CHAPTER 80: STAY

The silence afterward was suffocating. The kind of silence that didn’t come with peace or satisfaction—just weight. Heavy. Ugly. Filled with things unsaid, regret curling like smoke under Adrian’s skin, tightening around his throat.

He sat at the edge of the couch now, shirt half-buttoned, hair a mess, staring down at his hands as if they might offer answers for how the hell he ended up here. His reflection flickered faintly in the blank TV screen across from him—a distorted version of himself, blurred, distant, unfamiliar.

Clara curled into herself beside him, an oversized sweater swallowing her up, mascara smudged to gray shadows beneath her eyes, lips red from the bruising scrape of desperate kisses. Her bare legs were pulled to her chest, thin arms wrapped tightly around them like she was trying to make herself smaller, to disappear entirely.

But she wasn’t disappearing—not yet.

Adrian could still feel the imprint of her against his skin, the phantom echo of her nails dragging down his back, her mouth at his throat, the tears, the shaking. All of it. All of her.

She looked like a porcelain doll dropped too many times.

And he hated that this felt familiar.

Clara always cried afterward.

That’s how it was with them. Lust, desperation, colliding needs—and then her tears. Over and over again. Each time, Adrian told himself it would be the last, that he wouldn’t let himself fall into the wreckage of her gravity again. But the truth was brutal and simple: he was weak where she was concerned.

He should’ve known better.

But he didn’t move.

Not yet.

Clara sniffed softly beside him, curling her arms tighter around her middle. Her hand drifted almost unconsciously to her stomach, fingertips brushing her flat abdomen, that same protective gesture she’d been using all night. That tiny, damning gesture made Adrian’s stomach twist violently.

The baby.

His.

Is it mine?

God.

What the hell had he done?

A broken, hollow laugh escaped Clara’s lips, brittle and raw. "I’m sorry," she whispered, wiping uselessly at her smeared makeup. "I know you didn’t want this... any of it. I just..." Her voice cracked, splitting under the weight of her guilt—or what she wanted him to believe was guilt.

"I didn’t know who else to call. You’re all I have, Adrian."

His teeth clenched. His fingers curled into fists.

Don’t fall for this again.

But when he looked at her—really looked at her—all he could see was the ghost of the girl who used to fall asleep in his lap after too many glasses of wine, whispering her insecurities like secrets too heavy to carry alone. That girl, the one who had looked up at him like he was her world—that girl still lived somewhere behind the sharp angles and weaponized tears of Clara.

And that girl always knew how to get to him.

"I ruined everything, didn’t I?" she whispered, fresh tears slipping down her cheeks, making her look even more breakable. "I ruined us. I ruined me."

It twisted in his gut like a blade because they both knew that wasn’t entirely true.

She hadn’t done this alone.

You let this happen.

He hadn’t fought hard enough. He hadn’t shut it down the way he should’ve. And worse—he hadn’t fought for Ella.

He’d frozen, like he always did when things got hard. And now everything good he could’ve had was crumbling at his feet.

"I didn’t mean for it to be like this," Clara whispered, curling even tighter, her voice raw with too much truth tangled with too many lies. "Adrian, I swear—I didn’t want it to go this far. I was scared. I—I thought you’d go back —"

"To her," he finished, voice flat, detached.

Clara’s breath hitched. "I didn’t know how to compete with her."

His jaw tensed, sharp with suppressed frustration. "It wasn’t a competition."

"To you," she murmured. "But to me... it was everything."

Silence settled over them again like fog, thick with the weight of what neither of them dared to say aloud.

Finally, she moved, sitting up on her knees beside him, carefully reaching for his hand like she was touching a wounded animal. He flinched instinctively, but she caught his fingers with hers, lacing them together like fragile threads she was afraid would snap at any moment.

"I can fix this," she whispered, eyes locking onto his, bright and pleading. "We can fix this. We can be a family. We can make it right."

Adrian stared at their joined hands like they were foreign objects, like none of it belonged to him anymore. His gaze drifted from her trembling fingers to the delicate curve of her wrist, remembering a time when he thought holding Clara’s hand was the only kind of safety he needed in this world.

Now it felt like drowning.

"We don’t even know if—"

"It’s yours," Clara interrupted too quickly, too desperately. "It is. I know it."

His head snapped up, staring at her. Something about the way she said it, too practiced, too sharp around the edges—but then her lip trembled again, a single tear tracking down her cheek.

And what if it was true?

The image of a child—Clara’s child—his child, made his chest ache, not with happiness but with the suffocating, crushing weight of failure. Guilt for Ella, guilt for not loving Clara properly, guilt for letting all of them drown together in this mess.

Clara pressed her forehead to his shoulder, curling into him like a child, soft sobs shaking her small frame. She knew exactly how to break him down, brick by brick.

"I can’t do this alone," she whispered. "Please... please don’t leave me."

He should’ve stood up. Should’ve zipped his pants, gathered what was left of his dignity, and walked out the door. He should’ve called his father, or better yet, called Ella.

But the tears soaking through his shirt made his stomach turn with shame.

This wasn’t love. It was something much worse.

You did this, the voice in his head whispered. This is yours to fix, isn’t it?

"I don’t know how to fix this," he admitted softly, the words cutting his throat on the way out.

Clara’s grip tightened, like she was holding onto a lifeline. "Be with me," she breathed. "Start over. We’ll tell your family we’re still together planning to get married. We’ll tell them the story of how we’ve been hiding it to protect the baby. They’ll love that. Redemption, right? Don’t you see? They’ll believe us if you stand next to me."

She was good.

She’d always been good at knowing how to sell tragedy.

He looked down at her, searching for the truth beneath the performance. Somewhere, maybe buried beneath all the manipulation, maybe there was still that lonely girl who didn’t know how to exist without someone next to her.

But he didn’t have the strength to figure it out.

Not tonight.

Not when the guilt wrapped around his ribs like barbed wire.

Clara pressed a soft kiss to his shoulder again, tentative, testing, like she didn’t fully trust the moment yet.

"I love you," she murmured, voice so raw it sounded like it hurt. "Please don’t let this be the end."

Adrian closed his eyes.

He should’ve left.

But instead, he leaned back, letting her curl into him like she belonged there.

And that was the worst part.

He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to escape.

Not yet.

Not when the shame was easier to bear than the loneliness.

Not when he didn’t know how to go back to Ella without breaking something else along the way.

So he stayed.

For now.

And Clara smiled through her tears because she knew exactly what she’d done.