Chapter 40 #2
“I’m sorry,” I whispered against his breath.
“If it makes you feel better, a part of me will always carry regret for not choosing a life with you. I think it’s because I know you would have been the better choice, but my heart is too big for its own good.
It wants to be with Caiden, despite my feelings for you, despite how good it could be. ”
He kissed me again after I said that. His lip movements were slower as if he wanted to remember the curve of my lips and how it felt to hold me in his arms.
Caiden came in through the screen door two hours later, the slam echoing across the kitchen tiles, and for a second I saw him as I had in high school: angry, dangerous, and dazzling.
His hair was wild from the wind and his cheeks were raw and red, eyes bright with the cold and something deeper.
He barely glanced at Dante, but his gaze snagged on me, lips parting like he wanted to say my name but didn’t trust his voice not to say more.
Dante rose, made a show of stacking his mug and book, then said, “I’ll be out back. Try not to kill each other.”
Caiden and I just stood there for a while, not speaking, until my nerves got the better of me. I traced the lip of my mug, pretending heat still lingered there. “Long walk?” I finally asked.
“Long enough,” he said, voice hoarse. “Didn’t want to come back.”
We both knew he would, though. I felt the air between us tightening, the heaviness of the unsaid, heavier than any of the bruises he’d left on me years ago.
“I thought about last night,” I said, suddenly, and tried not to flinch at my own boldness.
He grunted, rubbing his jaw. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I enjoyed it,” I said, and I could feel the tension of our kiss augmenting.
“You sleep?” he changed the subject, not looking at me.
“Yeah. I did.”
He nodded, shoving his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt. “We should get going. It’s a long drive. A day and a half if we push it.”
I looked around at the little lake house, still bathed in cold light, the bare pine floors echoing under every step. “I’ll miss this place,” I said. “It felt safe, at least for a minute.”
Dante came back in as we were collecting our things, hands shoved in his jacket. He was calm, not bitter, and I realized that the sadness had burned off him like morning fog, leaving something resigned and steady.
“You two heading back to where you came from?”
Caiden nodded as he brought the bags to the door. “Yep. Back to North Carolina. I want to get going while we have daylight.”
Dante followed us to the porch, his boots thumping heavily on the boards.
We did an awkward shuffle by the car, cramming bags in the trunk and slamming the lid too loudly. Dante gave Caiden a long look, then offered me a hug that was all bone and muscle and not nearly as sad as I’d braced for.
“You take care of yourself,” he said into my hair.
“I’ll try.” I clung tighter than I meant to, then stepped back, blinking hard. I almost wanted to stay. Almost.
Dante reached out to Caiden, and for a second, I thought they might skip the handshake entirely. But they did it. Messy, uncoordinated, a collision of aggression and unspoken respect.
“If you fuck this up, I’ll find you,” Dante said, not even trying to make it a joke.
Caiden just nodded, jaw flexing. “Yeah. I know.”
We got in the car. I buckled up, staring through the windshield at a spot just above Dante’s head. The engine coughed into life, the heater breathing frost-laced air across my knees.
As we pulled away, Dante stuck his hands in his jacket and watched the road until he shrank in the mirror, until there was nothing left of him but a dark smudge on the ice.
For the first hour, we didn’t say much. Caiden stared out at the endless highway, one hand on the wheel, the other drumming slow and steady against his thigh. I watched the way the sunlight cut through the windshield, the way it painted his cheekbones with gold.
I wanted to say it, I wanted to tell him I’d chosen, that I wasn’t going to run anymore, that whatever we were or would be was enough. But every time I opened my mouth, the words stuck.
We passed out of the woods and onto a four-lane divided by dead grass and billboards for tractor dealerships and debt consolidation schemes. I watched them slide by, the names and numbers blurring into one long, meaningless line.
Every so often, Caiden would clear his throat, as if about to speak, but then think better of it and let the silence repopulate.
A few hours into the drive, he braked hard for a deer that ghosted across the shoulder, barely a shadow against the scrub, but it was enough to jolt me out of my daze.
“You good?” he said, not taking his eyes off the road.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Good thing you saw it in time.”
He made an agreeable noise, but didn’t say anything more.
The cold and controlled Caiden was back, not the wild and passionate one I had been with at the lake, and before that.
At some point, we crossed a state line, and the light got buttery, wild, and more forgiving. He reached for the radio, paused, then let his hand hover over the dial.
"You can put on whatever you want," I said, my voice a little too bright, like a girl on her first date.
He flicked through the stations, settling on classic rock. It was familiar enough for both of us to pretend that we were just two people with nowhere particular to be.
Fields turned to foothills, foothills to blue ridges, and still I said nothing.
The further we got from Pathosbury, the more I wanted to look back. I craned my neck at every turn, half-hoping to catch a last glimpse of the lake, or Dante, or even just a road sign that said home in a way that meant something.
I shouldn’t have missed it. There was nothing left for me there but the pieces of a family that had dissolved years before. But grief kept coming back like a relentless tide.
I thought about my mother, about how she’d once joked that if she ever died, she wanted her ashes scattered from the back of a moving train.
Funny how in the end, she chose to be buried.
Was that all any of us were, at the end? Just a rotting corpse left to return to the earth, or ashes spread into the wind, forever lost in the space between life and death.
I could feel Caiden watching me from the corner of his eye, gauging how close I was to splintering. There was a tenderness in it, a patience that I almost didn’t trust.
When I was little, I thought grief was supposed to fade, like a fever or a bruise. That it would bleed out of your system until there was nothing left but a dull story to tell at parties, a “remember when” you could laugh about.
But it didn’t fade. It calcified. It hollowed out a space inside you and then never left, a roommate you could never evict.
After a while, the landscape slid into sameness: gas stations and dead strip malls, cell towers strung along the ridge like telephone poles from a different century. Even the memories got repetitive.
At some point I dozed off, then woke to the smell of gas station pizza and the sound of Caiden cursing at the pump. My head throbbed with the ache of sleeping upright and the deeper, older ache that came with remembering.
He handed me a bottle of water and a pack of peanut M&Ms. No words, just a look, the kind that asked if I was okay even though he already knew the answer.
"Thanks," I said, peeling open the foil with shaking fingers.
He started the car and headed back onto the road.
I waited, letting the silence fill up the cab, letting it press against my ribs until I couldn’t take it anymore.
"Why do you think we survived?" I asked suddenly, surprising even myself.
He blinked, slow and reptilian. "What?"
"Colorado. The woods. All of it.”
He kept his eyes on the road, but his hand twitched on the wheel. “Because we were tougher than the things that wanted to kill us.”
“You don’t believe in fate, or luck? Just brutality?”
“Luck’s a lie,” he said, face turning hard. “If you get out, it’s because you crawled over someone else’s corpse to do it. No one’s ever rescued. They just escape.”
I thought about that, about the way we’d left the woods in Colorado with our skin still on, but something raw and vital scraped away forever. I thought about the way Caiden stabbed Blake so viciously, and how we left his corpse in that cabin. “So, you think we just outlasted it all?”
He grunted. “We didn’t outlast anything. It’s still there. You just get better at keeping it away from the surface.”
I let the words settle, mixing with the ache in my throat. I remembered the way he’d held me after the lake, fingers digging in like he thought I might dissolve if he let go.
Maybe he was right. Maybe we were nothing but willpower and scar tissue.
“Do you regret it?” I spoke. “That it was me you were stuck with, and that you didn’t leave me behind?”
He was quiet for so long, I thought he would ignore it. “No. That’s the only thing I don’t regret.”
“My mom used to say we only get one life. That you have to decide if you’re gonna spend it running from shit or chasing something better.” The words felt thin, borrowed.
Caiden shot me a sidelong look, not unkind. The sun caught in his eyes, turning them that impossible gray-blue that always made me think of thunderstorms, or the hush right before one breaks.
“I used to wait for things to happen,” I admitted. “I thought if I kept my head down long enough, it’d all just fix itself.”
“Did it?” His hand tightened on the wheel, knuckles pale. “Did playing dead ever fix anything?”
I looked out at the endless blur of pine and asphalt. “No. Just made it easier to stay numb.”
He rolled the window half down, letting the cold air slice between us. “I think you like the pain.”
“Excuse me?”
He shrugged, eyes back on the road, jaw set. “Not in a pathetic way. Just—you want to feel something. Even if it’s bad. You always did.”
It stung, because it was true. Because the only thing worse than hurting was the nothing that came before it.
“Maybe I do,” I muttered. “But you’re not exactly Mr. Stability, either.”