Chapter 20
Levi
I’d been on the couch with the television on low, not watching it, running through versions of a conversation in my head the way you did when you cared too much about how it went.
It was the headlights that caught my attention—sweeping across my window as a vehicle turned into the lot—and when I leaned forward to look, I could see it was Matt’s truck and not her car, which told me enough.
I watched through the window as he pulled in, waited until she was inside, then sat for a few more minutes in his truck the way he did before finally pulling away.
I gave it a beat after his taillights disappeared.
Long enough that it didn’t feel like I’d been watching for her, even though I had been, even though the moment those headlights crossed my window, I’d been on my feet without fully deciding to be.
I turned the television off. Pulled on my jacket.
Stood in the middle of my trailer for a moment in the quiet dark and thought about what Cade had said.
Don’t make it a big thing. Say it like something that needed saying.
Then I crossed the narrow strip of gravel between our trailers.
I knocked once, knuckles soft against the metal door.
It opened almost instantly.
Becca stood framed in the doorway, sleeves of her pink sweater shoved up to her elbows, exposing the delicate blue veins at her wrists.
Her hair had escaped its loose tie; dark strands curved against her neck and caught the lamplight like polished wood.
Her eyes met mine. They were steady, but rimmed with something raw and unguarded.
She smelled faintly of lavender soap, and she was so beautiful I couldn’t stop looking at her.
“Hey,” I said, voice low.
“Hey.” Her word was barely a breath. “Come in.”
I stepped inside. Noticing the soft crackle of the lavender candle flickering on the side table, the comforting, slightly dusty scent of books and worn upholstery. My boots made faint thuds on the linoleum.
“You didn’t drive yourself home,” I said, easing back against the narrow counter. The edge pressed cool metal into my palms.
She paused, fingers tightening briefly on the doorframe. “Matt insisted on driving me.” She turned fully toward me, arms crossing loosely over her chest like a shield she wasn’t sure she needed anymore.
“You want to tell me about it?” I asked.
She exhaled slowly, the sound almost a sigh. “I got a text earlier.”
“From who?”
“Unknown number.”
My shoulders drew tight. “About what?”
“About something we’re going to talk about.” She looked down at her bare feet, toenails painted a chipped soft blue, then lifted her gaze again. “I have a podcast.”
“Okay,” I said, keeping my tone even, gentle.
Her eyes searched mine—braced for my reaction and vulnerable. “It’s anonymous. I pitch my voice lower, slow it down a little, and use a modulator. It’s just stories. Observations. Things I have on my mind and don’t always say out loud. Like journaling but saying it loud instead.”
“How long?”
“A while. I’d do it whenever Travis was out, and I used to do it almost every night here. But not for a while.”
“And the text?”
“They said they missed it.” Her voice cracked faintly on the last word, thin as a reed.
“Is this connected to what’s been troubling you? To Matt? To the panic attack?”
“Part of it.” She spoke in soft fragments—the sighting at the riverbank, narrating live without thinking, the file erased from her laptop as if it had never existed. “Matt’s on it. He says it’ll be okay.”
“Then you will be. I trust him. Always have.” I studied the faint freckles scattered across her nose. “Are you okay?”
“I will be.” Her eyes found mine again, softer, almost liquid in the low light. “You’re here.”
“Then what are you really afraid of?” I asked, voice low. “If it’s not that?”
A small, trembling laugh escaped her, not amusement; she was nervous. “You don’t waste time.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Everything,” She looked down at the worn floor between us. “I’m scared of needing you. Of needing anyone, really. I can be too much. I don’t want to drag anyone down.”
The raw honesty sliced through me. “Needing someone isn’t a weakness, Becca.”
“It feels like it when they leave.” Quiet. Factual. Carved from years of proof. From her parents and Travis.
I stepped closer until the warmth of her body brushed mine. “I didn’t leave. And I won’t.”
“We drifted apart,” she whispered.
“You pulled back,” I corrected gently. “But I let you. We were young. Then life happened. You had Travis.” His name hung heavy, but without bitterness.
“You were okay without me,” she said, turning away, fingers threading through her hair so the strands lifted and fell like dark water, and her hair tie fell to the ground, unheeded. “God, none of this is coming out right. I’m not blaming you. I’m not trying to be accusatory.”
“Becca.” I kept my voice low, steady as a heartbeat. “It’s not your fault either. We’ve both learned to stand alone. That’s not the question now. The question is whether you want to keep standing there by yourself.”
Her breath hitched audibly. “I don’t want to need someone and then discover I was wrong about them,” she murmured.
This wasn’t only about me. That was every door that had closed behind someone she loved. I reached for her hand—slow enough she could pull away. She didn’t. Her fingers were cool at first, then warmed quickly in mine.
“You’re not wrong about me,” I said. “And I’m not asking you to rebuild your whole world around me tonight. I’m asking you to stop pretending you don’t want me standing beside you in it.”
Her grip tightened, small but sure. “That’s different.”
“Yeah. It is.”
The quiet stretched, soft as the lamplight pooling around us.
“I don’t say things I don’t mean,” I told her. “And I don’t make drunken proposals or crawl through windows for people I’m only halfway about.”
A tiny smile flickered across her lips, there and gone. “I believe you.”
“Then let me push you a little,” I said quietly. “Can I?”
Her eyes searched mine.
“Not into anything you’re not ready for,” I added. “Just into admitting you don’t want to keep pushing me away.”
“I don’t want you to leave. And I don’t want to do this alone,” she said. The words fell soft, brave, trembling at the edges.
Something deep inside me unclenched. “And for the record,” I murmured, “you were never too much. You were just mine. Always, Becca.”
Her breath caught. “You can’t say that like it’s simple,” she whispered.
“It’s not simple. Nothing about how I feel for you has ever been simple.”
She stepped closer, placing her hand lightly over my heart. Her palm was warm through the cotton of my shirt, and I wondered if she could feel how hard it beat.
“You make it sound like it was obvious,” she said. “How you felt, I mean.”
“It always was to me. But I couldn’t talk about it when you were with him. That wouldn’t have been right. You weren’t free.”
Her gaze drifted to my mouth, then back up. The air between us felt electric.
“I’m free now,” she whispered.
I lifted my hand and brushed a stray lock of hair from her temple. My fingertips grazed her skin, and her eyes fluttered closed.
“I’m not halfway about you,” I repeated.
“Levi…”
I stayed still. Let her choose. She didn’t step back. After a long moment, her hand slid down, but the space between us remained.
She drew a shaky breath. “Now, we have to talk about that proposal…”
I let out a quiet laugh that was half relief, half nerves. “Yeah. That. I was very drunk,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck; the skin there felt hot. “Timing was awful. Delivery was worse.”
Her mouth curved into an encouraging smile. “You weren’t that bad.”
I huffed a laugh. “I was pretty bad.”
“Okay, yeah, you were completely wasted.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, serious now. “You didn’t deserve to have something that big dropped on you like that.
Not the way I did it, and not that night.
” I held her gaze, wanting her to hear the difference between this and an excuse.
“You’d just ended something. You were standing in a parking lot dealing with Travis, and instead of just being there for you, I made it about me.
I put something on you that you had no business dealing with on top of everything else you were already going through that night.
” I paused. “That wasn’t fair. The timing was wrong, and I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway, and I’ve thought about that a lot since. ”
She glanced away, then back, eyes softer. “You don’t have to apologize for it. Not when you have all these feelings. Not if on some level, you meant it.”
For a second, I didn’t answer.
I could feel how exposed that was… the space between what I’d said before and what I was about to say now.
Saying it out loud made it real in a way that thinking it never had.
My chest felt tight, not in panic exactly, but in awareness.
Like there was no more room to pretend I hadn’t meant every fractured version of it.
Still, there was something steady under it, too. A kind of relief, like I’d finally stopped avoiding it. Becca deserved someone who would love her out loud.
“I did mean it,” I said slowly. “Just not the way it came out. I’m not asking you to marry me tomorrow. We’ve got a friendship to rebuild.” I let out a breath. “I—somewhere along the line, I stopped imagining a future without you in it. I want to be with you. On purpose. One step at a time.”
The quiet that followed felt like safe ground.
“I’m not looking for an answer,” I added. “I just need you to know it wasn’t a joke.”
She studied my face for a long time. “So you’re not asking me for anything right now?”
“I’m asking you to keep talking to me. Keep letting me in. I want my best friend back, and then I want more.”
Her exhale was soft, almost a sigh of relief. “Okay. I want that. I want all of it.”
I nodded once.
Neither of us moved.