The whole time, though, my chest hums with nerves.
Becausehe’scoming.
Six months. It’s been six long months since I’ve had Rafe in my arms. Since I’ve smelled him up close and felt the weight of him leaning into me like he belongs there. Since I’ve heard his laugh in the same room instead of through a phone speaker or a voice note sent at two in the morning from some hotel hallway in another country.
The tour ended a week ago. He went back to LA. He didn’t have to come here immediately, but he is anyway. He’s flying into Minneapolis today, getting a car straight to my place.
My place.
Even thinking that still feels strange. This house. This new neighborhood. This city that creaks under snow and doesn’t smell like the ocean. The trade forced a life change so fast I never got to grieve properly. I just moved. I just adapted. I just performed flexibility like my career depends on it, because it does.
But Rafe flying here makes it real in a different way. It means he’s stepping into the life that replaced ours. It also means he’s stepping into my cold.
I leave the facility with my shoulders pulled tight against the wind. The parking lot is a sheet of ice that glitters under floodlights, and my breath comes out in thick clouds. My car is coated in a thin layer of frost. I scrape it off with bare hands because I’m impatient and my gloves are somewhere in my bag, and my fingers go numb within seconds.
This is my life now,I think, half amused, half miserable.
I drive home through streets lined with snowbanks higher than my knees. The city feels quieter than LA in a way I still haven’t adjusted to. There are no palm trees with lights wrapped around them. No warm air. No constant hum of nightlife. Everything is muted by winter.
My phone sits in the cupholder, face up. I keep glancing at it like it might bite me.
At a red light, it buzzes.
Rafe: Landed. Getting the car now.
My heart swells. My fingers go warm around the steering wheel as I dictate a response.
Me: You okay?
Rafe: I’m fine. I’m tired. I miss you.
The words hit hard enough that for a second, I can’t breathe properly. I stare at the screen until the light changes and the car behind me honks.
I drive the rest of the way on autopilot, heart too loud, mind racing ahead to the moment he walks through my door. I try to picture his face. His eyes. The way he’ll look in this unfamiliar space. Whether he’ll seem distant. Whether he’ll seem angry. Whether he’ll seem like he’s already decided something I don’t know how to fix.
Because the truth is, the tear never really stitched itself back together after the trade. Fuck, after I let him down so dramatically on our second wedding anniversary.
We talked. We tried. We did the thing where we pretend we’re okay because the alternative is admitting we might not be. We sent messages, voice notes, updates. We saidI love youin small ways and then avoided saying the bigger things, the dangerous things. The resentment didn’t explode. It just settled. Quietly. Like dust.
And then he left on tour, and I told myself the distance was temporary. Then the trade made distance permanent. On top of that, we went six months without seeing each other.
Now he’s coming, and part of me is so relieved I could cry, and part of me is terrified because relief doesn’t fix anything. It just makes you aware of what you’ve been missing.
I pull into my driveway and sit here for a moment with the engine running, staring at my front door. Snow is piled along the steps. The porch light is on, throwing a soft glow across the walkway. I’m struck, randomly, by how quiet it all is.
In LA, there was always noise. Always something. Here, it’s like the world holds its breath.
I pull into the garage and turn the car off. My hands shake slightly as I gather my bag.
Inside, the house is warm. Too warm, compared to the outside. It smells faintly like the candle I lit last night—vanilla and something like cedar. The air is still, undisturbed. My place looks exactly the way it did when I left this morning—neat, functional, lonely.
I drop my keys into a bowl by the door and pause, bag hanging from my shoulder, boots damp against the mat.
My chest hums again, louder now. I check my phone, but there’s no new text.
I walk farther into the house and set my bag down by the couch. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I don’t know what to do with my body. I’m suddenly too aware of everything—the ache in my muscles, the tightness in my jaw, the bruise that still lives under my skin from old fights and old fear.
I try to breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth. Slow.
