CHAPTER FIVE

ARIA’s POV

The first thing I noticed was the dead silence. The second was the pounding headache threatening to split my skull into two.

I squeezed my eyes shut and buried my face deeper into the pillow. Bad idea.

The unfamiliar scent hit me immediately. Cedar, warm and masculine.

My eyes snapped open. I stared at the cream-colored ceiling above me. For a few seconds, my mind was completely blank. Then memories rushed back so fast that I sat upright.

The bar, the whiskey, the stranger that caught me when I nearly fell…his dark eyes, his finely built body, how I rushed at his cock when his towel fell, how he fucked me till I had burning sensation around my inner muscles.

My heart nearly stopped functioning.

I looked beside me and the other side of the bed was empty. The sheets were crumpled, but there was no sign of him.

No sign that the man who had occupied this bed with me a few hours ago had ever existed.

Then I threw the duvet aside and climbed out of bed. The room looked exactly as I remembered it. My handbag was still on the couch I left it on, my dress had been folded beside it. I stared at it. I knew I certainly hadn’t folded it.

I glanced around the suite again.

“Hello?”

My voice sounded small but there was no response.

I walked toward the bathroom, it was empty as well.

I checked the sitting area to see if there was a note or anything of such, but there was nothing there.

My mind slipped back into last night again. I stood in the middle of the expensive hotel suite and pressed both palms against my face.

“Oh my God. I slept with a total stranger.” I muffled the words out.

A man whose name I don’t even know, whose face I may not even recognize if I saw him again. And now he was gone. Just like that.

I lowered my hands and let out a shaky laugh. Of course he was gone. What exactly had I expected?

Breakfast in bed? Or a love confession?

“You’ve officially lost your mind, Aria.” I said and let out a hysterical laugh again.

I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was eight forty-two.

I walked toward my handbag and searched through it for my phone. I had thirty-six missed calls and twelve text messages when I checked the phone.

Almost all were from Charles, a few from Kara. Then, one from an unknown number.

I ignored Charles and Kara’s messages and opened the unknown message.

Where are you? You didn’t come back last night. Call me. Nina

Relief swept over me.

Nina was my coursemate and one of the few people I spoke to occasionally outside Kara and Charles. A friend of hers was having a birthday party and Nina had invited me over, and convinced me that it would be fun.

It was part of the gist I had planned to tell Kara and even ask her if we could go together, not knowing I was the clown in my own relationship.

I checked the time again and looked toward the door one last time.

The stranger wasn’t coming back.

A mixture of embarrassment and disappointment made my stomach lurched in disgust.

I later settled with the realization that last night had actually happened and it cannot be revert.

I glanced at the folded dress again and my eyes caught something sitting on the table beside the television. I walked closer and found out it was a wristwatch.

I remembered it, it was the same wristwatch on the stranger’s wrist. I had noticed that while assessing him as a whole last night.

I picked it up, it was a silver wristwatch. Heavy and definitely expensive.

I stared at it. No ordinary university student could afford to own a watch like this.

I turned it over. Engraved at the back were five words.

To Xavier. Always choose yourself.

I blinked twice

Xavier. So, that was his name.

I repeated the name more than thrice, it sent a sort of strange warmth in me before common sense slammed into me again.

“What are you doing Aria?” I asked myself and placed the watch down on the table.

He had only forgotten it. He wasn’t some mysterious prince, neither does he has the answers to my problems.

I changed into my clothes, found my shoes beside the luggage rack, exactly where I had placed them. I splashed water on my face at the bathroom sink, looked at myself briefly in the mirror, until I decided not to look any longer. I brushed my fingers through my tangled hair, picked up my bag from the couch, straightened my dress, grabbed the wristwatch from the table and threw it into my bag. Then, I left the suite with the key card on the nightstand.

My body protested against every movement as I walked. I stopped at the bar downstairs, the bartender that was there last night had closed on his shift. I dropped the wristwatch for the new bartender I saw there and gave him a brief description of the room the watch was forgotten in, incase the stranger I now know his name as Xavier came back for it. Then, I walked out of the bar and headed home — Should I call it home? I headed to the apartment I shared with Kara.

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The apartment door was unlocked when I arrived. My spare keys that I left in the door lock were now on the table.

I stood in the doorway for a moment before stepping inside. The sitting room looked different… not damaged, but stripped. The throw blanket Kara kept folded over the arm of the couch was gone. The row of her shoes that permanently lined the wall near the entrance had disappeared. The three framed photographs she had put up above the television were gone too, leaving pale rectangular outlines on the wall where they had hung.

I walked over to the bedroom door and pushed it open. The wardrobe stood open and empty. The dresser had been cleared. The bed was made with the impersonal neatness of someone who wanted to leave with no trace to return.

The message sank into me violently. Kara was gone. Every last piece of her had been cleared out.

I stood in the middle of the empty room for a long time and didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.

I had expected confrontation. I had brazen up for it on the entire walk from the hotel. I had rehearsed versions of what I would say, how I would hold myself, whether I would shout or stay cold. I had prepared for Kara’s face wearing that particular expression she used when she needed to rewrite a situation in her own favor.

What I had not prepared for was finding the room empty like this. No explanation, she just vanished.

I walked back to the sitting room, sat on the couch and stared at the blank wall for a very long time.

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Three weeks had passed since the whole fallout with Kara and Charles. Life had moved forward the way it always did.

I put my pains behind me and attended lectures with the mechanical commitment of someone going through motions they hadn’t fully returned to yet. I picked up part-time shifts at a café down the street to keep myself busy. I stopped checking my phone for messages from numbers I no longer wanted to hear from.

Charles had reached out twice but I declined both calls without opening the messages he sent afterward. There was nothing he could say that would rearrange what I had seen, and I had neither the energy nor the interest in giving him the audience he needed to feel better about himself.

Kara didn’t reach out at all, I was bothered at first but I stopped being.

The stranger from the hotel had faded to the edges of my memory the way dreams do. It was just a one night fling, nothing more was attached to it.

Until the morning I sat on the cold tile floor of the university bathroom with a pregnancy test in both hands, staring at two lines that had no interest in being ambiguous about what they meant.

I read the instructions on the pregnancy test kit again and turned it over, my heart sank. I pressed my back against the wall and pulled my knees to my chest.

I was pregnant. And the father was a man whose name I don’t fully know in a city of thousands of people with the same first name.