?”I looked at my son, at his face, at the color that had come back into it over the last few days, at the sharpness of his eyes that had always seen more than I wanted them to, and I thought about the consultation room and Adrian’s forehead against mine and the magistrate’s voice saying Saturday like it was nothing, and I smiled and said, “I’m fine, bug.”He looked unconvinced but let it go, which was its own kind of

ARIAThe sound of it was still in the air. My hand was still raised, still warm from the impact, and I stood there and looked at him and waited for something to happen.For the cold to come back or the fury to erupt or something , what I got instead was silence, silence that indicated that he was taking a moment before he decided what to do and how to react.Eli had gone completely still on the bed, his soup forgotten, his eyes moving between us with something in them that was too young to be fear and too serious to be anything else.Adrian turned his head back slowly. He looked at me, and his jaw was tight and the mark of my hand was on his face, and his eyes were not cold, that was the thing, the cold was gone, and what was there instead was something with so much heat in it that I had to stop myself from taking a step back.Some instinct firing, some part of me that recognized what was in his expression and knew exactly what it meant.He was quiet for a long moment. Too quiet.I st

ADRIANI heard her before I saw her. The sound of heels on the corridor floor outside my office, precise and unhurried, and something in my chest registered it before my brain did, some part of me that had spent the last week developing an entirely inconvenient awareness of her familiar rhythm, and I looked down at the file in front of me and told myself to focus.Then the door opened. I looked up because I always looked up when a door opened, it was reflex, it was nothing, and then I looked up and immediately understood that today was going to be considerably more difficult than yesterday.She was in black. Not the torn waitress uniform, not yesterday’s clothes, not any version of Aria I’d seen since she walked back into my life, something different, something fitted and deliberate, a dress that understood exactly what it was doing and had no apologies about it, and her hair was up, and she was wearing red on her mouth, and she smelled—She smelled like something I hadn’t smelled in

ARIAI felt everything at once. His hands on my waist, the heat of his chest against mine, underneath all of that, something that told me very clearly that the anger he’d been carrying all morning was not the only thing happening behind those eyes.I stood there and told myself to say something, to step back, to do literally anything except stand here and feel all of this and do nothing about it. I did nothing about it.He looked down at me, jaw tight, hands tighter, and then he leaned in, slow and deliberate, his mouth near my ear, his voice dropping into something that had nothing professional in it, nothing cold, just heat, just the low register that he only reached when he’d stopped being an asshole entirely.“Who,” he said, “are you talking to like that?”My. breath got caught in my throat.I felt it, the way my whole body reacted to his voice at that volume in that proximity, and I hated that I felt it, hated the warmth spreading from where his hands were and the way my pulse had