14. Taven
TAVEN
The festival crowds are long gone. Main Street sleeps under a thin blanket of fog, and the air carries the ghost of bonfire smoke and damp, fallen leaves.
A burst of laughter echoes from two blocks over, probably a few stragglers leaving the bar, and then the quiet rushes back in.
I should go home. I should put a football field of distance between me and whatever almost happened under that streetlight.
But there she is. On the inn’s porch, a small shape wrapped in a thick wool blanket, knees pulled tight to her chest. She’s staring out at the dark trees as if she can see something I can’t.
My feet stop moving. My brain tells me to turn around, to walk the other way, but my body has other ideas.
I find myself climbing the porch steps and dropping into the wicker chair beside her.
It groans under my weight, the sound loud in the stillness.
The decision was already made, long before I got here.
For a long time, we just sit. She watches the fog curl through the pines like slow-motion smoke.
I take a sip of the god-awful coffee I grabbed from the twenty-four-hour gas station on my way back from breaking down the last of the equipment.
It’s burnt and bitter, but it’s hot. The silence between us isn’t the awkward kind, the sort that begs to be filled with pointless chatter.
It’s solid. A tangible thing you can lean against. With anyone else, I’d be crawling out of my skin, already planning my exit.
But with her, the quiet feels like a shared space, a room we can both occupy without needing to perform.
It settles over us, comfortable and deep.
The wicker creaks again as she shifts, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. Her voice is so quiet, the wind almost snatches it.
“I don’t know who I am when no one needs anything from me.”
The words are a bare whisper in the dark, but they land like a punch to my solar plexus.
Every version of herself. The good daughter.
The perfect fiancée. The person who smooths everything over for everyone else.
I don’t say a word, just let her admission settle in the space between us.
Something sharp and familiar twists low in my chest—an old, healed-over injury that still aches when the weather changes.
I recognise the exhaustion beneath her confession, the quiet panic of realising you’ve spent your whole life performing a role so well that you can’t find the real person behind the costume anymore.
I take another swallow of the shitty coffee, the heat a welcome distraction. When I finally speak, the words come out stripped of the usual sarcasm I use as armor.
“My marriage was over long before the divorce was final.”
She turns her head to look at me, her face pale in the faint light spilling from the inn’s front window.
“I got so lost inside being the guy everyone could count on. The dependable one. The one who had his shit together. I was so focused on being useful that I disappeared. One day I woke up and realised I was just a collection of responsibilities that my wife didn’t even want anymore.”
The truth of it settles between us, heavy and cold in the night air. There’s no bitterness left in the memory, not anymore. Just the clean, quiet grief for a man who let himself fade away, one small, helpful act at a time.
She turns toward me then, and something raw flickers across her face—surprise mixed with recognition, like she's seeing another person clearly at last. The careful mask she wears slips just enough to reveal the bone-deep exhaustion underneath.
Her brown eyes search mine in the dim porch light, looking for proof that I actually mean what I said.
"I never thought about it like that." Her voice carries a tremor she's trying to hide. "Being so focused on being useful that you just... disappear."
The blanket shifts around her shoulders as she adjusts her position, facing me more fully now. The festival noise has completely died away, leaving just the distant hum of the highway and the soft creak of the inn settling into itself for the night.
"You do it too," I tell her, keeping my voice level. "Apologize for existing in spaces you have every right to occupy."
She opens her mouth to respond, then closes it. A small frown appears between her eyebrows.
"Earlier tonight, you apologized to Mrs. Henderson for laughing at her joke.
You apologized to Ben for asking him to reach something off a high shelf.
You apologized to Lachlan for needing a clean towel.
" I lean back in the wicker chair, watching her process this.
"None of those things required an apology. "
Her face goes through a series of micro-expressions—confusion, then dawning awareness, then something that looks almost like panic.
"I didn't realize I was doing that."
"You apologized to me three times during our walk here. Once for taking too long to decide which street to take. Once for talking too much about the festival. Once for—and I quote—'being weird about everything.'"
The blanket slips off one shoulder as she shifts again, her hands moving restlessly in her lap. I watch her mentally replay our conversation, cataloguing each unnecessary apology.
"Oh god, I'm sorry, I—" She stops mid-sentence, her eyes widening as she catches herself. A laugh escapes her, but it sounds more shocked than amused. "I was about to apologize for apologizing."
"There it is."
She stares at me for a long moment, and I can practically see the gears turning in her head. The realization is settling in—not just the pattern of behavior, but what it means. How much space she's trained herself not to take up. How much of herself she's learned to compress and minimize.
"I don't know how to stop," she admits quietly. "It feels automatic now. Like breathing."
Her voice gets smaller as she continues, and she pulls the blanket tighter around herself like armor.
"I'm sorry for being so emotional about this, it's just?—"
"Hey." I lean forward, forearms braced against my knees, and lock my gaze onto hers. The word cuts through her spiralling apology cleanly. "You have got to stop acting like your existence is inconveniencing everybody around you."
The impact hits her like a physical blow. Her face crumples for just a second before she jerks her head away, blinking rapidly against tears that spring up without warning. Her hand flies to her mouth as if she can hold back the emotion by force.
My chest tightens painfully, not because she's crying, but because she looks genuinely shocked that someone noticed.
I watch the tears she's fighting so hard to contain, and something fundamental shifts inside my chest. This isn't about attraction anymore, or the easy flirtation that's been building between us for awhile.
This is something deeper, more dangerous.
The careful walls I've spent years building around my emotions crack and splinter.
Without thinking, I slide my chair closer to hers.
The wicker scrapes against the porch boards, but I don't care about the noise.
My hand finds the back of her neck, fingers settling against the warm skin just below her hairline.
The touch is gentle, grounding—nothing like the charged moments we've shared before.
This is different. This is me offering her an anchor in whatever storm she's drowning in.
"You don't have to hold it together right now."
Her breath catches, and then she's leaning into my touch like she's been starving for it.
The movement is so instinctive, so unconsciously trusting, that it nearly stops my heart.
She turns toward me, and the careful distance she maintains with everyone dissolves completely.
Her forehead comes to rest against my shoulder, and I feel the exact moment she stops fighting the tears.
They come quietly, without the dramatic sobs I might have expected. Just a steady, exhausted release of everything she's been carrying alone. My other hand finds the edge of the blanket and pulls it more securely around her shoulders, creating a cocoon of warmth against the mountain chill.
"I'm so tired of being careful," she whispers against my shirt, the words muffled but clear enough to shatter something inside me. "I'm tired of making myself smaller so other people feel comfortable."
My thumb traces a slow circle at the base of her skull, and I feel her entire body relax incrementally. The fight goes out of her posture, and she melts against me with a vulnerability that's almost painful to witness.
"Then stop."
The words come out rougher than I intended, but she doesn't pull away.
If anything, she settles deeper into the shelter I'm offering, and I realize with crystalline, terrifying clarity that this moment is rewiring something fundamental in my brain.
The careful emotional distance I've maintained since my divorce—the protective numbness that's kept me safe—crumbles like wet sand.
Above us, the autumn stars burn cold and distant against the black sky. The mountains rise silent and eternal around this small pocket of light where we sit, and I understand with the kind of bone-deep certainty that changes everything that I am completely, irrevocably lost.
This woman has carved out space inside me I didn't even know existed. She's made herself at home in places I thought were permanently sealed off, and there's no going back from this. No clean exit, no easy retreat into familiar solitude.
I'm in trouble. Deep, life-altering trouble.
And I don't want to be anywhere else.