Chapter 2
ANDERSON
I let out a groan loud enough to wake my whole neighborhood as I press the heels of my palms into my eyes hard enough to see stars.
She left.
Again.
This is the fifty-fourth—yes, I’ve kept count—night Ava and I have spent together in the last eight months, and they all end like this.
Or, at least a variation of this.
Me, alone.
Sometimes I don’t hear her sneak out of bed—I just wake up the next morning, and she’s gone.
Other times, I roll over in the middle of the night, reaching for her while I’m still half-asleep, finding my bed empty and cold, like she only existed in my dreams.
The worst was the first night she came over after our one and only date at the drive-in theater last summer. I asked if she wanted to stay the night, and she looked at me like I’d just asked her to spend her Saturday at the DMV with me.
She was already up and getting dressed before I could even take back the words.
I remember just sitting there on the edge of the bed, sheets twisted around my waist, watching her move around my room like she was late for something.
Pulling her jeans on, tugging her shirt over her head, gathering her long, auburn hair into a quick ponytail on the top of her head like it was routine.
Like leaving was always the plan.
Like staying had never even crossed her mind.
The lamp on my nightstand cast this soft yellow light over everything, warm enough that it should’ve felt intimate but instead made the room look strange and temporary, like a hotel.
Like none of it belonged to either of us.
I tried to play it off, told her it was no big deal, that I’d only asked because it was late. My voice sounded too casual, too rehearsed, like I’d practiced not caring. She smiled, quick and polite, before saying she had an early morning at the coffee shop.
It was the first time she used the excuse, and definitely not the last.
The front door had shut behind her a minute later, and the whole house went quiet in that heavy, hollow way it only does after someone leaves. Too big. Too empty. Every sound echoed back at me like proof I was alone again.
I was too wired to sleep that first night, so I wandered through the kitchen, taking in the sight of my car keys thrown on the kitchen counter, the two wine glasses we’d left on my coffee table, and the blanket we used on the couch still crumpled on the floor.
All these small signs that someone had been here—evidence of a night that should’ve meant something.
That was the first time it hit me that we weren’t wired the same way. I was already picturing slow mornings and shared coffee with her toothbrush next to mine in the bathroom. She was calculating how fast she could get dressed and make it out before sunrise.
And still, I wanted her.
As I stood in the middle of my empty house—the one I’m dying to make a home—with the lights off and the air too still, I realized I should’ve known better.
But then she texted me a few days later when I had just gotten home from a twenty-four-hour shift at the fire station.
I was tired and beat, but the memory of that auburn hair splayed out on my bed sheets, those hazel eyes hooded with pleasure, those sharp, perfectly manicured fingernails scratching down my back, was enough for me to tell her to come over.
I remember thinking maybe this time would be different.
Maybe she’d linger. Maybe she’d sit back down on the bed and stay awhile.
Maybe she’d look at me like I was someone worth sticking around for.
But she didn’t—she doesn’t.
And now, every time my phone lights up with her name, I tell myself this is the last time, that I’m done mistaking her lust for something deeper.
But then the house echoes when it’s empty, all that space pressing in on me, and I start picturing her walking through the door again—sleepy, half-smiling, like she belongs here—and the loneliness gets louder than my common sense.
So, here we are. Eight months later. Still just as incompatible as ever, except for the sex, and I’m the one left hurting my own feelings by thinking that these nights will wear her down enough to give me an actual chance.
A chance I want more than anything.
I keep thinking if I give her enough nights like this—quiet, tangled, tender—she’ll finally see what I see: that we could be more than just bodies passing time, that she doesn’t have to leave before sunrise.
I let my arms drop to my sides, opening my eyes and following the blades of my fan as they circle around and around.
Ava is the first woman I’ve pursued since graduating from the fire academy and moving to Milwaukee to work at my uncle’s station, and I have no intention of looking elsewhere.
Why would I? I’m happy with the small part of herself she lends me every now and again—like it was taken directly out of my dreams.
It’s those moments in the middle of the night where she hands me these small, unguarded pieces of herself—sleep-heavy smiles, quiet confessions, lazy brushes of her fingers as if she forgot she’s supposed to pull away.
For those few soft, fragile hours, I can pretend we fit; that she’s mine; that I’m hers.
Instead, I always end up in the same spot, staring at the dent her head left in the pillow, wishing it didn’t feel so much like losing something I never really had.
The automatic deadbolt engages on the front door—a soft whirring sound punctuated by a beep pulling me from the thoughts.
I realize I’ve never been awake when she actually leaves, but I always find the front door locked the next morning. It’s a small act most would say means nothing, but it’s one that I noticed right away.
And as someone who is used to taking care of everyone and everything around them, small acts like that do mean something—especially to me.
I remain exactly where Ava left me, surrounded by the stillness.
Then, I hear the doorknob turn.
My stomach lurches at the thought that she’s coming back. Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe she decided to stay.
But the front door doesn’t open.
Instead, it turns a few more times.
Ava knows the code to unlock the deadbolt. She’s used it before—she just used it tonight.
The knob keeps turning, over and over again, my confusion deepening as I throw off my twisted bed sheets, pulling on a pair of sweatpants from my dresser and heading across the first floor of my house toward the front door.
I’m just about to unlock it when my arm freezes in the air.
Is she… counting?
It’s not whispered, but it’s muffled—so much so that there’s a sliver of doubt. It isn’t until I hear Ava’s voice crack when she reaches the number seventeen that I know I’m not hearing things. My heart aches at how that one word sounds so broken yet so relieved at the same time.
Her boots begin slowly crunching against the few inches of snow we got today, and I push my confusion about why she would be counting how many times she turns a locked doorknob to the back of my mind.
For now.
I open the door just as I hear Ava say, “Hello?”
But she isn’t talking to me. Her phone is held up to her ear, her body swallowed by her huge sweatshirt, which is definitely not warm enough for her to be wearing in the middle of a freezing night like tonight.
She’s a few steps away from her car, phone pressed to her ear, one arm wrapped around herself like she’s trying to hold in the warmth, and I just watch from my porch like an idiot.
The streetlight at the end of my driveway catches in her hair, turning it copper, the ends brushing her sweatshirt as a gust of wind comes through.
She doesn’t say anything, just listens intently to whatever the person on the other end is saying, her body completely still, her keys dangling from her fingers—already halfway gone even though she hasn’t driven off yet.
My body aches to go after her—to cross the concrete barefoot, to drape a blanket over her shoulders, to pull her back inside like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Like she belongs here.
Like this is where she sleeps, where she leaves her shoes by the door and her coffee mug in the sink, and doesn’t have to take calls outside at two in the morning in the dead of winter.
I picture her sliding back under the covers, her cold hands finding mine, her breathing evening out against my chest. Staying.
Standing there, I feel so useless, watching my breath form a cloud in the cold. I know if I go to her, if I ask her to come back, she’ll smile that soft, apologetic smile—and leave anyway.
But I can’t stop my lips from parting, her name on the tip of my tongue.
She gasps, and my stomach drops. “Go to your room and close the door,” she instructs whoever she’s talking to, a sense of urgency in her direct tone that worries me. “Don’t come out until I get there. I’m on my way.”
She unlocks her car and opens the driver’s side door as I step further onto my patio, ignoring the cold concrete on my feet and the freezing wind against my bare chest.
“Ava,” I call to her. “What’s wr—”
But she doesn’t hear me.
Her car door slams shut, and then she’s speeding away and out of sight.