The first sensation Verena registered was the cool, silky press of hotel sheets against her bare skin. The next was AJ's arm, warm and heavy across her waist, anchoring her to the center of a moment she hadn't quite stepped out of. She blinked slowly, eyes adjusting to the soft, golden spill of morning light streaming through the massive floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the far wall of the suite. The city beyond glowed under the haze of early sun, glass towers catching the light like steel fire.
It was quiet. Too quiet, maybe—but not in a hollow way. The room felt suspended, like the outside world had paused itself for her to decide what came next.
AJ adjusted a bit in his sleep but he didn’t wake. His breath fanned warm across her skin. She watched the slow rise and fall of his chest against her back, the subtle twitch of dreams still clinging to the corners of his rest. The urge to stay curled against him—to delay thought and consequence just a little longer—was overwhelming. But her mind was already awake. Racing. Rewinding.
Last night had unraveled something inside her. Or maybe revealed was the better word. As if the person she had been hiding beneath "good choices" and "safe promises" had finally exhaled.
Verena slipped from the bed slowly, delicately untangling herself from the nest of limbs and linen without waking him. She moved with the care of someone not wanting to break a spell.
AJ's shirt was draped over the arm of the nearby chair—half-on, half-off from when he'd shrugged out of it between kisses. She pulled it on without thinking, the fabric cool against her skin, the scent of him clinging to it in an almost unbearable way. Earthy. Clean. Intimate.
She crossed the suite barefoot, the morning light warming the hardwood under her feet. Her breath caught as she reached the windows. The view was stunning. Below them, the city stretched endlessly—cars like slow-moving ants, the early sun washing everything in a soft golden wash. Planes skimmed the clouds in the distance, and somewhere far below, someone was probably late for work, spilling coffee, cursing the traffic.
And here she was. Standing in borrowed clothing, skin still carrying the imprint of last night, her heart completely and irreversibly not where it had been the day before.
Coffee. Was the first thing that popped into her head. Once she got the coffee going she took out her sketch book and a charcoal pencil and a regular pencil. Slowly she sank into one of the comfortable plus couches by the window and curled her legs beneath her. The silence was full now—not empty, but weighted. Sacred.
Slowly arms wrapped around her knees, AJ's shirt slipping off one shoulder, and she stared out at the city.
I said yes to James because it made sense. Because it looked and felt right at the moment. Because I wanted to please my mother. But then AJ touched me—and it wasn't about answers. It wasn't about fixing something broken. It was about seeing. About being seen.
The stillness pressed in around her, not suffocating—just present. Her chest rose slowly, her breath syncing with the skyline.
She thought of James. She thought of how small she'd made herself around him. How she'd started apologizing for things that weren't wrong. How love had turned into negotiation, into performance, into… survival.
She had always been careful. Graceful. Strategic.
Last night with AJ hadn't been any of those things. It had been messy and breathless and raw. Sacred. He hadn't worshipped her like an idol—he had worshipped her like a woman. Real. Flawed. Entire. And when it was over—when they were tangled in sheets and silence—he hadn't turned away.
He had held her. Like he meant to keep doing it. She felt him stir again, a rustling behind her. She didn't turn. She wasn't ready to leave this moment yet. Her reflection stared back at her, eyes wide, mouth soft, heart awake.
Behind her, the low hum of the coffee machine finally sputtered into silence, its mechanical sigh signaling the end of its work. The room, high above the restless city, returned to stillness. Verena rose slowly from the chair by the window, her muscles languid from sleep and memory. The morning light spilled across the hotel suite like liquid gold, warming the pale wood floor and catching in the delicate wisps of her hair as she moved.
She crossed the room in AJ's oversized shirt, the hem brushing the tops of her thighs. The scent of him lingered faintly on the fabric—amber, cedar, a trace of last night. It wrapped around her as intimately as his arms had just hours earlier.
The coffee carafe was half-full. She poured herself a mug with careful hands, added a splash of vanilla creamer, then stirred. The scent bloomed into the air—warm, comforting, sweet and sharp all at once. It reminded her of quiet mornings she used to dream of, the kind where no one expected anything from her, where she could just be.
She padded back to the armchair and tucked her legs beneath her as she sat. The cityscape stretched endlessly beyond the glass, but her attention was pulled inward now. She cradled the mug between her palms, took a slow sip, and let the heat fill the hollow behind her sternum.
Then she set the mug gently on the glass coffee table beside her, reached for the sketchbook, and opened it to a fresh page. Her fingers found the pencil like it was instinct, like the graphite itself was an extension of her pulse.
She didn't plan what to draw. She never did—not when it mattered.
Instead, she let herself slip beneath the surface of thought, let her hand move on its own. The pencil danced and scraped against the paper in fluid strokes, some sharp, some soft. She didn't chase perfection. She chased truth. Her truth.
The first sketch was a profile—delicate, almost androgynous. A line for the jaw, a shadow for the mouth. On the next page, a curled hand, fingers half-tensed, as if gripping something invisible. Then a tangle of bedsheets. The corner of a mouth. A city skyline distorted as though seen through tears.
Page after page, image after image poured from her like breath—nothing coherent, nothing connected. Yet every line held something sacred: the echo of a touch, the weight of silence, the stretch of time between two heartbeats. Then she found herself drawing his eyes. She hadn't meant to.
It started as a shape. A crease. The curve of a brow. But as her pencil moved with more certainty, she realized who they belonged to.
AJ.
She focused in—subtle shadows beneath the lids, the thickness of his lashes, the faint edge of the crinkle near the corners when he smiled. But it was the gaze that caught her. That haunted her. Eyes not wide with hunger or desire, but heavy with the kind of tenderness that stripped her bare. She spent the most time on that sketch. Layering detail. Adjusting contrast. Capturing the light, the depth. As if drawing them allowed her to hold the moment a little longer, to reach back into the night and keep part of it with her.
When she finally stopped, she stared down at the page, her pencil hovering just above the lower lid.
It was him. Unmistakably him.
But more than that—it was her reflection in him. The way he had looked at her as though she wasn't just beautiful, but real. Like he saw every fractured piece and wanted to trace each one with reverence, not fix it.
Verena exhaled.
Her hand lowered. The pencil rolled from her fingers to the edge of the sketchbook. She curled one knee tighter against her chest and leaned her cheek against it, just… looking. She didn't know how long she sat there, studying the drawing. The quiet was unbroken except for the distant murmur of the city outside and the occasional drip of condensation from the windows.
Eventually, her eyes fluttered shut. Not from exhaustion, but saturation. Emotion brimming too full inside her chest to do anything else.
The drawing remained open on her lap—AJ's gaze forever caught in graphite.
Watching her. Seeing her. Loving her without saying the word.
And in this quiet place, wrapped in a hotel morning, warm coffee, and the memory of skin on skin, Verena didn't run from it. She let herself be seen.
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