“Take that back.”
“Nope.”
“Rook.”
“Soren.”
He huffed out a breath that might've been a laugh or might've been exasperation. “You're the worst.”
“You're worse.”
“Not possible.”
“Extremely possible.”
“We're doing this again.”
“You keep engaging.”
“Because you're wrong.”
“I'm never wrong, remember?”
He groaned and buried his face against my shoulder. “I forgot how fucking stubborn you are.”
“No you didn't.”
“No, I didn't,” he admitted, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “But I was hoping maybe you'd mellowed out over the years.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Clearly.”
We fell quiet again, but this time it felt different. Lighter somehow, like we'd remembered how to just exist together without everything being heavy and painful. The stars wheeled overhead, the valley lights flickered below, and I held him close while the cold air settled around us.
“I should probably head home soon,” Soren said eventually, but he didn't make any move to leave. “I've got a gig tomorrow night, and I need to sleep at some point before then.”
“Yeah.” I didn't want him to go at all. I wanted to keep him here in this moment where nothing else could touch us and the rest of the world didn't exist. But that wasn't realistic, and we both knew it. “You'll text me when you get home safe?”
“You want me to?”
“Yeah.” I brushed my hand through his hair one more time, committing the feel of it to memory. “I want you to.”
He smiled at that, and the expression was small but real, and I felt it like a fucking sunbeam cutting through fog. “Okay. I'll text you when I get home.”
We stood up slowly because we were both stiff from sitting in the cold for too long, and I immediately missed the warmth of having him pressed against me. He grabbed the empty ginger ale cups from where we'd left them on the rock and carried them toward his car, and I followed him because walking away felt wrong even though I knew he had to go eventually.
At his car, he stopped and turned back to face me with his keys in hand, and we stood there in the dark staring at each other like neither of us knew how to say goodbye properly.
“This doesn't fix everything,” he said quietly. “You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“There's still a lot of shit we need to talk about. A lot of shit I still need to explain to you about what happened.”
“I know that too.” I took a step closer to him, close enough that I could see the way his breath fogged in the cold air between us. “But we started talking tonight, and that's enough for right now.”
He nodded at that, and then before I could second-guess the impulse, I pulled him into another hug. He came easily, wrapping his arms around my waist and pressing his face into my shoulder like he was trying to memorize the shape of me the same way I was memorizing him.
