Chapter 12: Diane's Interrogation
The morning light felt like an accusation. It was too bright, too clear, revealing every dust mote spinning in the air, every paint smudge on Catriona’s thumb, every unreadable emotion on Diane’s face as she set her mug down with a definitive clink.
Aidan’s confession hung in the air, thicker than the steam from the coffee pot.
“A goddess, huh?” Diane finally said, her voice low. She wasn’t looking at Aidan anymore. She was looking at Catriona, who had stopped hiding behind her mug. A faint blush painted the freckles on her cheeks, but she held Diane’s gaze, a challenge in her green eyes.
“It was a weird morning,” Catriona shrugged, but the shrug was too deliberate. A performance of nonchalance. “Foggy brain. Naked. You know.”
“I don’t, actually,” Diane said, a slow smile touching her lips. She leaned back into the velvet couch, her body language opening up, claiming space. “Waking up tangled with a near-stranger who’s already hard for you? That’s a specific kind of weird.”
Aidan felt a fresh heat crawl up his neck. He busied himself with pouring more coffee, but his hands weren’t entirely steady. The memory was visceral now, summoned by his own words: the weight of her, the shocking softness of her skin under his palm, the instinctive, half-asleep way his body had responded to her presence.
“It was innocent,” he said, the statement sounding feeble even to him.
“Was it?” Catriona asked softly. She wasn’t teasing anymore. She was genuinely curious. She drew her knees up to her chest on the armchair, the movement pulling her threadbare t-shirt tight across her breasts. “I mean, you said you were caressing me. All night.”
Silence stretched, punctuated by the distant growl of a city bus. The wilting orchid on the cluttered table seemed to lean in, listening.
Diane watched them, her dark eyes missing nothing. She saw the way Aidan’s knuckles were white on the coffee pot handle. She saw the pulse jump in Catriona’s throat. The tension in the sun-drenched room wasn’t awkward anymore. It was a live wire, humming.
“Last night wasn’t innocent,” Diane stated, a simple fact. “And we’re all sitting here, drinking coffee, pretending this is a normal Tuesday.”
“What’s normal?” Catriona fired back, but there was no bite to it.
“This isn’t.” Diane gestured vaguely between the three of them. “You told that story for a reason, Cat. You wanted to see his face when he said it out loud. You wanted me to hear it.”
Catriona didn’t deny it. She bit her lower lip, a flash of uncertainty breaking through her confidence. She looked to Aidan, a silent question there.
He finally sat, the old wooden chair creaking under his weight. The scent of turpentine from her canvases was sharp in his nose. He met her look, then Diane’s. The laid-back part of him wanted to crack a joke, to deflect, to smooth everything over into comfortable ambiguity.
But the memory of the night before was a brand on his nerves. Diane’s taste. Catriona’s cries. The feel of their hands joined over his heart.
“No,” he said, his voice quieter than he intended. “It’s not normal. I don’t know what it is.”
The honesty disarmed them. Diane’s challenging posture softened a fraction. Catriona uncurled slightly, her feet finding the floor again.
“Good,” Diane said. “A little terror is healthy.” She stood up suddenly, a swift, graceful motion. She walked to the window, pushing the sheer curtain aside. The sunlight haloed her messy dark hair. “I have to be at the gallery in an hour.”
The statement was like a pinprick, a reminder of a world outside this paint-scented bubble. A world of appointments and separate lives.
Catriona looked abruptly bereft. “Right. Yeah.”
Diane turned back to them. She didn’t move from the window. “You two have today off?”
Aidan nodded. “I’m remote today. Just data analysis.”
“I’m between commissions,” Catriona said.
Diane’s smile returned, but it was different now. Softer, more intimate. “Then you should go back to bed.” She let the curtain fall, plunging her face into shadow for a moment. “Finish the story you started that morning. Without the sleepwalking. Without me.”
The air left Aidan’s lungs. Catriona went perfectly still.
Diane walked toward the door, collecting her leather jacket from the back of the couch. She slipped it on, taking her time. When she reached the door, she paused, her hand on the knob. She looked back, her gaze travelling from Aidan to Catriona, a painter assessing a composition she’d arranged.
“Tell me how it ends,” she said, and then she was gone. The click of the latch was deafening.
For a full minute, neither of them moved. The coffee cooled in their mugs. The golden light tracked slowly across the floorboards, illuminating a discarded sketch of a starry-eyed fox.
Catriona was the first to break. She stood up, her movements slow, deliberate. She didn’t speak. She walked over to Aidan’s chair and simply held out her hand.
He looked at it, at the smudges of ink and paint he knew so well now. He took it. Her grip was firm, warm. She pulled him to his feet and led him silently out of the living room, down the short hall, into his bedroom. It was neater than hers, dominated by his large monitor and a framed print of the Pillars of Creation.
She let go of his hand and closed the door. The morning light here was muted, filtered through a blinds. Quiet pressed in.
“She’s right,” Catriona said, her back against the door. “This is terrifying.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted her to leave.” The admission was a whisper. “I wanted her to give the instruction so I could do this without feeling like I was stealing something from her.” She pushed away from the door, crossing the space between them. She stopped inches away, her bright eyes searching his. “And I really, really want to do this.”
Her hands came up, framing his face. Her thumbs brushed his cheekbones. This kiss was nothing like the hungry, whiskey-fueled collisions of the night before. It was slow. A conscious beginning. A tasting.
Aidan’s hands settled on her hips, pulling her against him. The feel of her, even through clothes, was an electric shock of recognition. His body remembered hers intimately. He walked her backward until her legs hit the edge of his bed.
She broke the kiss, breathing unevenly. “Show me,” she said, her voice husky. “Show me what that morning would have been like if I’d been awake.”
He understood. He peeled her t-shirt over her head, revealing the familiar tattoos, the swell of her breasts in a simple cotton bra. He pushed her gently down onto the mattress and followed, his weight settling over her. He kissed her again, deeper, while his hands rediscovered the landscape of her—the curve of her waist, the dip of her navel, the rough denim of her shorts.
He took his time. He mapped her with a reverence that hadn’t been possible in the chaotic synergy of three. He learned the little gasp she made when he bit her earlobe, the way her back arched when he finally unhooked her bra and took a nipple into his mouth. He was hard, painfully so, but he ignored the urgency, focusing on the flush spreading across her chest, the way her fingers clutched at his shoulders.
When he finally tugged her shorts and underwear down her legs, she helped him, kicking them off. She lay bare before him in the muted light, gloriously real. No sleepwalking fugue. Her eyes were wide open, watching him watch her.
“You are a goddess,” he murmured, the words leaving him before he could think.
She reached for him, pulling his shirt off, her hands skating over the muscles of his back. She fumbled with the button of his jeans, her urgency finally breaking through his deliberate pace. When she freed him, her breath hitched. Her hand wrapped around him, not leading, just feeling. Remembering. “Jesus, Aidan.”
He nudged her legs apart and sank into her in one long, continuous stroke.
The sound she made was pure, unfiltered pleasure, her head pressing back into the pillow. He stilled, buried to the hilt, letting them both adjust to the shocking, perfect fullness. It was different. Deeper, somehow. A conversation with no audience.
He began to move, and she met him thrust for thrust, her hips rolling, her legs locking around his back. There were no witty remarks, no playful commands. Just gasps, and the soft, wet sound of their joining, and the creak of the bedsprings. Her eyes never left his. He watched the pleasure build in her, saw the moment it tipped from manageable to overwhelming. Her mouth fell open, a silent cry, and her body clenched around him in rhythmic waves so intense he had to grit his teeth to keep from following her over.
When the last tremor passed, she went boneless beneath him, her skin slick with sweat. He was still hovering on the edge. She must have seen it in his face. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a deep, claiming kiss.
“Now,” she whispered against his mouth. “Come on.”
He let go. His climax was a silent, shattering release, a whiteout that stripped him down to raw sensation. He collapsed onto her, his face buried in the fiery silk of her hair, breathing her in—lavender and turpentine and sex.
Time bled away. The sunbeam had moved from the floor to the wall when he finally shifted his weight, rolling to his side but keeping her anchored against him. Her hand lay on his chest, right over his heart.
“So,” she said, her voice raspy. “That’s how it ends.”
“No,” he said, pressing a kiss to her temple. His mind was quiet, clear. The terror was still there, but it had solidified into something else. A decision. “That’s not the end. That’s the first page we actually read.”
She tilted her head up to look at him. A slow, real smile spread across her face, brighter than the morning sun. She didn’t ask what he meant. She knew.
Down the hall, in the sun-drenched living room, her phone buzzed on the cluttered coffee table. A single text from Diane lit up the screen.
Well?