We don’t talk much in the car.
I play her music, old songs scratched into burned CDs I forgot were in the glovebox.
The sound is warm and imperfect, full of static and memory, the kind of music that feels like it belongs to a different lifetime—one where things were simple, and quiet, and safe. The kind of lifetime neither of us ever got to live, but sometimes pretend we did.
She sits small in the passenger seat, curled slightly toward the window, her bare legs drawn up just enough that the oversized hoodie slides higher on her thighs every time she shifts. The morning light leaks through the windscreen, soft and gold, colouring the edges of her hair and turning her skin into something almost unreal.
I catch her smiling at the lyrics, mouthing along when she thinks I’m not looking.
She presses her lips together when she notices me glance, like she can hide the softness, but she can’t. It fills the whole car. It fills me.
The road stretches ahead of us, empty at this hour, just grey asphalt unraveling into more sky. Houses blur past—quiet, still,untouched by the chaos living in our heads. Street lamps flicker. Pavements shine from last night’s rain.
Her legs are bare. Her hoodie rides up when she shifts. And my hand tightens on the wheel like it’s her skin.
I don’t touch her.
Not yet.
Not when this simple, fragile moment feels like something I could break just by breathing wrong. Not when the quiet between us feels almost holy—like the world exhaled for the first time in years and told us to listen.
So I keep my eyes on the road. On the curve of the bend ahead. On anything except the soft shape of her knee or the way she tucks her hair behind her ear or the way her lips part slightly when a lyric hits her in the chest.
I don’t touch her.
Not until I’m sure I won’t ruin it.
But God, she’s close. And the car smells like her—shampoo, vanilla, something warm and familiar. Something I never should’ve had and can’t let go of.
She taps her fingers on her thigh in time with the song. She hums under her breath. She shifts again, and the seatbelt slides across the curve of her chest in a way that makes my breath stutter and my grip on the wheel tighten until my knuckles ache.
A red light stops us.
The city is waking—slow, sleepy, unaware that inside my car the world has narrowed to one girl and one question I’m too afraid to ask:
What the hell are we doing?
She glances at me again, soft and shy, like she’s checking to see if I’m still here.
I am.
More than she knows.
The light turns green. I press the accelerator.
And we keep going.
Into morning.
Into whatever the fuck this is.
Into something that feels dangerously close to hope.
The elevator creaks like it remembers me — the nights I slept on the roof when I was seventeen, the nights I waited for a father who never showed, the nights I convinced myself that cold concrete counted as safety if I stared at the sky long enough.
It shudders to a stop, and she stands beside me in the dim, flickering light, staring at the warped bulb above the doors as though the whole world might be waiting on the other side.
When the metal slides open, the wind hits us with a force that steals breath and steadiness, city air pushing past us like it’s been waiting years for someone to open the door again. It carries the smell of rain that hasn’t fallen yet, petrol from some distant street, and the faint metallic tang of night.
