He caught me catching him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
“You did with your eyes.”
“My eyes are medical professionals.”
“Tell them to clock out.”
“Impossible. They’re union.”
His mouth twitched.
The air smelled like dust, sugar, chile smoke, and cold coming down from the mountains. Lights flickered overhead, turning his dark hair copper at the edges. For a second, standing beside him in a gravel lot with music and laughter around us, I had the strangest sensation that the world had folded wrong. Like we had stepped out of the story we had been trapped in and into someone else’s easier life.
Dylan stopped before we reached the ticket booth.
I looked at him.
He held out his hand.
Palm up.
Not grabbing.
Not assuming.
Asking.
The gesture hit me harder than it should have.
Maybe because I remembered every other touch. The desperate ones. The forbidden ones. The ones stolen from grief, fear, and hospital shadows.
This was different.
This was open air.
This was a choice.
I placed my hand in his.
His fingers closed slowly around mine.
Warm.
Careful.
A little rough.
Still Dylan.
The electricity was still there. Of course it was. That live-wire feeling under my skin, the old pull, the dangerous hum of him. But it did not feel like a trap this time. It felt like a current we were finally allowed to notice without pretending it was lightning meant to destroy us.
He looked down at our joined hands.
Then at me.
