Chapter 8 #3
“Yeah.” He didn't lift his head from my shoulder, just spoke into the fabric of my shirt with his breath warming it.
“They're good, all things considered. Talia's working in finance now, Micah's in college studying something I don't understand, and Poppy's finishing up high school. We made it through somehow.”
“You made it through,” I corrected him, because that distinction mattered more than he probably realized. “You're the one who kept them together when everything fell apart.”
“Barely kept us together.”
“But you did it anyway.” I tightened my hold on him. “That matters more than you think it does.”
He made a noise that might have been agreement or might have been exhaustion, and I let the silence settle back over us like a blanket.
The valley lights flickered below us in the distance, the stars wheeled overhead in their ancient patterns, and we stayed exactly where we were because moving felt impossible and unnecessary and like it would break whatever fragile thing we'd just started to rebuild between us.
“I don't know what happens now,” Soren said quietly after a while. “I don't know how to fix any of this.”
“We don't have to fix it all tonight,” I told him, and I meant it completely. “We just have to start somewhere, and we already did that.”
“Start how?”
“Like this.” I shifted slightly so I could see his face without making him move away from me.
His eyes were still wet and red from crying, his nose was running from the cold and the tears, and he looked more exhausted than anyone had a right to look.
“Sitting here together. Talking instead of running. Not disappearing on each other again.”
“I'm really bad at not running away from shit.”
“I know you are.” I brushed my thumb across his cheekbone, wiping away a tear that had caught there, and watched his eyes flutter closed at the contact. “But you're here now, and that's what matters to me.”
He opened his eyes again and looked at me with an expression I couldn't fully read. It might have been gratitude, or grief, or relief, or all of those things tangled together in a way that didn't need words to make sense of.
“You always knew how to make me feel like I wasn't completely fucked up,” he said softly.
“You're not fucked up at all.”
“I'm a disaster.”
“You're a person who survived a disaster,” I corrected him, and I felt him exhale shakily against my chest. “That's completely different from being one.”
“Is it really?”
“Yeah.” I pulled him closer again and tucked his head back under my chin where it fit perfectly. I let my hand settle in his hair. “It is.”
The tears had stopped for both of us by then, leaving behind the kind of exhausted calm that always came after crying too hard for too long.
My shoulders ached from the cold and from holding him for so long, but I didn't move away.
Didn't want to break this moment. The physical closeness felt necessary in a way I couldn't explain, like our bodies were doing the work our words couldn't quite manage yet.
“I used to come here sometimes,” Soren admitted quietly. “After you left for college and I was still stuck here. Just to sit in this spot and remember what it felt like when things were easier between us.”
“Did it help at all?”
“No.” He laughed, and the sound came out soft and bitter. “Just made me miss you even more than I already did.”
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine him sitting here alone in this clearing, staring at the same stars while carrying the weight of everything he couldn't tell me. The image hurt worse than anything he'd actually said tonight.
We sat in the quiet for a minute, and then Soren shifted against me and said, “You still do that thing where you crack your knuckles when you're thinking too hard?”
I blinked at the sudden change in direction. “What?”
“Your knuckles.” He nodded at my hands. “You've been doing it on and off for the past ten minutes. Used to drive Coach crazy during film sessions.”
I looked down and realized he was right. I'd been cracking them without even noticing. “Old habit.”
“Some things don't change.” He grinned up at me, and this time the expression actually reached his eyes. “You also still sit like you're about to get called for a shift. All tense and ready to move.”
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do. Look at your shoulders right now.”
I became immediately aware that my shoulders were, in fact, hiked up near my ears like I was bracing for contact. I forced them down and Soren laughed, the sound warmer than it had been all night.
“See? Told you. Captain Kincaid, always ready for the next play.”
“Shut up,” I said, but I was smiling despite myself. “You're one to talk. You're drumming on your knee right now.”
He glanced down at his hand, which was indeed tapping out some kind of rhythm against his leg. “Shit. You're right.”
“Some things don't change,” I repeated back at him, and he shoved my shoulder lightly with his.
“Asshole.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Wow, breaking out the playground insults. Real mature, Captain.”
“You started it.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“We're thirty-one years old and arguing like we're twelve,” Soren said, shaking his head but still grinning. “This is peak maturity right here.”
“Your fault for bringing up the knuckle thing.”
“My fault for noticing you haven't changed in over a decade?”
“Exactly.”
He laughed again, and I felt the sound of it vibrate through his chest where it was still pressed against mine. “You know what else hasn't changed? You still can't admit when you're wrong.”
“That's because I'm never wrong.”
“You're wrong right now about being never wrong.”
“That doesn't even make sense.”
“Makes perfect sense. You're just too stubborn to admit it.” He poked me in the ribs, and I caught his hand before he could do it again.
“Don't start that shit. You know I'm ticklish there.”
“Oh, I remember.” His grin turned absolutely evil. “I remember very clearly.”
“Don't you fucking dare—”
He went for my ribs with his other hand, and I had to physically wrestle him away while trying not to laugh. We ended up in a tangle of limbs, him trying to get past my defenses and me trying to keep him from exploiting the one weakness he'd known about since we were fifteen.
“This is—stop it—this is so fucking stupid,” I managed between attempts to block him.
“You started the insults!”
“That's not how this works!”
“It's exactly how this works!”
I finally managed to grab both his wrists and pin them, and we froze like that, breathing hard and grinning at each other like idiots. His face was inches from mine, close enough that I could see the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled for real, and for a second neither of us moved.
“Truce?” he said finally.
“Truce,” I agreed, and let go of his wrists.
He settled back against my shoulder, and I could feel him still shaking slightly with laughter. “Can't believe you're still ticklish there. You'd think playing professional hockey would've toughened you up.”
“Getting hit by two-hundred-pound defensemen is different from getting poked in the ribs by assholes with bony fingers.”
“My fingers aren't bony.”
“They're drummer fingers. They're definitely bony.”
“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.
“Thank you,” he said into my shirt. “For listening to me. For not hating me after everything.”
“I could never hate you,” I told him, and the words came out before I could stop them. They were honest and raw and more true than anything else I'd said all night. “Not even close.”
He pulled back far enough to look up at me with those damn eyes that had always been too expressive for his own good, and he smiled. “I'll text you.”
“You better.”
He climbed into his car and started the engine, and I stood there in the cold watching his taillights disappear down the dirt road until I couldn't see them anymore.
Then I stood there a little longer after that, staring up at the stars that had watched us break open together, and I tried to figure out how the hell I was supposed to go home and sleep after everything that had just happened.
My phone buzzed in my pocket about ten minutes later.
Soren
Home safe. Thanks for tonight. I mean it.
I stared at the message for a long time before I managed to type back a response.
Rook
Anytime. I mean that too.
Soren
Goodnight, Rook.
I smiled despite everything, despite the exhaustion and the emotional wreckage and the cold that had settled deep into my bones.
Rook
Goodnight, Soren.
I drove home in complete silence because my mind was too full and too empty at the same time to handle music.
The house was dark when I got there, and I walked inside without bothering to turn on any lights.
I just went straight to my bedroom and collapsed onto the bed fully clothed without even taking off my shoes.
The ceiling stared back at me in the darkness, and I replayed the entire night in my head on loop.
His face when he'd cried. The way his body had fit against mine like no time had passed at all.
The truth he'd finally told me about his parents and his siblings and why he'd disappeared.
The years we'd lost because he'd been too ashamed to ask for help and I'd been too hurt to keep looking harder.
It didn't fix everything between us. He was right about that.
But it was a start, and after years of having absolutely nothing, a start felt like everything.