Chapter 19
Another car on the main road and my stomach lurches sideways. I hold my breath, wait for it to turn, wait for that rental sedan shape, wait for—it passes. Not him. Jesus Christ, I need to breathe.
I rearrange the pen caddy for what has to be the fifth time, maybe sixth, I've lost count.
The desk is so clean it's ridiculous and I can't remember the last time I ate and every muscle in my body feels like it's been wrung out and left to dry in the sun.
My hands won't stop shaking and I keep trying to look busy but I'm just moving things around, reading invoices without seeing the words, jumping at every sound that comes from the garage.
Footsteps. My pen clatters to the floor.
Holt appears in the doorway, grease streaked up his forearms, his eyes locked on mine. He takes one look at me and his jaw goes tight.
"Get in the truck."
I blink at him. "What? But Evan could—"
"Finn's here. We won't be long." His voice drops, goes quiet but certain in a way that doesn't leave room for argument. "Get in the truck, Scout."
The command underneath stops every protest forming on my tongue. I grab my bag and follow him out into the heat that hits like a wall, like I haven't been outside in hours, like I forgot the world existed beyond these four walls and my own spiraling thoughts.
He opens the passenger door and waits. I climb in.
The engine rumbles to life and we pull onto the road, windows down, wind rushing in hot and wild and full of dust. I don't ask where we're going because I can't seem to form words, can only watch his profile and the way his jaw's still tight, the way his hand reaches across the seat and finds mine.
Rough calluses and warmth, anchoring me here.
"Holt—"
"Just breathe." His thumb moves over my knuckles, slow and steady, a rhythm I can follow. "For ten minutes, just breathe."
I close my eyes and let the wind and engine noise fill all the space where panic's been living since yesterday, since that phone call, since I heard his voice again.
My shoulders drop and my lungs remember they're supposed to expand, that air is supposed to go in and out, not get stuck somewhere between my ribs and my throat.
The vise around my chest loosens enough that I can feel my heartbeat slowing, steadying against the thunder it's been doing all day.
The road climbs and I can feel it in the way the truck leans, the way the air changes—thinner, cooler, sharper somehow. My thumb traces circles on his hand while the sun dips lower, turning the desert into something gold and shadowed and almost peaceful.
I open my eyes and glance behind us at the truck bed—blankets. A cooler.
I can't breathe again.
He planned this. While I was falling apart at the front desk, while I was jumping at every sound and rearranging pens like a crazy person, he was throwing blankets in the truck bed and packing a cooler and thinking about me.
About giving me this, about stealing me away for ten minutes so I could remember how to breathe.
My throat goes tight and hot and I can't look at him because if I do I might actually cry.
"Holt—"
"I know." That's all he says but it's enough, it's everything.
The road ends at a cliff edge and he parks, kills the engine. Cicadas buzz. Wind moves through scrub grass. The desert breathes around us.
He climbs out and drops the tailgate, holds out his hand. I take it and let him pull me up into the truck bed where the blankets are still warm from the sun, soft under my legs as I settle beside him. The view—I forget words exist. Endless desert stretching out forever.
We drink and watch the sky change colors, watch the stars multiply until they're uncountable.
My heart's still beating too fast but it's slowing, calming, finding its rhythm again in all this quiet.
I'm viscerally aware that this is borrowed time, that Evan could be pulling up to the shop right now, that we're stealing this moment from the edges of a crisis I'm supposed to be facing.
But I let myself have it anyway. Let the stars blur and the peace sink in deep, somewhere I can hold onto it later.
"I used to think running was survival," I say quietly. "Like if I kept moving fast enough, nothing bad could catch me."
"And now?"
"Now I think staying might be braver." I look at him and find his eyes already watching me. "Facing things. Building something real instead of just escaping from everything."
His hand finds mine again, all calluses and scars and heat. "You're brave, Scout."
I laugh and it comes out wet, broken. "I'm terrified."
"Brave isn't not being scared." His thumb traces my pulse point where it's still hammering against my wrist. "It's being scared and doing it anyway."
I turn to really look at him, see the tattoos dark against his skin and the way the dying light catches the edges of his jaw, the way he's looking at me like I'm worth stealing away for. "Is that what you did? With the shop? With me?"
"Yeah."
"I'm glad you stayed."
"Me too."
Heat floods the space between us—immediate, electric. My breath catches and I'm moving closer before I decide to, before I think about it, and then he's kissing me—slow at first, careful, then deeper when I make this sound in my throat that I didn't mean to make.
His hand cups my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone, and I taste beer and want and something that feels like holding on and letting go all mixed together. I pull back gasping. "I don't want to stop."
"Then don't."
We undress in the truck bed and I'm laughing at elbows bumping and my shirt catching on my bra clasp and the blankets tangling around our legs. He helps me, patient and careful, fingers working the clasp free until I'm finally bare under the stars, feeling exposed and seen all at once.
"This is either very romantic or very redneck."
His mouth quirks. "Can't it be both?"
Then he's kissing me again and I'm pulling him closer, need flooding hot and urgent through every nerve in my body. His weight settles over me and I gasp at the heat of his skin pressing me down into the blankets. The stars wheel overhead and the desert stretches out forever.
He moves slow and gentle, watching my face like he needs to see every reaction. "You okay?"
"So okay." My voice breaks on it.
He enters me and I arch, breath punching out, vision going white at the edges as stars explode behind my eyelids.
He moves and I move with him, unhurried but full of want, savoring every second because we both know this is stolen, borrowed, precious.
His hand finds mine and laces our fingers together, holds on tight.
Heat builds low in my belly, tension winding tighter and tighter until it's everywhere—in my thighs, my spine, radiating out through every nerve ending.
His name on my lips, his breath in my ear, the stars spinning overhead as I break apart, shaking and gasping with his hand holding mine through all of it.
He follows right after, my name rough on his tongue, and I feel him shudder, feel him let go.
In the aftermath I stay tangled around him with my palm flat on his chest feeling his heartbeat slow, my head tucked against his shoulder. I trace patterns on his skin—the ink, the scars, the places where he's put himself back together piece by piece. Safe here. Whole here.
"Whatever happens—"
He presses a kiss to my hair. "I know."
We don't finish it, just hold each other longer and steal these last minutes of peace while we can.
Eventually he shifts and reaches for our clothes. "We should head back."
I nod even though everything in me wants to stay here under the stars where nothing can touch us.
We dress in comfortable silence with hands brushing as we help each other with buttons and zippers, the kind of small gestures that shouldn't matter but do.
He folds the blankets while I climb into the cab, and when he slides behind the wheel his hand finds mine again automatically, like we've been doing this for years instead of weeks.
The drive back is quiet with stars overhead blazing now and the desert dark and vast around us. His thumb moves over my knuckles in that steady rhythm that's become familiar and I try to hold onto the feeling—the peace, the stars, the way he makes me feel like I can face this.
But the closer we get to the shop, the tighter my chest gets. The harder it becomes to pull in air. The shop lights appear first, bright against the darkness. Then the shape beside Finn's truck.
Rental sedan.
My stomach plummets—doesn't drop, doesn't sink, it plummets. Falls through the floorboards and through the earth and keeps falling. I can't breathe. Can't move. Everything goes sharp and bright and too much all at once.
"Holt—" His name comes out strangled.
He sees it. His hand squeezes mine hard enough to hurt, grounding me even as terror floods back sharp and vicious.
"I've got you."
He pulls up beside the sedan and it's empty, he's inside, already inside with no buffer or transition or time to prepare.
Holt kills the engine and turns to look at me. His eyes cut through the fear, steady and certain. "You ready?"
I take a breath and it shakes going in. Think of the stars and what I said up on that cliff—staying is braver than running. Think of his hand in mine. Think of choosing this, choosing to face it instead of disappearing like I always do.
"Yeah." My voice only shakes a little. "I'm ready."
We get out together and I can see movement through the shop windows—Finn's bright energy and someone else, someone taller and sharper and familiar in all the wrong ways, in ways that make my skin crawl and my heart race and every instinct scream run.
But I don't run.
My heart's pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat but my feet keep moving forward. Holt's hand finds mine one more time before we reach the door and I squeeze back, holding onto him and my choice and the girl who watched the stars and decided staying was brave.
We walk inside together.