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“Yeah?”
His eager tone catches me off guard, and when I look up, I notice his expression matches his voice. My brain is grasping at it like a straw. I have to forcibly tell it to shut up and sit down.
“I just... I’m sorry. If I made you uncomfortable. I don’t want things to be weird between us.”
“Oh.” He nods slowly, that eager look fizzling out. “Right. No. You didn’t.”
“I think I just made a lot of assumptions that were silly,” I say, trying to make it into a joke.
“Silly,” he parrots, not sounding amused at all.
He doesn’t make anything easy.
“Of course you were just being nice, and I read it wrong. I just don’t want you to think I can’t do my job or something because I thought you might be serious.”
He doesn’t say anything, and when I peek up at him, I notice his expression now almost looks pained. I must be making this worse. He looks like he wants to die right now.
I clear my throat, making a move to step away so I can escape to my bedroom and think up different ways to pass away. “Anyway, I guess I’d better—”
Suddenly, Aiden has his hand around my upper arm, notsqueezing exactly, but applying enough pressure to let me know he would like me to stay put. I glance down at his hand in confusion, then back up at him to find him still staring at the spot I’d just stepped away from, looking just as confused that he reached for me as I am.
“Aiden?”
“It’s not,” he says tightly, still not looking at me.
My brow knits. “What?”
“Silly,” he says. “It’s not silly.”
My heart starts to race. I tell myself not to hope, not to read too much into this, every instance of doing so thus far has left me disappointed.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Aiden shakes his head. “I’m not sure I do either.”
“You have to give me more than that,” I say, frustrated. “You’re being confusing.”
Aiden laughs, but it’s strange. “Ifeelconfused around you.”
“What? What does that even—”
“Because I shouldn’t be thinking about you as much as I do.”
All the air leaves my lungs in a rush. “What?”
Aiden looks right at me then, and even in the dark I can make out the hunger in his eyes. It’s enough to take my breath away. “And I shouldn’t be thinking about you thewaythat I do.”
I know in this small space there’s no way he misses the way I swallow. “Aiden, I—”
“You don’t have to say anything,” he sighs. “You probably shouldn’t. I know that I’m overstepping. It’s just... I feel like I’m going crazy. I’m starting to think this entire arrangement was a bad idea, but Sophie just loves you so much, and I can’t be the reason to fuck all of that up with the way I can’t seem to stop—”
I’m not sure if it’s the darkness or the way he’s slipping into this word-vomit-like speech that is a stark contrast to his usuallycollected self, but he doesn’t notice when I pull away from his grip, when I step just close enough to bridge the short distance between us. His words die on his tongue as he looks down at me, and I can just make out his eyes, one bright and one dark and both fixed on me. I can still feel my heart beating a tattoo against my ribs, still hear the blood pulsing in my ears as I question myself, even now, but something about the way Aiden is looking at me gives me courage.
“And what if”—I swallow thickly, my gaze dipping from his mouth back up to his eyes—“I don’t want you to stop?”
I hear his quiet gasp. “What?”
“Who says that you’re the only one? What if I’ve been thinking about you too?”
