"Just breathe." His thumb moves over my knuckles, slow and steady, a rhythm I can follow. "For ten minutes, just breathe."
I close my eyes and let the wind and engine noise fill all the space where panic's been living since yesterday, since that phone call, since I heard his voice again. My shoulders drop and my lungs remember they're supposed to expand, that air is supposed to go in and out, not get stuck somewhere between my ribs and my throat. The vise around my chest loosens enough that I can feel my heartbeat slowing, steadying against the thunder it's been doing all day.
The road climbs and I can feel it in the way the truck leans, the way the air changes—thinner, cooler, sharper somehow. My thumb traces circles on his hand while the sun dips lower, turning the desert into something gold and shadowed and almost peaceful.
I open my eyes and glance behind us at the truck bed—blankets. A cooler.
I can't breathe again.
He planned this. While I was falling apart at the front desk, while I was jumping at every sound and rearranging pens like a crazy person, he was throwing blankets in the truck bed and packing a cooler and thinking about me. About giving me this, about stealing me away for ten minutes so I could remember how to breathe. My throat goes tight and hot and I can't look at him because if I do I might actually cry.
"Holt—"
"I know." That's all he says but it's enough, it's everything.
The road ends at a cliff edge and he parks, kills the engine. Cicadas buzz. Wind moves through scrub grass. The desert breathes around us.
He climbs out and drops the tailgate, holds out his hand. I take it and let him pull me up into the truck bed where the blankets are still warm from the sun, soft under my legs as I settle beside him. The view—I forget words exist. Endless desert stretching out forever.
We drink and watch the sky change colors, watch the stars multiply until they're uncountable. My heart's still beating too fast but it's slowing, calming, finding its rhythm again in all this quiet. I'm viscerally aware that this is borrowed time, that Evan could be pulling up to the shop right now, that we're stealing this moment from the edges of a crisis I'm supposed to be facing. But I let myself have it anyway. Let the stars blur and the peace sink in deep, somewhere I can hold onto it later.
"I used to think running was survival," I say quietly. "Like if I kept moving fast enough, nothing bad could catch me."
"And now?"
"Now I think staying might be braver." I look at him and find his eyes already watching me. "Facing things. Building something real instead of just escaping from everything."
His hand finds mine again, all calluses and scars and heat. "You're brave, Scout."
I laugh and it comes out wet, broken. "I'm terrified."
"Brave isn't not being scared." His thumb traces my pulse point where it's still hammering against my wrist. "It's being scared and doing it anyway."
I turn to really look at him, see the tattoos dark against his skin and the way the dying light catches the edges of his jaw, the way he's looking at me like I'm worth stealing away for. "Is that what you did? With the shop? With me?"
"Yeah."
"I'm glad you stayed."
"Me too."
Heat floods the space between us—immediate, electric. My breath catches and I'm moving closer before I decide to, before I think about it, and then he's kissing me—slow at first, careful, then deeper when I make this sound in my throat that I didn't mean to make.
His hand cups my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone, and I taste beer and want and something that feels like holding on and letting go all mixed together. I pull back gasping. "I don't want to stop."
"Then don't."
We undress in the truck bed and I'm laughing at elbows bumping and my shirt catching on my bra clasp and the blankets tangling around our legs. He helps me, patient and careful, fingers working the clasp free until I'm finally bare under the stars, feeling exposed and seen all at once.
"This is either very romantic or very redneck."
His mouth quirks. "Can't it be both?"
Then he's kissing me again and I'm pulling him closer, need flooding hot and urgent through every nerve in my body. His weight settles over me and I gasp at the heat of his skin pressing me down into the blankets. The stars wheel overhead and the desert stretches out forever.
He moves slow and gentle, watching my face like he needs to see every reaction. "You okay?"
"So okay." My voice breaks on it.
