That single touch sparked something sharp and silent in my chest. Not a flame, not yet. But a flicker. A beginning I didn’t trust myself to name.
He didn’t pull away. Neither did I. The night held us in its quiet, the ocean breathing somewhere below like it always had.
I didn’t know what staying would cost me yet. I only knew I wasn’t leaving again.
CHAPTER 5
ELLIOT
After last night on the deck, something had shifted between me and Anthony.
It was in the way he didn’t try to fix me. Didn’t rush to fill the silence. He just... existed beside me. In that present, quiet, and steady way he had. And in that stillness, something in me cracked, finally letting the light in after weeks of suffocating dark.
There was a weight in him I recognized. Not the performative kind people wore like armor, but something deeper. The kind that came from surviving what should’ve destroyed you. He didn’t tell me how to grieve. He just let me. Hesawme in a way no one had since the day Mom died. And worse—heunderstoodme.
It was almost three when we stopped talking, when the bottle between us finally ran dry. It was too late for him to leave and drive back to the Inn. So he took the spare room—the one Mom always kept made up, just in case.
“Just in case,” she used to say with that sly, knowing smile. My throat clenched. Of course she was right. She always was.
A fresh wave of grief ripped through me sharp, and brutal. She’d never fuss over the sheets again. Never yell up the stairs toremind me to eat. Never say my name like it was a secret she’d been keeping safe. Justgone.And somehow I was still here. Breathing. Hurting. Existing in a body that didn’t know how to carry this kind of emptiness.
I laid in bed, unmoving, watching the shadows stretch and distort across the ceiling. Grief and memories twisted like vines around my ribs—tightening, tightening.
Anthony’s voice lingered in my ears. That low, gravel-edged rasp. The way he said my name like it wasn’t just a name, but a truth he’d decided to believe in.
My hand moved before I could stop it, reaching for the journal I kept beside my bed. I didn’tmeanto draw him. It wasn’t a decision. It was instinct. He spilled onto the page like water through my fingers in fragments and impressions I hadn’t realized I’d memorized.
The slope of his shoulders. The curve of his lips around the neck of the bottle. The silver threading through his hair, soft and defiant. The arc of smoke as he exhaled. That scar under his left collarbone I kept pretending not to look at.
Not his face, not directly. That felt too intimate. Too honest. But his presence. Thefeelof him. Like a storm that hadn’t broken yet.
I didn’t mean to make it sensual. But it was. It always was with him. Even in silence. When I dreamed I felt himaboveme, breath tangled with mine. Just heat and closeness and the sense of being seen too completely. His presence pressed into mine in a way that had no shape but too much meaning.
I woke with a gasp, heart hammering, my skin burning like I’d touched something I wasn’t supposed to. Shame flooded in fast and vicious. I felt exposed. Filthy. Like I’d trespassed somewhere sacred and left fingerprints behind.
Wanting him felt wrong.
But not wanting him felt like tearing something out of myself.
“Coffee,” I muttered, too loudly in the silence. A distraction. A lie. “Just need coffee.”
The hallway was bathed in that disorienting gray of pre-dawn, the kind of light that makes everything look like a dream you’re waking up from too soon. Like the world hasn’t decided whether to vanish or come back to life.
A fog pressed behind my eyes. Not exhaustion—no, this was deeper. Bone-deep. Suffocating. Like wearing someone else’s wet clothes. Heavy and saturated, dragging with every step. The kind of grief that makes you forget what it was like to evernotfeel this way.
I padded down the hallway, wood cool beneath my feet, the house hushed as if it knew what I’d dreamed. Anthony’s door was slightly ajar. A sliver of light bled through the crack, stretching across the floor like an outstretched hand.
I should’ve kept walking.
I told myself I would.
But my body didn’t care what my mind had decided. My bodyknew. Knew the sound of his footsteps. The shape of his absence. The pull of gravity that only existed when he was near. Like a moth to the flame, I moved closer.
The soft groan of the pipes echoed through the house. Steam crept into the hallway, warm and sweet with soap and something uniquelyhim. The bathroom door creaked open, and I looked up just in time to see him step out.
Backlit by soft gold light, barefoot and towel-clad, still damp from the shower. Water clung to him in darkened lines. His golden-caramel skin caught the light, warm and glowing against the soft shadows, a map of sunlight and storms that made my chest twist. He looked unguarded. Real. Like a moment that wasn’t meant to be witnessed.
His eyes were heavy-lidded with sleep, jaw covered by his untamed beard. He looked like a man pulled from myth. Sacred in the way only the broken could be.
