She hadn’t meant to let Olivia in. When she saw her for the first time on the front steps, gorgeous and sharp-edged, carrying the weight of a world she couldn’t set down, Emma had thought”too pretty, too controlled, too closed off.”
But she hadn’t been.
Not with Emma.
Not once the walls started crumbling. Once she started sleeping under the stars, laughing in the kitchen, crying duringyoga, and whispering her secrets into Emma’s mouth between kisses that tasted like honey and heartbreak.
Jesus.
Emma let her head fall back, the sun now warm against her face, breath catching in her throat.
Helping Olivia hadn’t just awakened something in her; it had dismantled her, like water carving stone.
She’d peeled back layers Emma hadn’t even realized were armor. And beneath it all, Emma found something terrifying: hope.
Hope for more than the safety of solitude. Hope that maybe she wasn’t meant to be the one who guided others through their pain without ever asking for anything herself.
She’d spent so many years being the strong one. The wild one. The grounded one.
But with Olivia, she wanted to need.
She wanted softness, morning kisses, inside jokes. She wanted tangled legs beneath thin sheets and arguments and make-ups and long silences that didn’t feel like punishment. She wanted all of it.
She wantedher.
And if Olivia left,whenOlivia left, Emma knew it would split her wide open. Because loving her had become second nature. It was like breathing, like standing still in the desert and listening to the wind and knowing, without question, you belong.
Emma swallowed thickly, blinking back the sting behind her eyes. She’d never cried for a woman before—not after sex, not after goodbye, not even after betrayal.
But she knew if Olivia walked away and never came back, this would be the one she never got over.
Still, she didn’t regret a single damn second.
The sun was high when Emma returned from the ridge, her body loose from exertion but her chest tight with everything she hadn’t said out loud. She bypassed the main lodge and retreated into her cabin, closing the door behind her with a soft click that echoed louder than it should’ve.
The quiet inside was deep and familiar, still carrying the scent of Olivia, something warm and musky, with traces of her shampoo and whatever sun-warmed sweetness Emma couldn’t name but craved like a fix.
Emma crossed to the desk in the corner where her leather-bound journal lay waiting, the spine cracked from years of half-started entries. It was the only thing she’d kept from her former life, before the desert, before the silence taught her to listen. Back then, she wrote lists, schedules, snippets of longing she never let herself feel.
But now, she opened it with reverence, flipped past the past, and pressed her pen to a blank page like it might save her.
She sat for a moment, staring at the white space, heart thudding too fast.
Then slowly, carefully, she wrote.
“I didn’t mean to fall in love with her.”
The words looked foreign in her own handwriting. Sharp. Exposed.
“But it’s happening. It’s happened. And it’s not just about the way she tastes or how her body fits perfectly against mine, though Christ, that’s part of it. It’s the way she looks at me like I’m something she chose. Like I’m not just the one who saved her from falling, but the one she wants to fall with.”
Emma swallowed thickly, the pen steady but her heart nowhere near it.
“I thought I was past this kind of thing. I thought I’d built something safe and quiet. But she cracked it open with that soft goddamn voice and her trembling hands and that guarded kindness that makes me want to wrap her in a blanket and never let the world touch her again.
She paused, her breath catching as emotions crawled up her throat like fire.
“I didn’t expect to feel afraid again. And I sure as hell didn’t expect to want to stay afraid if it means keeping her.”
