“I pushed you away because I couldn’t bear the thought of you staying with me out of pity. If you stayed because you felt sorry or obligated, you’d be giving up something you’d fought for, and I couldn’t carry that on my conscience. When Orion told me you were Ara at the hotel, I meant it when I said it would not have changed anything. Your loyalty is to the band first, and I couldn’t ask you to choose me over that. I knew if I pushed you away, you’d keep going and not have to look back at what I’d become.”
“No,” she says, and the single word is softer than I expected. “Nothing changes the fact that I wouldn’t have left the tourfor you. Not because I didn’t care or I didn’t have feelings for you, but because at that point we’d just decided to be in a relationship. We were both still building something. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I couldn’t put my entire career on hold for you. There wouldn’t have been anything I could have done for you then that would have helped more than the professionals already were. I couldn’t let down the band or the people who count on us to keep going. If this had happened and we’d been in a more serious place—if we’d been farther along in our relationship or engaged—maybe I would’ve made a different choice. But as it was, I wouldn’t have left the tour.”
My façade thins, but I try to keep it in place. Her words land like a clean strike; she wasn’t malicious, but just stating a fact, and it stings my ego more than I expected. I nod to what she’s saying because, as much as it hurts, I do understand it. I let the silence sit long enough to breathe through the sting, then I pick up where I left off.
I say the next things out loud, not because I need her to answer, but because I want her to hear them. Hearing someone else say it makes it less like an order and more like an option. “Physical therapy is a grind. It’s a calendar of small humiliations that add up to something that eventually looks like progress. You go to appointments, you do the exercises, you learn how to trust a body that doesn’t always answer when you call it. It’s boring, and it’s brutal, but it’s what I have been working toward for months. My therapist says healing is incremental, and patience is like a prescription. I would always roll my eyes at that, but after a while, I realized it’s true. I wish I’d started sooner. My parents died when I was fourteen, from drug overdoses. It was around that time I decided not to have kids of my own.
“The decision didn’t come in a single moment of clarity. It wasn’t a neat moral stance so much as a survival plan. If I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t turn into the people whomade me, then I wasn’t going to risk making someone who had to survive me. I’d already spent enough time wondering if addiction lived in my blood or if the anger did. If the things that ruined them were waiting in me, too. I kept thinking about what it felt like to be fourteen and realize the people who were supposed to keep you safe… couldn’t.
“When I turned eighteen, I scheduled my vasectomy. If I ever became a parent, it would be the way my adoptive parents did it. I bounced around foster care for a bit until they took me in when I was sixteen. They took in teenagers. The kids nobody else wanted because they were too old, too angry, too ‘damaged’ for most families. And they didn’t try to fix us. They just… stayed. Turns out that’s the most radical thing you can do for a kid who’s been bounced around long enough. They tried to get me into therapy then; they kept bringing it up, but I refused. I was too proud, too angry, and too convinced I could fix myself if I just worked harder.”
I let the sentence sit and fully sink in, then keep going. I feel like I’m trauma dumping, but I’m trying to create space, so Celeste might feel safe to share what happened. “When I was seventeen, they asked if they could adopt me. I said yes, they were the only ones who pushed me toward making a future for myself. I used the foster scholarship to get through school. I got a bachelor’s in criminal justice, then I went to the FBI Academy at Quantico. That was the plan: school, fieldwork, keep moving forward. It was practical and what I thought I needed.
“After I got out of the hospital, I was required to go to therapy. I hated every second of it in the beginning. I thought it was for people who couldn’t handle themselves. IthoughtI could go back to compartmentalizing the things that hurt and keep functioning. Turns out compartments leak.”
I force a small, humorless smile and let a little of the old defensiveness show before I push it down. “I wish I’d startedsooner. Physical therapy taught me how to trust a body that had been betrayed. Psychotherapy is teaching me how to trust a mind that’s been doing the same. It’s slow andfucking boring, and sometimes it’s humiliating. If I could go back and talk to sixteen-year-old Lucian, I would tell himtherapy doesn’t make you weak. It gives you tools to stop the memory from running the show. It doesn’t erase what happened, but it makes the days after it livable. If you decide you want to do it, start sooner than I did, and no matter what, remember that you are not alone.”
She whispers so softly I almost miss it. “I’m scared, I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to relive the attack.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her, because it is. “Being scared doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human. You can go slow. You can stop. You can walk out of the room whenever you need to. That’s the point, Wildflower,youhave control.”
Her breath breaks on the last thing I say, it starts as a tiny hitch, then a full-body sob that makes the space shrink around us. My hands jerk on the wheel before my brain catches up; horns and lane lines blur into background noise. I yank the SUV toward the shoulder and throw it in park. The world contracts until it’s only the two of us and the thud of my heart.
I don’t wait for permission, I unbuckle her, lift her out of the seat, and pull her into my lap like she’s the most important thing I’ve ever held. She folds into me without hesitation, her face buried against my chest, and the sobs come in ragged waves. I press my cheek to the crown of her head and hold her like a brace, my arms locked around her.
A single tear slips down my face; I catch it with the heel of my hand and wipe it off. I can’t let it fall again. I tuck my cheek against the top of her head and press my thumb to the damp spot at her temple. I don’t want her to look up and see me undone. I know if she saw me like this, she’d fold it into her own guilt, and I won’t burden her with that. So I keep my voice low andsteady, keep my hands busy, and let the rest stay hidden behind the steady cadence of the words I know will hold us both.
I keep my cheek pressed to the crown of her head until the sobs thin to hiccups and then to a breath that’s more even. My hands don’t leave her; they anchor her to me the way a dock holds a boat. I hold her until the tremor in her shoulders eases and she can breathe without the sound breaking.
When she finally lifts her face, it’s almost as wet as the front of my shirt from her tears. She wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand and gives me a small, crooked smile that’s half apology and half surrender. “I’ll call someone,” she says, voice thin but determined.
I press my forehead to hers for a second, a brief, private pact, before I let her crawl off my lap. I pull the SUV off the shoulder once she’s settled. Traffic swallows us again, but the anxiety that lived in the cab has loosened into something a bit steadier.
She rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand, a tired gesture that makes me want to pull her right back into my arms. When she looks up at me, there’s that hopeful, half-ashamed softness people get when they want comfort but don’t want to ask for it outright. “Where’s Sir Sass? A cuddle from him would be perfect right now.”
“He’s still with Orion.”
She groans as she sinks deeper into her seat. “That’s a match made in hell. When do I get to hold him again?”
I glance over at her, at the way she’s curled into the same position she was earlier, like she’s trying to make herself smaller than she is.
“I’m a little offended you want to cuddle with him instead of me.”
Her head snaps toward me, eyes wide like she wasn’t expecting that.
Fuck. That was too gruff, let’s try again. I roll my shoulders, give her the most half-hearted flex imaginable, trying to show more humor than ego. “I mean, look at me. I’m objectively a better cuddler. I have a broader surface area and excellent heat retention. All very advanced snuggling credentials.”
She blinks at me, startled at my weird behavior—yeah, me too—and Sir Sass isn’t even here, but I can practically feel his judgment radiating from whatever corner of the universe he’s currently occupying.
“And,” I add, dropping my voice like I’m about to reveal classified intel, “I won’t even lick you awake. That alone should put me miles ahead of him.”
I expect her to laugh, maybe shove my arm, or tell me to shut up. What I don’t expect is the way her breath catches, or how color rises high on her cheeks like I’ve said something far more intimate than I meant to. The realization hits me a beat too late, and I freeze, hands tightening on the wheel.
“Oh—no. No, no, no,” I say quickly, because apparently my mouth has decided to betray me today. “That’s not—I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
I can feel the heat crawling up my neck, and it has nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with the way she’s looking at me, wide-eyed and pink-cheeked as if I’ve just said something indecent. Which, to be fair, I kind of did.
“I swear,” I mutter, still half-hiding behind my hand, “my mouth is staging a coup. There’s duct tape in the glove compartment. Please use it.”
