Allison’s POV
Getting Aiden Blackwell off a park bench when he's two-thirds through a bottle of Maker's Mark is not covered in any sober companion manual. There is no section titled what to do when your client confesses to a duck that he stole your notebook and then accidentally calls you by the right pronoun.
"Come on." I held out my hand. "Hotel."
He took it. His fingers were cold, his grip unsteady, and the warmth of his palm sent a current up my arm that I filed under deal with later.
He leaned on me the whole walk back — genuinely drunk, his weight shifting against my shoulder. The silence between us had changed on that bench — not comfortable, but honest.
I got him to his suite. Keycard, door. He made it to the couch and I turned to leave.
"Don't leave." I stopped. My hand was on the door handle and every rational thought was saying go and my feet were not moving.
"Stay with me." His voice was raw and stripped of every performance I'd ever heard. Just a man on a couch asking someone not to leave. "Please. Since you came back into my life I've started feeling alive."
I should have gone. The deal, the secret, the professional boundary that existed for exactly this — a vulnerable client saying things that land like lit matches.
I let go of the handle. Turned around. Looked at him — past the stubble and the whiskey, past the rock star and the thief and the boy who did homework in rich people's kitchens. At the man underneath, hands open on his knees, nothing in his eyes except the terrifying simplicity of wanting someone to stay.
I crossed the room. Sat beside him. Close enough that our knees touched and the warmth of him came through the fabric and into my skin.
He looked at me — raw and wrecked and so open it hurt to hold his gaze. His eyes moved across my face like he was memorizing it, like he was searching for a word and couldn't find one.
"I can't breathe without you." His voice cracked on breathe. "I know what that means. That I'm nothing without the girl whose words I stole, that every song and every stage was just me holding my breath until you walked back into my life —" He stopped. "You're the only real thing I've ever had."
He kissed me. Or I kissed him. His mouth was warm and tasted like whiskey and something that was just him, and his hand came up to my jaw — careful, tentative, terrified of breaking something.
He pulled back. Eyes searching mine — looking for the no, the flinch, the Allison who would have shoved him away three weeks ago.
"Are you okay?" His hand had stilled on my waist.
"Stop asking and touch me." Something shifted in his face — surprise, then a gentleness I didn't know he contained. His hands moved to my waist and I answered by pulling him closer, pressing my mouth against his throat.
What happened next was messy and overwhelming and real. His hands shook on my skin. Mine shook on his. We fumbled with buttons and every point of contact sent sensation through me so intense I couldn't tell if it was pleasure or panic.
He noticed — the tremor, my hands gripping too hard. His bravado dissolved. The rock star vanished, replaced by someone gentle and present in a way that made me want to pull him closer and never let go.
"Hey." His voice, low against my ear. His whole body had gone still. "We can stop."
"If you stop I will end you." I pulled him back down and he laughed — quiet, real, his breath warm on my collarbone.
I'd braced for pain. Every first-time story I'd ever heard, every whispered warning, every clinical description — I'd built a wall of expectation around this moment. But when he moved against me, slow and careful, he stopped. Not pulled away — just stopped, his forehead pressed against mine, his breath ragged, his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still.
"Look at me," he said. I opened my eyes. His were right there — dark and close and completely focused on my face, reading me the way he read lyrics, searching for the line that mattered. "Tell me when."
The stillness between us was the most intimate thing I'd ever felt. His weight above me, his skin against mine, and the patience of a man who was shaking with want and choosing to wait. I breathed. Shifted. Felt my body ease around him, adjust, open — not surrender but decision. My hands found his jaw. I pulled him closer.
"Now." The word came out like a breath I'd been holding since the bench, since the breakfast table.
He moved. Slow at first — a rhythm that was more question than statement, each motion checking, adjusting, finding the angle that made my breath catch for the right reasons. There was no pain. There was pressure and fullness and the strange overwhelming intimacy of being that close to another person, of having nowhere to hide, of feeling his heartbeat against my chest keeping time with mine.
His hand found mine. Fingers interlaced. He pinned it gently above my head and something about that — the tenderness of it, the way he held my hand like we were walking through a park and not pressed together with nothing between us — cracked something open inside my chest.
I gasped and his rhythm shifted, deepened, and the gentleness didn't leave but something else joined it. Heat. Urgency. The sound he made against my neck — low, broken, my name wrapped inside a breath — sent a wave through me that started at the base of my spine and spread outward until my fingers tingled and my toes curled and I was pulling him closer with my legs and my arms and every part of me that could reach him.
"There," I whispered, and I felt him smile against my throat — not a smirk, not performance, just the quiet satisfaction of a man who was paying attention. He stayed there. Found a rhythm that built something inside me I didn't have a name for — a tightening, a rising, a wave that crested so slowly I didn't realize it was happening until it broke.
I arched into him. His arm slid under my back, pulling me against his chest, holding me through it, and when I opened my eyes his were on me — not watching with ego but with wonder, the face of a man seeing something he didn't think he'd earned. He followed a moment later, his whole body going taut, my name again — raw this time, unraveled, the syllables coming apart in his mouth.
After. The quiet that follows something enormous. We lay tangled in sheets, and I cried. Not pain. Not sadness. The tears came from somewhere below language — the part of me that understood what had happened before my brain caught up. I'd let someone in. Through a wall I'd forgotten was there until he walked through it.
He held me. Didn't ask why. Just his arm around my shoulders and his thumb tracing slow circles on my skin and his breathing steady against my hair.
I'm lying to you. The thought arrived like a knife. Every song I slid under your door had a price tag. Otis is paying me to keep you functioning. I'm no better than him.
His thumb kept tracing circles. He was falling asleep — the whiskey and the bench and this, all pulling him under — and I thought: you have to tell him. Soon. Every minute in this bed without telling him is choosing the lie over the man.
His arm tightened around me — a reflex, unconscious. I pressed my face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, the rhythm of a man who'd stopped performing long enough to fall asleep in the arms of a woman he'd destroyed and been destroyed by in the same breath.
I didn't sleep for a long time. The strip pulsed through the window and his heartbeat pulsed against my ear and between those two rhythms I lay counting the cost of what I'd have to say in the morning.