Uncuffed

I was warm.

That was the first thing — a deep, bone-settled warmth, the kind that made me feel held in place even before I was fully conscious. I was wrapped in something solid and certain, and whatever it was smelled good. Clean and slightly woody, with something underneath that I couldn’t name but wanted to. In the soft grey space between sleep and waking, I curled closer instinctively, and the solid thing tightened around me.

Nice, some drowsy part of me thought. Very nice.

And then I became aware of something else. Something hard and insistent pressing against the back of my thigh, unmistakable even through the fog of sleep, and my half-conscious brain filed it under good dream, and I shifted back against it — just slightly, just a slow, sleepy roll of my hips.

His breath caught.

And then his face was against my neck, lips brushing the skin just below my ear — warm and slow and still mostly asleep, like he was following something instinctive — and I made a sound I would spend the rest of the day trying to forget, soft and unguarded, my head tilting to give him more room without my brain having any say in it whatsoever.

His hips pressed forward against me, and I arched into it, and his mouth opened slightly against my neck, a groan low in his throat, rough and unrestrained and completely, devastatingly real —

The cool press of metal against my stomach.

Small. Certain. Undeniable.

My brain came back online all at once. Oh, fuck.

I went completely rigid.

The arm around me was real. The chest at my back was real. The metal at my waist was real, and the warmth between us was real, and the soft grey space of the dream had evaporated entirely, leaving me with the extremely bright, extremely unambiguous reality of a January morning in a room that was not mine, pressed flush against a body that was not — that I did not —

I did not move.

The body behind me had gone still too. Like he had caught up at the same moment I had.

Oh no, I thought.

Oh no oh no oh no.

I became aware, in rapid and merciless succession, of the following: the headache behind my eyes, the fruity ghost of too many cocktails on my tongue, the curtains that were absolutely not my curtains, and the fact that I had apparently, at some point in the last several hours, made a series of choices I could not currently remember or account for.

I took a breath.

The arm at my waist moved — carefully, slowly — and I felt him become aware of the metal too, felt the slight tension that ran through him as he registered it. Neither of us spoke.

“Hi,” he said finally. His voice was rough with sleep and did something entirely unfair to the air in the room.

“Um, hi,” I said back.

I needed to get up.

I started to move — slowly, carefully, attempting to peel myself away from the warmth of him with the last shreds of my dignity — and that was when the chain pulled taut between us. Small. Certain. A foot of black metal links connecting my left wrist to where his right arm was still draped across my waist.

I looked down.

The handcuffs were slim and dark, the kind with a small, solid padlock at the centre, the kind that required an actual key. Not novelty. Not cheap. The kind that absolutely required a locksmith.

I turned over.

He was already looking at me. Dark eyes, dark stubble, jaw that hadn’t seen a razor recently, and an expression that was doing something careful and unreadable — like he was trying very hard to look like a man who had not just groaned into my neck thirty seconds ago. He was objectively, unfairly attractive in the way that some people simply were, and I was immediately, acutely aware of how I must look.

“You’re wearing my shirt,” he said.

I looked down. The shirt was — yes. Definitely his.

“I see that.”

His button-down — dark navy, soft from washing, far too wide in the shoulders — hung open, the fabric falling to either side, and underneath it, my strapless bra and underwear were doing considerably more work than I would have liked. Black lace. Not subtle. My best friend Jess had told me to wear the good ones last night because you never know, Aria, and I had rolled my eyes at the time because I always knew, I planned for everything, I did not leave things to —

I looked up to find his eyes on me.

Not my face. Lower. Moving over me with a slow, unhurried attention that felt almost involuntary, like he was doing it before he’d decided to — the lace, the curve of my waist, the length of my legs — and then his jaw tightened and he looked away, and it didn’t matter because the damage was already done. Heat pooled low in my stomach, immediate and inconvenient, and I pulled the shirt closed with my free hand and told myself it meant nothing.

You don’t even know his name, I reminded myself.

His throat moved as he swallowed.

I looked at the cuffs. I looked at him.

“These aren’t mine,” I said.

“They’re not mine either.”

“Then where —”

“I don’t know.” He sat up, the chain pulling taut between us. We ended up facing each other on the edge of the bed, linked at the wrist, roughly six inches of space between us. He turned the cuffs over, examining them. “The lock looks real. I think we’re going to need a key or a locksmith.”

“We need our phones first.” I looked at the nightstand. Both phones, dead. Of course. “Do you have a charger?”

“Not on me.”

I looked around the room with the automatic sweep of someone who assessed venues for a living. Generic hotel art. Minibar — I counted seven empty minibar bottles lined up on the dresser with a kind of archaeological resignation, like evidence at a scene. My dress on the floor near the bathroom. His shoes — one by the window, one nowhere visible. My bag, hanging from the bathroom door handle.

“My charger should be in my bag,” I said.

Getting the bag required standing, which required coordination. We managed it with the graceless, negotiated shuffling of two people who had not yet established a system, ending up closer than intended somewhere between the bed and the bathroom door, and I got a full hit of that warm, woody smell again — clean skin and something else that was simply him — and I focused very deliberately on the bag.

I found the charger. I plugged my phone in, then his, because it was practical and we both needed phones. Standing that close, I could see the line of his jaw and the way his t-shirt sat across his shoulders, and I looked at the outlet with tremendous focus.

“Thank you,” he said, from approximately four inches away.

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

When I turned, he was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite categorize — taking me in, the shirt and everything the shirt didn’t fully cover, and then back up to my face. Slowly. Like he was trying to remember something. Like maybe he almost could.

“My name is Aria,” I said. “I was at that party last night with my friend, and I genuinely do not remember anything after midnight.”

Something moved across his face. He nodded, just slightly. “Colton. And yeah. After midnight is —” He paused.

“Fuzzy?” I offered.

“Very fuzzy.” His jaw tightened for a moment. “Though I —” He stopped again.

I looked at him. “What?”

He looked at the cuffs. At the shirt. Back at me. “I do remember a few fragments from last night. But I don’t know what’s real and what I’m —” He stopped. Exhaled. “Maybe we should get coffee before we get into it.”

My heart was doing something I blamed entirely on the hangover.

“Coffee,” I said. “And then you tell me everything.”

“Every fragment I have.”

“Deal.” I extended my hand — he looked at it, then at the logistics of it, and reached across with his left. The handshake was lopsided and slightly ridiculous and somehow still felt like an agreement.

We were handcuffed together and shaking hands awkwardly, which should have been absurd. Somehow it felt like the most real thing that had happened since I’d opened my eyes.

Outside, the first day of the new year was already well underway, loud and indifferent.

I had a feeling that whatever had happened last night, the answer was going to be worse than I feared and better than I was prepared for.