Chapter 10: The Morning Confession
The shirt smelled of him—of sweat, and musk, and the faint, clean scent of his laundry detergent. Catriona pulled the collar up to her nose, inhaling deeply as she sat at the chipped kitchen table. The fluorescent tube overhead buzzed, flickering in a syncopated rhythm with the rain tap-tapping against the window. The world outside was a watercolor blur of grey and green.
Aidan stood at the counter, his back to her, pouring coffee. The muscles in his shoulders moved under his grey t-shirt. The normalcy of the gesture felt like a performance.
She watched the rain slide down the pane. “Last night,” she began, and her voice came out scraped raw. She cleared her throat, tried again. “After you fell asleep. I just lay there. Thinking.”
He turned, leaning his hips against the counter, cradling his mug. He didn’t speak. Just waited. His expression was neutral, but his eyes were watchful.
“I’ve spent my whole life in my head,” she said, tracing a finger through a ring of condensation on the table. “Everything was a story. A fantasy. A what-if. Even my… desires. They were plots. Character motivations.” She looked up, meeting his gaze. The flickering light cast jagged shadows under his cheekbones. “Last night, when you were… afterwards, with the… the aftercare. It wasn’t a story anymore. It was just feeling. And for the first time, I didn’t feel like a librarian playing a role. I felt like a person. A real, alive person.”
She saw his throat work as he swallowed.
“That’s the problem,” she whispered. The confession hung in the air, thicker than the smell of burnt toast from the forgotten slice in the toaster. “I felt alive because of you. Not just because of what you were doing. Because it was you doing it.”
Aidan pushed off the counter and walked to the table. He didn’t sit. He stood over her, a looming, solid presence. He set his coffee down with a soft click.
“Cat,” he said, his voice low. “You know I feel the same.”
The words should have been a balm. Instead, they felt like a verdict.
“But?” she prompted, her heart a cold, hard knot in her chest.
“But Dave’s train gets in at seven tonight.” He said it flatly, a simple statement of fact that dismantled everything. “He’ll be buzzing the intercom, lugging his bag of laundry up the stairs, shouting about his mum’s cooking.” He ran a hand through his hair. “He’ll want a pint. He’ll want to know what we got up to. He’ll sling his arm around my shoulders and call you ‘our Cat’ and it’ll feel like fucking treason.”
The word, ‘treason,’ was deliberate. It named the thing between them.
“So what is this, then?” Catriona asked, pulling his shirt tighter around her. “A scheduled transgression? Your Wednesday night filthy hobby?”
“Don’t,” he warned, a flash of anger in his eyes. It wasn’t directed at her, but at the situation, at himself. “You know it’s not that.”
“Do I? You agreed to a game. A safe, dirty game. I’m the one who’s gone and muddied the waters by catching feelings.” She gave a brittle, hollow laugh. “Classic me. Can’t even have a straightforward deviant arrangement without romanticizing it.”
He finally sat, the chair groaning under his weight. He reached across the sticky table and took her hand. His grip was warm, calloused, absolute. “It’s not just you. I’m in it, too. Up to my neck. I look at you, in my shirt, at this table, and I don’t just want to fuck you again—though Christ, I do. I want to know what you’re reading. I want to hear you complain about the library budget. I want to make you tea and tell you to go back to bed.”
The domesticity of the image was more devastating than any erotic promise.
“Then what are we doing?” Her question was a plea.
“We’re trying not to destroy a good man who trusts us,” Aidan said, his thumb stroking her knuckles. “And we’re trying not to destroy each other in the process. This thing between us… it’s a fucking pressure cooker. We can either turn the heat off, pretend it never happened, go back to how we were.”
“Could you?” she interrupted, searching his face. “Could you really go back to just being my roommate, after… after what we did?”
He was silent for a long moment. The rain pattered. The light buzzed.
“No,” he admitted, the word a surrender. “No, I couldn’t. Which leaves option two. We keep going. We navigate it. We set more rules. Rules for the heart, not just the body. And we accept that we’re probably going to hurt everyone, including ourselves.”
The kitchen felt suddenly too small, the walls pressing in. The half-empty whiskey bottle on the counter gleamed like an artifact from a simpler, colder time.
“What would the rules be?” she asked, her voice small.
“I don’t know yet.” He sighed, a deep, weary sound. “No secrets between us, ever. That’s one. We check in. We talk, even when it’s ugly. And we decide, together, what to do about Dave. We don’t just let it fester. We make a plan.”
“A plan to break his heart.”
“A plan to be honest,” Aidan corrected, though his expression was pained. “Sooner or later.”
The weight of it settled over them. Catriona imagined Dave’s open, friendly face collapsing. She imagined the quiet of the flat without his booming laugh. The guilt was a physical nausea.
Aidan’s phone buzzed on the counter, skittering against the Formica. They both froze. He didn’t move to get it.
“That might be him,” Catriona said.
“I know.”
The buzzing stopped. A second later, a notification tone chimed—a message. The silence that followed was heavier than before, loaded with the future now knocking at the door.
Aidan stood up, but he didn’t go to his phone. He came around the table and knelt beside her chair. He looked up at her, his face level with hers. In the unflinching fluorescent glare, he looked older, stripped bare.
“However this goes,” he said, holding her gaze, “you are not my dirty secret. You are not a hobby. You’re the complication I walked into with my eyes wide open. Okay?”
She nodded, unable to speak. He leaned in and kissed her, not with the fever of the night before, but with a slow, desperate certainty that felt like a promise and a goodbye all at once.
When he pulled away, he rested his forehead against hers. “Go get dressed,” he murmured. “I’ll check the message. And then… we’ll figure out the next hour. Just the next hour.”
She stood, the shirt falling around her thighs. As she walked back toward the bedroom, the reality of the flat—Dave’s muddy trainers by the door, the shared television, the roster on the fridge—seemed to mock her. They had crossed a line into a new country, and there was no map, only the uneasy truce they had just forged in the flickering light of the kitchen, with the rain coming down and the clock ticking relentlessly toward seven.