I’d made my world small on purpose. Orderly and quiet and under control. I’d shrunk it down until I was the all-knowing center of my private universe.
Then Aria had burst in and made my world so much bigger than myself. The more out of my control things got, the more scared it made me. Every step of the way, I’d tried to put limits on my feelings for her - tried to force them back into my tiny little world where things made sense.
But Aria was bigger than anything I could imagine. There was no limit to what I felt for her. She was now the center of my universe, and because of that it was infinite.
She was beyond my control.
And I surrendered.
Happily.
Forever.
In my haste to get back home from Jesse’s, I nearly ended up in a ditch. Which might have been poetic if it wasn’t so stupid.
I let my foot off the accelerator, gritting my teeth.
But when I finally, finally arrived home, it was to discover the great house was dark. Her shitty little hatchback was gone from its spot in the drive, the first time I’d seen that spot empty since the day she’d slapped me on the lawn.
She was gone.
I gripped the steering wheel and tried to hold off the rising panic. Okay. She was gone. But that didn’t mean she was lost to me forever. I knew Aria. I knew where she might go - to her parents or maybe to Xavier’s, or, and this would be weird, to Cole’s - and how long she’d be gone.
She’d be back.
I believed this the entire time it took me to clean up the carriage house. I wiped down the counters and made sure her favorite mug had a place of honor. I pre-mixed a batch of homemade cocoa in case she wanted to warm herself by the wood stove while I ran down the list of apologies I owed her and promises I’d keep.
It was nearing the solstice, so as the sun slipped lower, I told myself that it didn’t matter. Maybe wherever she was, she’d decided to stay for dinner.
It wasn’t like she was far away.
It wasn’t like she’d left forever.
I fixed myself a plate of food. I’d done that so many times before, but tonight, the solitary action seemed suffocating. I kept staring out the window. My hand went to my phone a million times, the need to call her and make sure she was okay, make sure she wasn’t doing something out of control, something rash… like leaving me forever….
“Fuck,” I growled at my reflection in the dark window.
A bearded stranger stared back at me. A full day of worrying and trying to keep busy was all my beard needed to assert itself. Where I’d once kept a nicely trimmed scruff was now a cloudy tangle that obscured my jawline.
I was turning back into a mountain man recluse every second I went without her.
“Dammit.” I turned away from the window and forced myself into the bathroom, where I attacked the impending beard with a bit too much zeal. Nicking myself in the cheek, I swore, and dragged the razor over my skin, leaving a line of paleness in its wake.
“Shit.” I glared at my reflection. There was no saving it.
The beard had to go,
The last time my cheeks were naked, I was sixteen years old. As I shaved off the beard, I felt like an archaeologist uncovering an artifact, layer by careful layer, exposing something underneath it all that hadn’t seen the light of day in centuries.
I faced the mirror a brand new man.
A bewildered, broken-hearted man.
Where was Aria?
I sat down at my computer. It would be a matter of a few keystrokes to track her down. Her phone was unlocked, I realized that when I’d put up the firewalls to keep her safe. She wasn’t trackable inside the perimeter I’d thrown up, but if she was outside of it?
I leaned forward, brushing my fingers up and down the keys to make them rattle.
Did it matter that I was interfering out of concern?
I leaned back and deliberately set my hands in my lap. No. She had a right to live her own live without me trying to intervene and make it better.
It never worked out for the better when I did stuff like that.
I reached for my phone instead.
My finger hovered over her name - Baby Girl - in my contacts list. I wished like hell I had someone - my brother, Jesse, hell, Nick Butler might even have an opinion to share with me about the right course of action, though I’d be sure to do the exact opposite of whatever he said.
Sometimes solitude is a real bitch.
Especially when you’re looking for advice on how not to hold too tightly to the best thing that ever happened to you.