Between Us, Always.

What I Don't Say Out Loud

It's 4:13am when I give up pretending I might still fall asleep.

Jude is out cold beside me, sprawled on his stomach, one arm flung over my waist like his body's decided I'm a seatbelt he can't travel without. His curls are flattened on one side, lashes resting against his cheeks, lips parted just a little. He's snoring the tiniest bit, the way he does when he's properly exhausted not the fake-snore he does on the sofa to make the girls laugh.

I should be sleeping. Both twins are finally down. The monitor on my side of the bed glows faintly, soft white static and two little moving lines that flicker with their breathing. It's quiet. Peaceful, even.

My brain does not care.

It's doing that thing where it feels like it's sprinting while my body lies completely still.

I stare at the ceiling and focus on the facts.

You're okay. Everyone's okay. You're safe.

It's a little grounding trick Jude learned with me years ago and has been feeding back to me ever since. Sometimes I hear it in his voice. Sometimes I hear it in my own, quieter, less convincing.

I inhale slowly, let the air fill my chest. Jude's hand flexes unconsciously against my hip as I breathe in, like his muscles are wired to me even when his brain's turned off. It makes my throat tighten in that stupid emotional way.

This is my life now.

My name is Aria Hastings. I'm twenty-two years old. I live in a quiet modern townhouse on the edge of Madrid with the boy I fell in love with at fifteen and the two six-month-old daughters we somehow created together.

I used to think that sentence sounded like a fantasy. Now, at four in the morning, with my eyes burning and my bones humming from lack of sleep, it feels very, very real.

The monitor crackles softly. One of the girls shifts I can't tell if it's Ivie or Elsie from the sound alone a little sigh, a rustle of fabric, then nothing. My heart still pauses like I'm waiting for a storm.

They're fine.

They're fine.

They're fine.

I swallow, blink at the ceiling again, and roll the words around in my head until they settle.

⸻

People think they know who I am because they know who he is.

To the world, I'm Jude Bellingham's girlfriend. The pretty brunette in the stands. The quiet one with the camera. The one holding the babies in the background of grainy fan videos. A face in a crowd that the internet zooms in on, circles in red, captions with things like WAG life and how is she real?

But before I was any of that, I was just the quiet girl in Birmingham who hid behind a camera because it was easier than talking.

I grew up in a house where the walls remembered shouting.

My mum ...Isobel is... complicated. Emotional in ways that never came out quite right. She loved us, I know that now, but when I was small it felt less like love and more like weather. Unpredictable. Stormy. Sometimes suffocating. Sometimes gone.

My dad, Dan, was the opposite. Quiet. Steady. Always there, but always a step removed, like he was watching life through glass. They fought a lot. About money. About work. About us. About everything and nothing. I learned early that it wasn't my job to take a side it was my job to make sure everyone stayed standing.

I was the peacekeeper. The soft one. The child who could read a room before she could read a book.

I had siblings, thank God. I wasn't alone in it.