The final morning workshop was bittersweet.
I'd structured it as a sharing session—each writer presenting a piece of what they'd worked on during the week. The conference room felt different this morning, smallersomehow. Someone had brought a tin of gingerbread cookies, and the spice-sweet smell mingled with pine from the wreaths still hanging on the walls. Through the windows, snow blanketed the peaks, the kind of postcard-perfect scene that made everything feel both more and less real.
Rebecca went first, reading a polished but emotionally distant thriller opening. She was technically proficient, every word chosen with care, but there was no heart in it. No vulnerability. Just competence masquerading as craft.
Others followed—some strong, some still finding their way, all of them earnest and trying. Claire read a tender scene about a grandmother teaching her grandson to bake Christmas cookies, and half the room teared up. An older man shared the opening of what might actually become something good if he kept at it.
Then it was Jason's turn.
He stood, shuffling his pages with nervous fingers, and I had to resist the urge to go to him. To tell him he was brilliant and he had nothing to worry about. To kiss him in front of everyone and claim what was already mine.
"This is new," he said, adjusting his glasses. "Something I wrote yesterday. It's... different from my usual work."
He read.
And it was about us. Not explicitly—he'd changed details, made it abstract enough for plausible deniability. But I recognized us in every line. The way two people could find each other in unexpected places. The terror and joy of being seen. The question of whether something that felt this right could possibly last.
His voice was steady as he read:"He taught me that inspiration isn't something you wait for in silence. It's something you create—with your hands, your mouth, yourhonest words in the dark. It's the choice to be seen, even when being invisible feels safer. Especially then."
The room was silent when he finished.
My throat had gone tight. He'd just laid himself bare in front of a dozen near-strangers, and the courage that took—the trust—
"That's beautiful, Jason," Claire said softly, breaking the spell. "Really beautiful. The emotional honesty is just... wow."
Others murmured agreement, leaning forward in their chairs. Even Rebecca looked grudgingly moved, though she tried to hide it behind crossed arms and a skeptical tilt of her head.
Jason's eyes found mine across the room and I tried to communicate everything I was feeling through that look.I see you. I know what you're saying. I feel it too.
"Thank you for sharing that," I said, my voice not quite steady despite my best efforts. "That's the kind of emotional honesty we've been working toward all week. Taking risks, being vulnerable, trusting the reader with your truth." I paused, holding his gaze. "That takes real courage."
We moved on to the next person but I couldn't focus. All I could think about was Jason's words, the way he'd claimed what we had in the only way he could—through his art. Through the thing that mattered most to both of us.
When the session ended with everyone exchanging contact information and promising to stay in touch—promises that would mostly evaporate by February—I found myself at the front of the room, watching people filter out into the hall where they were playing "I'll Be Home for Christmas" too loud.
Jason hung back and when we were finally alone, he crossed to me.
"So…" he said.
"You wrote about us." It wasn't a question.
"I wrote about what it feels like to find something you didn't know you were looking for." He adjusted his glasses, a nervous tell I'd learned to read. "If that happens to sound like us, well..."
I pulled him close, not caring if anyone walked back in. Not caring about anything except the solid warmth of him and the way he fit against me like all the clichés I'd spent years avoiding in my writing. "It was perfect. You're perfect."
"I'm really not."
"You are to me." I kissed him, trying to pour everything I couldn't say into it—all the want and fear and desperate hope that we could make this work.
When we pulled apart, he was smiling. "What happens now?"
"Now we pack." I took a breath, steadying myself. "And then we figure out how to make this work in the real world."
***
Packing felt wrong. We moved around the room that had been ours for a week, gathering clothes and books and all the small accumulations of seven days together.
Every item felt weighted with memory. Jason's sweater, the green one he'd worn that first workshop when he'd caught my attention with his questions. My notebook, full of half-formed ideas that all seemed to circle back to him.
