I pressed my mouth to the back of her head — not a kiss exactly, more a confession I didn’t have words for.
She made a tiny sound, barely there; was it contentment or surrender?
And I realized then that whatever this was — however impossible or temporary — I didn’twantto let it go.
She was curved into me, the back of her head under my chin, my arm still draped over her waist. I could feel every slow rise of her breathing against my ribs.
A stronger man would have moved.
I wasn’t that man.
Instead, I let my thumb trace the edge of her wrist, just enough to feel the faint beat there. She didn’t pull away, but her voice came small and careful. “Are you always this bad at convincing yourself that you’re not thinking?”
I swallowed. “I’m thinking too much.”
“That’s what I thought.” She shifted a little, enough that the blanket rustled, enough that the scent of her hair hit me all over again. “You’re already figuring out how to write this without writing it.”
She wasn’t wrong. I was already trying to find the words that might make sense of what we’d done, what we hadn’t done.
“I don’t want to turn you into a story,” I said finally. “I just… don’t know what else to do with something that feels this big.”
Her fingers found my forearm, resting there like an anchor. “It doesn’t have to be a story,” she whispered. “It can just be whatever this is.”
The simplicity of the moment landed somewhere deep. What thisis.Not what it means, or where it’s going. Just this — her body warm against mine, the storm easing outside, the brief illusion that we’d built a small, secret world between us.
I breathed her in and let my forehead rest against her shoulder. “You make that sound easy.”
“It’s not.” Her laugh was soft, sad. “But we can pretend, right?”
After several quiet moments, her voice drifted through the dark again, quiet but steady. “Can I ask you something?”
I made a small sound against her shoulder — something that wasn’t quite a yes, but wasn’t no either.
“Why are you really here?”
The question didn’t surprise me. Thetimingdid. She could’ve asked last night, when I was too far gone to answer, or tomorrow, when I’d have time to lie. But now — wrapped in the same blanket, her heartbeat brushing mine — it landed right where it hurt.
“I told you,” I said. “I needed quiet.”
She made a soft noise. “No one rents a cabin in the middle of nowhere for quiet, Silas. They rent it to run.”
That stung, mostly because it was true. “No one was supposed to notice.”
“I’m very observant,” she murmured. “Especially when a man looks like he hasn’t slept in a decade and crashesmylonely little escape.”
I exhaled through my nose, something like a laugh. “That’s generous.”
Silence again. Her thumb brushed over the back of my hand where it rested at her waist — absent, tender.
Then, “You miss her.”
The words froze me.
She didn’t have to say who. I could still see the edge of a photograph in my suitcase — one I hadn’t been able to throw away, one I’d stopped looking at months ago but couldn’t forget.
“I used to,” I said carefully. “When things were good. When the books were popular and agents were banging down my door to get to me. Now I just miss who I thought I was when she loved me.”
Her breath hitched. “That’s so much worse.”
