The sound I make is nothing I’ve made in years. Not pain. Not relief. Some new shape of both.
He looks up fast. For one second, he reaches across the flames and wipes a tear from my face with his thumb—except he doesn’t. He stops an inch away like he hit glass.
“May I?” he asks, wrecked.
I shouldn’t let him. I should hold the line we drew in the ambulance with clinical gloves and cool words.
“Yes,” I say.
He comes around the pit, slow, like approaching a skittish animal. When he sits, the bench dips toward his weight and my body lists with it. I feel the heat rolling off him, the field he carries, the crackle in the air that always makes my skin sit closer to my bones.
He reaches out. Doesn’t touch my cheek after all. He takes my free hand instead, careful, palm up in his, like he’s memorizing a prayer he’s not sure he’s allowed to say.
I lace our fingers before I can talk myself out of it.
Something steadies with the contact. Not lust. Not at first. This is quieter. The click of two gears finally finding the same teeth.
His thumb moves once over the inside of my wrist. Just once. My pulse leaps into that stroke like it was waiting for it. He feels it. I feel him feel it.
“Keep going,” he says, voice low, like the wind might steal it if he’s careless.
I read the next letter out loud.
January 1
I’m sorry. I miss you. If I can’t have you, I promise to be useful. If I can’t be happy, I’ll be useful.
“Axel,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“I’m trying.”
I reach for another. My tears drip on the page and bead there, perfect, ridiculous. I have the urge to apologize to the paper for ruining it.
March 5
I saw you at the grocery store. Not you—you know what I mean. A girl with your walk. I was in front of the peaches like an idiot and I forgot how to breathe. Guys at work keep telling me to let it go. I told them the day a river stops finding the low ground is the day I’ll forget your last name. I’m sorry I’m a cliché. I miss you. I bought the peaches anyway because they smelled like July and you used to bite them over the sink and laugh when juice ran down your wrist.
I laugh then.
He closes his eyes, relief breaking across his face like dawn. “God,” he says, half a prayer, half a curse.
A gust slides through the trees and brings the high cold of the ridge with it. All at once I’m aware of the dark pushing closer to our little halo of light, and of his hand warming mine, and of the way the fire paints his profile in gold and shadow. His lashes throw tiny bars on his cheek. His mouth is set like he’s keeping himself off a cliff.
“Savannah,” he says, barely above a whisper. “If this hurts you, say the word.”
“It hurts,” I say. I squeeze his fingers until the tendons shift. “But it’s the right hurt.”
He nods without looking away from my face, like he knows this pain—this specific ache of finally touching the thing you’ve been circling.
I draw a deeper letter—the pages are many, the fold soft from being opened and closed a hundred times by hands that never mailed it.May 27.The first line steals whatever air the flames didn’t.
I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. I’ll write it until the pen dries, until the paper gives out, until the word stops spinning. I’m sorry for the roof and the jump and the way the night smelled like ash and rain. I’m not sorry for being the boy who looked at you and saw a life he wanted. I miss you. I’m still that boy and it’s humiliating.
A tear breaks and runs into my mouth. Salt and smoke. I swallow it. The fire pops and sends up a burst of sparks that look like tiny planets escaping gravity.
