Skipping Stones Again
POV MARLOWE
I hadn’t been back to that crossing since the night I left.
I want to be plain about that. Four years of deliberately routing myself around one specific half-mile stretch of county road, and I sat in the passenger seat of his truck watching the mesquite go by and felt my whole chest tighten as the bridge came into view, low and unassuming, the creek running shallow and clear over limestone the way it always did this time of year.
“We don’t have to stop,” Weston said, reading something in my silence, already easing off the gas.
“No,” I said. “Stop. I think I need to.”
He parked on the shoulder and we walked down to the water’s edge together, the same path we’d worn into the bank a hundred times in the six years we were together, and I stood there watching the current work its slow way over the rocks and felt something in me that had been braced for four years finally, cautiously, start to let go.
“You taught me to skip stones right here,” I said. “Second week we were together. I couldn’t get one to go more than once, and you stood behind me adjusting my wrist for about twenty minutes straight like it was the most important lesson either of us would ever learn.”
“I remember,” he said. “You got mad at me. Told me I was hovering.”
“I was hovering,” I corrected, and something in the old rhythm of it, the easy back-and-forth we’d once had before everything went sideways, made me smile before I’d decided to let myself. “I was terrible at it. Still probably am.”
“Prove it,” he said, and picked up a flat stone, turning it once in his fingers before handing it over, and I took it, felt the old familiar weight of it, and sent it skipping three times across the water before it sank, better than I remembered being able to do, four years of some muscle memory apparently having improved itself without my permission.
“Show off,” Weston said, and there was real warmth in it, real ease, the particular unguarded sound of a man who’d forgotten, for one whole minute, to be careful.
* * *
POV WESTON
We stood there a long while after that, not talking much, just watching the water, and I found myself studying the side of her face the way I used to when we were young and stupid enough to think we had all the time in the world, the particular line of her jaw, the way the afternoon light caught in hair she’d cut shorter but hadn’t fully changed, still her, still the same woman I’d fallen in love with on the back of a bike six years back, just older now, harder-won, carrying four years of a life I hadn’t gotten to witness.
“I used to come out here,” I admitted, before I’d fully decided to say it. “After. Not often. Maybe once a season. Never could figure out if I was torturing myself or trying to feel close to you the only way I had left, and I never worked out which one it actually was.”
“Both, probably,” she said, quiet. “I’ve done the same thing with different places.
Ash Hollow’s got a creek too. Nothing like this one, but close enough some evenings that I’d drive out there just to stand at the edge of it and remember what it felt like, being the kind of person who still believed in skipping stones. ”
“You don’t believe in it anymore?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “For a long while. Believing in anything felt like setting myself up.” She turned to look at me then, really look, and something had shifted in her face since we’d parked, some old guard finally, cautiously, standing down.
“I think I might be starting to again, though. I wasn’t expecting that. Coming back here.”
We were standing close enough by then that I could see the exact shade of gold the afternoon light was doing to her eyes, close enough that four years and every hard mile of them seemed, for one suspended second, like they might not matter as much as the six feet of space closing slowly between us, and I felt myself leaning in before I’d consciously decided to, felt her go still in the particular way a person goes still when they’re deciding whether to lean in too, and for one full held breath I thought — I let myself think — that this was it, that we were about to close the last of the distance standing between us and everything might just be simple again.
Then Marlowe stepped back. Not far. Just enough.
“Not yet,” she said, breathless, and I heard the whole weight of everything still unsaid between us in those two words, Reyna’s name still hanging unexplained in the air between us, the fact of four years of her own withheld silence about Birdie still sitting unaddressed, and I understood, even through the sharp disappointment of it, that she was right to say it, that a kiss at this particular crossing, with this much still unfinished, would be building the second chance on the same shaky foundation that had let the first one collapse.
“Okay,” I said, and made myself mean it, made myself step back too, though every instinct in me wanted the opposite. “Not yet. But soon, I hope. Once we’ve cleared the rest of it out of the way.”
“Soon,” she agreed, and there was a promise in the word, careful, but real, and we walked back up to the truck together in a silence that had changed shape entirely from the one we’d driven out here carrying, lighter now, though no less complicated, two people who’d just proven to themselves, out at the edge of a creek that had once taught her to skip stones, that whatever this was between us hadn’t finished being real just because it had been interrupted for four years.
I drove her back to my mother’s in a quiet that felt different from every other quiet we’d shared since she’d come back to town — not the careful, guarded silence of two people bracing against each other, but something closer to the comfortable kind we used to carry, the kind that didn’t need filling.
I kept catching myself glancing over at her at the stop signs, and catching her, once, doing the same, and neither of us said anything about it, just let the small private smile pass between us and stay there.
I thought about the ledger again that night, same as I had most nights since Marlowe came back, sitting at my desk with the drawer open and the black cover soft under my palm, and for the first time I let myself imagine actually opening it in front of her, walking her through the whole of that night in my own handwriting instead of just my own halting words, and the imagining of it didn’t scare me the way it had a month ago.
It felt, instead, like relief waiting on the other side of a door I’d kept shut so long I’d half forgotten what was behind it besides the fear.
* * *
POV MARLOWE
I called Reyna that night. I want to explain why, because it might not make obvious sense on its face — a woman calling the very name that had once broken her marriage, asking to hear the truth straight from the source instead of waiting on Weston’s timeline any longer.
I got the number from Weston, told him plain I couldn’t wait on soon anymore, not after the crossing, not after standing six inches from a kiss I’d wanted more than I’d wanted almost anything in four years and still finding myself unable to close that last distance honestly.
He didn’t argue. Just wrote the number down on the back of a shop receipt and handed it over without a single word of protest, which told me, more than anything else he could have said, how much he’d actually meant what he’d promised on that porch.
Reyna picked up on the second ring. Her voice was warmer than I expected, steadier, a woman who sounded like she’d been waiting four years for this particular phone call and was, if anything, relieved it had finally come.
“I’ve thought about calling you myself, more than once,” she said, before I’d even finished explaining who I was, like she’d been rehearsing this conversation as long as I’d apparently been dreading it.
“Never felt like it was my place, showing up in your life uninvited to explain something that was Weston’s to explain first. But I understand why you’d want it from me instead of him.
Easier to trust a stranger with no reason to lie than a man who’s already let you down once trying to explain himself. ”
“That’s about the shape of it,” I admitted.
“Marlowe,” she said. “I’ve got a few things I think you’re owed to hear. You free to drive out this weekend? Some of it, I think, needs saying with a face attached to it, not just a voice on a phone.”
“I’m free,” I said, and felt the whole shape of the next several weeks shift under me, the last piece finally sliding into place, and hung up the phone with my hands not quite steady, bracing myself for whatever truth was waiting two counties over to finally be handed to me whole.
I sat a long while after that call, phone still warm in my hand, and thought about the woman on the other end of it, her voice carrying none of the venom I’d built her up to hold in my imagination across four years of picturing her as the reason my marriage had ended.
She’d sounded, if anything, like a woman who’d been carrying her own private grief a long while, waiting on someone to finally let her set it down, and I understood, sitting there in the quiet of Carol’s kitchen with my own daughter’s breathing audible through the baby monitor on the counter, that I’d been building an entire villain out of a name and a timestamp for four years, and that the actual woman waiting to meet me might turn out to be nothing like the shape I’d carved her into.