Chapter Four #2
"Working student?" he asks after a while.
I nod. “Night classes mostly. I'm almost done with my associate's degree."
"In what?"
"Something practical."
“Such as?”
“Business administration.”
"Good choice.”
"Is it?"
"It means you think ahead. You plan."
I almost laugh at that. If only he knew how little I've planned, how much of my life has been reaction and survival and trying to keep my head above water.
We reach the steep section of the trail—the part where it climbs up along the ridge, where the trees thin out and you can start to see the valley below.
My breath comes harder now, and I focus on counting steps instead of breathing.
Seventeen to the next switchback. Twenty-four to the outcropping of rocks. Thirty-one to where the view opens up.
He stays beside me the whole time. Never ahead. Never behind. Just there.
We reach the overlook point.
It's exactly as beautiful as I remembered—the frozen lake spread out below us, a sheet of pale blue-white ice surrounded by dark trees and distant mountains. The sky is that particular shade of winter gray that makes everything feel quiet and still, like the world is holding its breath.
I walk to the edge of the overlook. There's a low stone wall here, natural rock that keeps you from getting too close to the drop-off. I lean against it, trying to catch my breath, and he comes to stand beside me.
Too close.
Not touching, but close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, close enough that if I shifted my weight even slightly, my shoulder would brush his.
I don't move.
Neither does he.
The gap between our bodies is the loudest thing in the world.
I start counting without meaning to. The distance. Four inches. Maybe three and a half. My lips move silently with the numbers, and I hate myself for doing it, but I can't stop. It's what I do when I'm nervous, when I'm scared, when I'm feeling something I don't know how
to name.
Three inches.
Two and a half.
"It is beautiful," he says quietly.
"I come here to think.” I’m surprised to hear myself sharing this, albeit shyly.
“About what?”
Everything. Nothing. Kansas. My father. The courtroom. The judge's voice saying ‘life without the possibility of parole.’
But most of all, the one thing that I can’t stop thinking about is the letter I received from him months after.
Don’t ever visit me.
The memory makes me swallow hard. And I find myself shoving my hands deep into my pockets. “Just...life,” I finally say.
We stand there in silence. The wind picks up, cutting through my coat, and I shiver without meaning to.
"You’re cold," he says.
"It's February in Wyoming. Everyone's cold."
He makes a sound that might be a laugh, low and quiet. Then he shifts, and suddenly he's standing slightly in front of me, angled so his body blocks the wind.
"Better?" he asks.
I can't speak.
He's close now—closer than before—and I can see everything. The ebony depths of his eyes in the gray afternoon light. The strong line of his jaw. The way his hair falls slightly across his forehead. The small scar above his left eyebrow that I've never noticed before.
Two inches between us.
One.
He's not touching me, but I can feel him anyway. The warmth, the presence, the way he takes up space in a way that should be overwhelming but somehow isn't.
My heart is doing something structurally unsound.
“Thea...”
He reaches up as he says my name, and my breath catches.
Is he going to—
Is he—
Oh.
I almost feel like laughing and cringing at the same time when Santino simply ends up adjusting my coat collar and pulling it up against the wind. His fingers brush my neck—just barely, just for half a second—and, well, there goes my again.
"So you don’t freeze on the way down.”
His hand lingers. Just for a moment. Just long enough that I can feel the warmth of his fingers against my skin, can feel my pulse jumping under his touch.
Then he pulls back.
Steps away.
The cold rushes in to fill the space where he was, and I want to protest, want to tell him to come back, want to close that gap myself.
But I don't.
I just stand there with my coat collar pulled up and my heart racing and the exact imprint of his fingers still burning against my neck.
"We should go," I say, and my voice comes out rough. "It's getting late."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then: "Yes."
We turn and start back down the trail.
The walk back is different. Quieter somehow, even though we weren't talking much on the way up. But this silence feels heavier. Weighted. Like there are words neither of us is saying, and the not-saying is taking up all the space between us.
I count steps to distract myself. Thirty-one from the overlook to the outcropping. Twenty-four to the switchback. Seventeen to where the trail levels out again.
He stays beside me. Not behind. Not ahead. Beside.
And I'm hyperaware of every single thing—the sound of our boots on the snow, the way our breath comes out in white clouds, the careful distance he's maintaining now, like he's deliberately not getting too close.
Like touching my collar broke some rule he'd set for himself.
Like he's trying to rebuild the distance.
We're halfway down, maybe twenty minutes into the descent, when I hear it.
Voices.
Female voices, bright and carrying through the cold air. Coming up the trail toward us.
My stomach drops.
I see them before they see us—a group of three or four women, dressed in expensive ski gear that probably costs more than my car. Designer jackets. High-end boots. The kind of people who winter in Jackson Hole because they can, not because they live here.
And in front—
Kimberly.
She's wearing white—white puffer jacket, white pants, even her hat is white—and her blonde hair is perfect despite the wind, and she looks like she stepped out of a ski resort catalog.
She sees us. Her eyes go wide for a second—genuine surprise—and then her face rearranges itself into that bright, glossy smile.
"Oh!" Her voice cuts through the quiet like a knife. "Santino!"
He stops walking. His expression doesn't change, but something in his posture shifts—not quite tense, but alert. Wary.
Kimberly and her group close the distance. They're all beautiful in that effortless way that suggests personal trainers and expensive skincare and lives without coffee stains or bald tires. Lives without fathers in prison. Lives without counting steps to stay calm.
"Fancy meeting you here!" Kimberly says, and her smile is so bright it almost hurts to look at. She looks at me then, and I almost step back. She’s still smiling, but why does it feel like she wants to stab me instead?
“Wasn’t it just last night when you said that you didn’t know him?”
“I—”
“I told her to keep my identity a secret.”
Santino’s unexpected answer has me biting my lip hard. I don’t want him to lie for my sake, but I feel like it’s only going to make things worse if I make a big deal out of it.
“HOW NICE THAT YOU TRUST her to do so.” Kimberly’s smile has turned brittle now. “Is that why you’re spending time with her then? Rewarding her silence by slumming it?”
It takes a few extra moments before I realize that the other girl really said those words out loud, and I can feel my face goes white as the insult behind it starts sinking in.
Kimberly is still smiling while her friends look uncomfortable, their gazes darting between the other girl and...him.
Santino.
His face has turned cold and hard, and I find myself gulping even though I know it’s not me he’s angry at.
"Scusa.” His voice is so dangerously soft. "What did you say?"
"Oh, I just meant—" Kimberly's smile doesn't waver, but something in her eyes flickers. Uncertainty. "I mean, you usually go for—you know. Your type. I just wouldn't have guessed—"
"My type." His accent is thicker now. "Tell me, what is my type?"
"Santino, I didn't mean—"
"No. Please. Explain to me what you meant when you said I was, how did you put it, slumming it?"
Kimberly's smile is starting to crack around the edges. "I was just joking—"
"It did not sound like a joke."
The silence is excruciating.
All of Kimberly’s friends are suddenly busy doing all sorts of things and staring at different directions—anywhere but him—while Kimberly looks between us like she's trying to figure out how to fix this, how to laugh it off, how to make it into nothing.
My own thoughts are a mess, but the moment I see his fists clench, and I realize he’s about to say something more vicious—
“We should go,” I blurt out.
Santino stiffens.
I manage a smile. “It’s about to get dark.”
I wish I could say something else, but my eyes start stinging all of a sudden, and so I quickly turn away.
The last thing I want is for them to see me crying.
I walk as fast as I can.
I hear footsteps behind me, but he doesn't try to catch up, and it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.
How...perfect.
I start counting steps out of habit. It’s what I’ve learned to do when I'm falling apart.
One, two, three.
Fourteen to the next bend. Thirty-eight to the clearing. Sixty-two to the steep section. Each number is something to hold onto, something to keep me from completely dissolving.
Slumming it.
Kimberly’s words keep harrassing my thoughts, and I start seeing myself in her lenses.
Because in the eyes of the world, it is true.
Santino is slumming it when he’s with me.
For all I know, I’m just this phase to him. An experiment. A walk on the wild side before he goes back to his real life with his trophies and his Monaco apartment and women like Kimberly who know which fork to use at fancy dinners.
So maybe you should quit while you’re ahead, Thea.
The trail levels out. The parking lot comes into view. His car is still there. My car is back at the café. I'm going to have to get in that car with him, sit in that small space, and pretend I'm fine.
I reach the car and stop. Turn around.
He's ten feet behind me. He stopped when I stopped, maintaining that
careful distance.
"Thank you for the hike," I say.
My voice is polite. Professional. The same voice I use at the café when I'm taking orders from customers I'll never see again.
The same voice I use when I'm invisible.
"Thea—"
"It was nice. I should get back. I have homework."
"Thea, what she said—"
"It's fine." I'm still using that voice. That careful, invisible voice. "Can we go?"
He looks at me for a long moment. His expression is unreadable again, all the warmth from the overlook gone, replaced by something I can't identify.
Then he unlocks the car without a word.
I get in.
He gets in.
We drive back to the café in silence.
The fourteen-minute drive feels like twelve hours.
I count seconds instead of looking at him.
Eight hundred and forty seconds. That's how long it takes to drive from the trailhead back to the café when you're not speaking, when the silence is so heavy it feels like it has weight, when you're trying very hard not to cry.
840 seconds of me staring out the window and him driving with that same precise control and neither of us saying anything because what is there to say?
He pulls into the café parking lot. My car is still here, waiting exactly where I left it.
"Thank you for the ride," I say, and I reach for the door handle.
"Thea." His hand moves—not toward me, just toward the space between us—and then stops. "She is wrong."
I don't look at him. I can't. "It's fine."
"It is not fine. What she said—"
“It’s really fine." I open the door. The cold air rushes in. "I enjoyed the walk. Thank you."
"This is not—" He stops. Takes a breath. When he speaks again, his voice has gone formal. No contractions. "This is not what I wanted."
"I know." And I do know. I know he didn't plan for Kimberly to show up. I know he didn't want her to say what she said. I know he was trying to defend me back there on the trail.
But none of that changes the fact that she was right.
"I have to go," I say.
"Tomorrow—"
"I'm working."
"Thea—"
"Goodbye, Santino."
I get out of the car. Close the door. Walk to my car—fourteen steps, I count them automatically—and I don't look back.
I get in. Start the engine. It takes three tries again, which is mortifying, but he's still sitting there in the parking lot, watching, and I can feel his eyes on me the whole time.
Finally the engine catches, and I pull out, and I drive home, and I don't let myself cry until I'm inside my apartment with the door locked and no one can see.
Then I sit on my bed—the mattress that's really just an IKEA frame I assembled wrong—and I let myself fall apart.
I know You’re here for me, God. I know I’m safe with You. I know I’m loved by You. But I still hurt.