Chapter 20
Silas
The words left me before I even knew I’d spoken them. She froze for half a second, then shifted toward me — slow, careful, still half asleep.
When she tucked herself against me, the world just… steadied. The storm outside could’ve torn the roof away and I don’t think I would have noticed. Her body was warm against mine, soft in all the ways I hadn’t dared imagine.
I pulled the blanket higher, cocooning us in that narrow space between the fire’s glow and the first hint of dawn. Her hair brushed my jaw when she sighed, and something deep in my chest twisted.
I’d forgotten what it felt like to hold someone who wasn’t performing comfort — who just was. She didn’t ask for anything. Didn’t demand or expect or fill the silence with explanations. She just breathed, and I matched her, breath for breath.
When her hand found mine under the blanket — slow, uncertain — she laced our fingers together against the soft curve of her stomach. That simple touch did something I wasn’t ready for.
This wasn’t about rescue. Or guilt. Or loneliness. It was something small and human and real.
I pressed my mouth to the back of her head — not a kiss exactly, more a confession I didn’t have words for.
She made a tiny sound, barely there; was it contentment or surrender?
And I realized then that whatever this was — however impossible or temporary — I didn’t want to let it go.
She was curved into me, the back of her head under my chin, my arm still draped over her waist. I could feel every slow rise of her breathing against my ribs.
A stronger man would have moved.
I wasn’t that man.
Instead, I let my thumb trace the edge of her wrist, just enough to feel the faint beat there. She didn’t pull away, but her voice came small and careful. “Are you always this bad at convincing yourself that you’re not thinking?”
I swallowed. “I’m thinking too much.”
“That’s what I thought.” She shifted a little, enough that the blanket rustled, enough that the scent of her hair hit me all over again. “You’re already figuring out how to write this without writing it.”
She wasn’t wrong. I was already trying to find the words that might make sense of what we’d done, what we hadn’t done.
“I don’t want to turn you into a story,” I said finally. “I just… don’t know what else to do with something that feels this big.”
Her fingers found my forearm, resting there like an anchor. “It doesn’t have to be a story,” she whispered. “It can just be whatever this is.”
The simplicity of the moment landed somewhere deep. What this is. Not what it means, or where it’s going. Just this — her body warm against mine, the storm easing outside, the brief illusion that we’d built a small, secret world between us.
I breathed her in and let my forehead rest against her shoulder. “You make that sound easy.”
“It’s not.” Her laugh was soft, sad. “But we can pretend, right?”
After several quiet moments, her voice drifted through the dark again, quiet but steady. “Can I ask you something?”
I made a small sound against her shoulder — something that wasn’t quite a yes, but wasn’t no either.
“Why are you really here?”
The question didn’t surprise me. The timing did. She could’ve asked last night, when I was too far gone to answer, or tomorrow, when I’d have time to lie. But now — wrapped in the same blanket, her heartbeat brushing mine — it landed right where it hurt.
“I told you,” I said. “I needed quiet.”
She made a soft noise. “No one rents a cabin in the middle of nowhere for quiet, Silas. They rent it to run.”
That stung, mostly because it was true. “No one was supposed to notice.”
“I’m very observant,” she murmured. “Especially when a man looks like he hasn’t slept in a decade and crashes my lonely little escape.”
I exhaled through my nose, something like a laugh. “That’s generous.”
Silence again. Her thumb brushed over the back of my hand where it rested at her waist — absent, tender.
Then, “You miss her.”
The words froze me.
She didn’t have to say who. I could still see the edge of a photograph in my suitcase — one I hadn’t been able to throw away, one I’d stopped looking at months ago but couldn’t forget.
“I used to,” I said carefully. “When things were good. When the books were popular and agents were banging down my door to get to me. Now I just miss who I thought I was when she loved me.”
Her breath hitched. “That’s so much worse.”
“It is.”
She shifted then, just enough that her back pressed fully into my chest, her head tipping until it rested against my jaw. Her warmth was steady, grounding.
“I understand,” she whispered. “I wasn’t enough for him either. I tried to be, but—” she stopped herself, shaking her head. “He made me feel like the worst version of myself. You know?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I know.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty this time. It was full — of what we’d lost, what we’d found, and what neither of us had been brave enough to name.
Her heartbreak fresh, her wounds still bleeding. Mine older, scarred and puckered.
After a long moment, I tightened my arm around her waist. Not to possess. Just to stay. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like I was running.
She didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t have to. Every breath between us said what words couldn’t. Just for a moment, it felt like the world was small enough to hold in my hands.
Then my phone buzzed against the floorboards.
Not a little buzz, either. The kind that echoed in the quiet, like a reminder from somewhere far, far outside the cabin walls — that other life, the one with deadlines and expectations and people who didn’t care if I’d bled myself dry to escape them.
Colette stiffened just slightly, pulling back just enough to glance over her shoulder.
“Was that…?”
I cursed under my breath and reached blindly toward the edge of the mattress, fingers brushing cold metal. One look at the screen was enough to ice the inside of my lungs.
PAGES DUE — FIRST HALF
Of course it was.
Of course the moment I tried to breathe, the universe reminded me I wasn’t allowed. Colette’s voice was small, curious in a way that felt suddenly dangerous. “Are you gonna get that?”
I hesitated. There was a whole practiced speech I should give — an explanation about deadlines or revisions or the new contract everyone kept pretending I cared about. But all I could feel was the warmth where her back had been pressed against me, already fading.
“It can wait,” I said.
And it could. But the world outside was already clawing its way back in — threatening to make everything in here feel temporary.
Even her.