7. 7
Sometime before dawn, Victor gently shook me awake.
For a few confused seconds, I didn't know where I was. The room was dark except for the faint gray light beginning to creep around the curtains, and Victor was warm beside me, one arm still draped across my waist. Then I remembered everything.
"It's almost morning," he whispered.
I lifted my head and looked toward the window. The fire had gone out hours ago, and the first hint of daylight was beginning to show through the trees. Brandon would be waking soon.
Victor didn't have to say it. I slipped carefully out of his arms and found my clothes scattered around the room.
Neither of us spoke while I dressed. There was nothing left to say that wouldn't make leaving harder than it needed to be, and when I turned back toward him, he was sitting on the edge of the bed watching me.
For one dangerous second, I wanted to crawl back in beside him.
Instead, I crossed the room and kissed him.
It was nothing like the kisses we'd shared the night before. There was no desperation in it, no demand for more. Just one soft press of my lips against his before I pulled away.
"Goodbye, Victor."
His eyes held mine. "Goodbye, Zoe."
I slipped out of the bedroom and made my way quietly through the cabin, easing the door shut behind me before crossing the clearing toward the remains of the campfire.
The air had that cold, damp bite that came just before sunrise, and I hugged my arms around myself as I hurried across the grass.
Brandon was still asleep where I'd left him, bundled inside his sleeping bag, and relief washed through me when I saw that he hadn't moved.
I climbed carefully beneath the blankets beside him, trying not to wake him. I'd barely settled onto the ground when Brandon stirred. My heart jumped as his eyes opened and found mine.
For half a second, I wondered if he knew.
Then he smiled.
"Morning."
I smiled back. "Morning."
He yawned and rubbed a hand over his face, squinting toward the pale sky beyond the trees. "So, I guess we should probably head home, huh?"
I looked toward the cabin, then back at Brandon.
"Yeah," I said. "I guess we should."
By the time we finished loading the car, the cabin barely felt like the same place.
Morning sunlight spilled through the trees and flashed across the lake, turning the dark water from the night before into something blue and harmless.
The sleeping bags were rolled up and shoved back into the closet, the last of our clothes had disappeared into suitcases, and Brandon was making one final trip through the cabin because he was convinced he'd forgotten something.
"You always forget something," I told him.
"I do not."
"You left your phone charger at my mom's for six months."
"That's one thing."
"You bought three replacements."
"I needed chargers."
I leaned against the car while he disappeared back inside, then laughed when Victor came down the porch steps carrying Brandon's tackle box.
"You're kidding."
"He wants it."
"He spent half of yesterday telling you to throw it away."
"Changed his mind."
Victor opened the trunk and set the tackle box beside our bags. He looked rested despite the night we'd had, dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt, his hair still damp from the shower, and for one brief second neither of us spoke.
Last night seemed impossible in the morning light.
There was nothing possessive in Victor's expression now, no secret smile over what I'd given him or suggestion that the things he'd said in his bedroom had followed us into the morning.
If anything, he seemed calmer than he had all weekend, as though whatever restless hunger had been driving him had finally quieted.
Sated.
The word sent warmth creeping into my face, and I looked toward the cabin just as Brandon came through the door carrying a sock.
"Found it."
I stared at him. "You went back for one sock?"
"It's a good sock."
Victor laughed. "Definitely my son."
"Fuck both of you."
Brandon tossed the sock into the trunk and slammed it shut, smiling as he did. He'd been smiling most of the morning, actually, and as I watched him shove his hands into his pockets and look out toward the lake, I realized he'd been smiling most of the weekend.
The change hadn't happened all at once. It was there in the way he talked to Victor now without that slight edge beneath every sentence, and in the way he'd stopped looking suspicious whenever his father mentioned something from when he was a kid.
Even their arguments had changed. They weren't reopening old wounds anymore.
They were arguing about tackle boxes and campfires and whether Brandon had actually gotten lost behind a campground bathroom when he was ten.
The anger wasn't gone. A weekend couldn't erase years.
But something had changed.
Brandon looked around the property one last time, his gaze moving from the dock to the lake and finally to his father. "We should do this again."
Victor and I both looked at him, and Brandon immediately seemed embarrassed by his own suggestion. "I mean, not right away or anything."
"I'd like that," Victor said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
For a moment they simply looked at each other, and I remembered Brandon in the car on the drive up, his hands tight around the steering wheel while I tried to convince him this wasn't going to be a disaster. Now he stepped forward and hugged his father.
It wasn't some dramatic movie embrace. Brandon slapped Victor on the back, Victor did the same, and within a few seconds they'd separated again, both looking slightly uncomfortable about having done it.
But they'd done it, and something tightened behind my ribs as I watched them.
This was why we'd come.
Whatever else had happened here, whatever terrible choices I'd made, Brandon had gotten something back that he'd lost years ago.
When Victor glanced at me, I saw satisfaction there, but no smugness and no sense of victory. If anything, he looked almost peaceful. Last night belonged to us, but the morning belonged to this, to Brandon standing beside the car smiling at his father and already talking about coming back.
It was over.
"Thanks for coming," Victor said.
The words were ordinary enough for Brandon to hear. I smiled and answered just as ordinarily. "Thanks for having us."
Victor stepped toward me and opened his arms, and I hesitated only a fraction of a second before hugging him.
His arms closed around me, warm and familiar in a way they had absolutely no right to be, and for an instant my cheek rested against his chest as memory threatened to turn the simple goodbye into something else.
Then Victor released me.
"Take care of him."
I glanced toward Brandon. "Somebody has to."
"Hey."
Victor smiled, and that was all. No whispered promise, no secret touch, nothing that suggested this goodbye was anything other than exactly what it appeared to be.
Brandon climbed behind the wheel, and I slid into the passenger seat while Victor walked back toward the porch. He stood there as Brandon started the engine, one hand lifted against the morning sun.
"Call me," Victor said.
Brandon nodded. "I will."
And I knew he meant it.
We pulled away, the tires crunching over the gravel as the cabin disappeared behind the trees, then appeared again briefly when the road climbed above the lake. Victor was still standing near the porch, smaller now, one hand tucked into his pocket, and I watched until the trees swallowed him.
Brandon reached across the console and took my hand. "Thank you."
I looked over at him. "For what?"
"For making me come."
"You would've come anyway."
"No, I wouldn't have."
I started to argue, but he squeezed my hand.
"I'm serious, Zoe. I would've found a reason not to. I always do."
The road curved along the side of the mountain, sunlight flickering through the trees across the windshield. I watched it dance over Brandon's hands on the wheel and thought about the angry silence we'd driven through on the way up.
"I just didn't want you to regret never trying," I said.
"I know." He was quiet for a moment, watching the road. "I'm glad I did."
"So am I."
And strangely, I meant it.
I should have been drowning in guilt. Maybe part of me was.
I'd lied to Brandon, betrayed him under his father's roof, then slipped out from beside him last night and walked willingly into Victor's bedroom.
I couldn't undo any of it, but as the road carried us farther from the lake, I began to believe I didn't have to carry it home.
I could leave it behind.
Last night had been my goodbye to something that never should have started. I'd given myself one night without excuses or resistance, and morning had come exactly as I'd known it would. I was still Zoe, Brandon was still Brandon, and Victor was behind us.
Brandon turned on the radio and immediately started flipping through stations.
"Stop."
"What?"
"Go back."
"That song sucks."
"I like that song."
"You have terrible taste."
"You're dating me."
He glanced over. "Exactly."
I laughed and punched him lightly in the arm. Brandon caught my hand before I could pull it away, brought my fingers to his mouth and kissed them, then settled our joined hands on the console between us.
Outside the window, the mountains rolled past in long green slopes beneath a cloudless blue sky. I leaned my head against the glass and closed my eyes, letting the sunlight warm my face as the vibration of the road hummed softly through the window.
Victor belonged to the weekend we'd left behind.
I belonged here.
Brandon squeezed my hand.
I squeezed his back and smiled as the highway unspooled ahead of us beneath the morning sun.
Everything was going to be all right.
***
Zoe thought she could leave what happened at the cabin behind.
She was wrong.
Zoe and Victor's forbidden affair continues in Taken by My Boyfriend's Father, coming soon.
***
Thank You for Reading!