Chapter 12 #2
“The night of the crash, it rained. So hard. I was going too fast, trying to make up time, because she was fussing that we were late. We were and it was my fault. I messed around at the shop too long. The rain was coming down in sheets. You couldn’t see anything.
Just rain falling so fast that the wipers couldn’t keep up.
The road curved… I knew it… I’d driven it a thousand times.
I knew it curved, but it was raining and we were late and I couldn’t see.
I should have pulled over. I should have said we could just be late…
” He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to.
I know what happened. He told me. His whole body is so tense.
He looks at me and the anguish on his face has me sobbing.
“I came to on the bank. I had been ejected. I was so cold. So fucked up. I couldn’t move my leg and blood was everywhere.
I was in so much pain. But I kept trying to crawl back in the water anyway.
I—I thought that maybe… maybe they were just trapped.
That if I could just get to them, I could still…
” His hands are shaking. I reach for them. He lets me.
“I blacked out again. Came to in the hospital, hooked up to wires and with tubes running out of me and connected to machines. I knew… I knew but I couldn’t believe it…
I refused to. I wan— wanted someone to tell me it was a nightmare and that they were fine…
but they weren’t. I knew it.” His voice cracks and I reach for his hand.
I can’t help it. It’s ice cold. My palm covers it, offering warmth, comfort, just anything…
He brokenly sighs. “I think about what she would’ve looked like now,” he’s hoarse. “She’d be eleven. Probably tall. Molly was tall. She’d probably be beside me every fucking day, hauling tubes and latching life vests and fearlessly diving off the rocks even though I told her not to.”
My eyes burn.
“You know what pisses me off?” he says, almost laughing. “She loved this fucking river… wanted to swim in it every day. She loved it, she wasn’t scared of it… and it’s what took her from me.”
I don’t have words. So, I give him what I have.
Presence. Stillness. Touch.
The moment hangs between us like breath in a storm. And then, he leans in.
It’s soft. It’s gentle. Just the press of his lips on mine. His are cold and mine are wet with my tears. It’s nothing like our previous kisses. This kiss doesn’t taste like hunger. It tastes like survival.
We kiss for a long time, our lips just clinging and softly moving together. When we part, he rests his forehead against mine and whispers, “I’m still here.”
“You said that already,” I whisper back.
“Yeah. But I needed to say it to you. Not just leave it on your fucking counter.”
I close my eyes as his words fill the parts of my soul that he hasn’t touched yet. Breathing deeply, I simply say, “Okay.”
I’m cooking lemon pasta, roasted chicken, and a fresh peach cobbler in my kitchen when he stops on the porch like he’s not sure if he’s invited. The screen door is the only thing between him and me, so, I let him in like he never left.
After dinner, we don’t have sex. We don’t need to. We sleep in the same bed, stripped down to our underwear, but clothed. I wake up at 1AM to find him sitting at the edge of the mattress, staring out the window. I can tell he’s not seeing it though.
“You okay?” I whisper.
“No.” He says back. I sit beside him and he says, “But I’m here.”
I nod “Yeah, you are. First time you haven’t left.”
He turns his head and looks at me before crawling back into the bed and lying beside me, “I’m staying.”
I believe him. For the first time since I ran, I believe someone won’t just walk away.
Gruene isn’t walking away.
Gruene
I don’t sleep a wink. Not even close. I lie there beside her, still as stone, while her body curls into mine without hesitation.
She’s soft and warm, and she smells like citrus and rosemary and the ghost of last night.
Her thigh brushes against mine. Her breathing is shallow.
Her skin is slightly damp from the heat lingering in this damn cabin, and yet, I don’t move.
If I move, I’ll break this.
And if I break this… I’m not going to survive it.
Her fingers twitch against my chest around 2AM and for one wild, stupid second, I wonder what it would feel like to fall asleep with her hand inside mine.
To wake up with her mouth on my skin again.
Her breath in my ear. Her body pressed close because she wants to be, not because she has nowhere else to go.
But I already know better than to ask for things I don’t deserve.
I slip out of bed before dawn. She stirs once but doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t ask where I’m going. She doesn’t try to stop me, but she doesn’t roll away from the space I leave behind either. Instead, she curls into the space and snuggles her face against my pillow. My chest pangs.
The screen door creaks like it’s tattling on me as I step out onto the porch.
The river’s quiet this early. Mist is rolling low and soft across the current like it’s keeping secrets I’ve spent years trying to drown.
Sitting down on the top step with a mug of bitter coffee, the weight of everything I didn’t say last night sits hard in my chest.
I told her about Molly.
About Aubree.
About the worst night of my life and how it’s still echoing in my ribs like a scream that never ends.
What I didn’t tell her…
What I’ll never tell anyone.. is that I was twenty-eight and cocky and stupid and so fucking sure I could outdrive the storm.
And now they’re gone.
And I’m still here.
I feel her before I hear her. Her bare feet are on the wood. Her soft breath is in the doorway.
I don’t look back, but I feel the moment she steps outside and drops down beside me.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t ask where I went. She just offers me her silence like it’s a gift.
And for once, it is.
“You ever have a nightmare while you’re awake?” I murmur, asking her but really just wanting to fill the silence.
She turns her head, meeting and holding my eyes. “All the time.”
I nod. “That road…. the one by the drop… I can’t drive it. Not even for tubing runs. Reece does ‘em.”
Her shoulder brushes mine. “Does it help?”
“No.”
It doesn’t.
Nothing does.
We don’t kiss. We don’t need to.
She’s here, and I’m not running.
That’s enough.
For now, it’s enough.
I spend the afternoon half-present at the shop, pretending to check inventory while Reece covers runs. He doesn’t say much—just gives me a look like he knows I’m doing the thing I do when I’m trying to disappear inside myself.
“You’re not ghost-proof, Gruene,” he mutters as he passes me a clipboard. “And she’s not the type who sticks around if you start pulling that Houdini bullshit.”
“I’m not,” I say too fast.
He raises a brow. “Aren’t you though? You can be in the same space and still not be there.”
Clenching my jaw, I say nothing.
Fuck you, Reece.
Fuck you for being right.
By six, I can’t take it anymore. I walk back to her place, slowly, deliberately, every step heavier than the last. I expect her to look wary… confused… distant.
She doesn’t. She opens the door like she’s been waiting for me since I left… like I never had to knock, and I think that’s what breaks me.
I don’t have things like this.
Not anymore.
Not since the river.
Dinner smells like garlic and tomatoes and peace.
We eat quietly. It’s not awkward. It’s easy … like the silence is a part of the conversation and not the absence of one.
I tell her about the time Aubree got into the back of a shuttle and told the entire tubing crew she was going to be their “River Queen” and that they had to call her “Captain Sparkle” all summer or they’d lose their jobs.
She laughs so hard she chokes on her pasta. And for one second, I let myself imagine what it would’ve felt like to watch her and Aubree side by side.
Fire and light.
Thunder and sunrise.
I push my plate away before I say something I can’t take back.
After helping her clean up the kitchen, I’m standing on her porch, hesitating again.
She doesn’t say anything. She just waits.
Taking that first step back inside feels like stepping off the edge of something I’m not ready for, but I do it anyway.
She doesn’t press me. She doesn’t ask if I’m staying. She doesn’t invite me to her bed.
She just turns out the light and settles onto the couch beside me, pulling a blanket over her legs.
Reaching over, I pull the edge of her blanket over, so it covers mine, too.
For a while, we sit in the dark with the hum of cicadas outside and the quiet thunder of everything we’re both still carrying as the only sounds in the room.
“I didn’t want to live,” I whisper. “After the crash. I didn’t want it.
I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even try. I even tried to…
you know.” She turns toward me, eyes wide, breath still.
“But something wouldn’t let me go. And I hated it.
Hated that I was still breathing while they weren’t.
” I stare down at my hands. “They pulled me out with broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a memory of their screams I still can’t silence.
And then I just… existed. A broken shell of the man I used to be. ”
Blakelyn reaches for my hand, and I let her take it. My fingers open, weaving with hers. “You’re not broken, Gruene,” she says.
I look at her with my brow arched, literally feeling the scar through it pull with the movement. “You sure about that?”
“No. You can be fractured, but it doesn’t mean you’re broken. I think maybe you’re more human than anyone I’ve ever met.”
I swallow. Hard. Weighing her words, imagining that they could be true.
Her voice is soft as she says, “Tyler made me feel like nothing. I went from being a whole, happy, confident woman to feeling like an object. Something for him to possess… to control… to break. I was a weight. A mistake. He fractured me, but he never broke me. If he had, I wouldn’t be here now.
And if you were broken, Gruene, truly broken, you wouldn’t be here either. ” Her voice is steel-wrapped velvet.
“You don’t erase pain by burying it,” she says. “But you can carry it beside someone who doesn’t make you feel small… and together, you can piece the fractured pieces back together.”
I blink, absorbing her words. Then, I nod because she’s not wrong.
We stay on the couch, our limbs tangled, our hearts still bruised, but we’re breathing.
Together.
I wake up before her. We fell asleep on the couch, and I just watch her .
She’s all long, dark lashes and mussed, dark hair. Her cheeks are flushed and her mouth is slightly open. Her bare feet are tucked under the blanket like she’s part of the furniture now, but her toes peek out.
For the first time in six fucking years, I think?—
Maybe I could want something again.
Not because I deserve it.
Because she does.
But wanting her means giving her all the parts of me.
And I don’t know if I can.
Not yet.
Not fully.
I’m here and she’s still reaching.
And maybe… that’s where we begin.