18. Luke #2
We finish dinner in silence that feels like mourning. She helps me clean up afterward, moving around my kitchen with the easy familiarity of someone who's done this a hundred times, and every gesture feels like goodbye.
When the dishes are done and there's nothing left to do with our hands, she grabs her bag from by the door.
"I should go," she says, not quite meeting my eyes. "Get started on packing, email Vanessa back, figure out logistics."
I nod, throat too tight to speak. Walk her to the door because that's what you do, that's the right thing, even though every step feels like walking toward a cliff edge.
At the threshold she pauses, turns back to me with something vulnerable and uncertain in her expression.
"Luke—"
"This is a good thing," I interrupt, before she can say whatever she's about to say that might break me completely. "You're going to be amazing. They're lucky to have you."
She studies my face for a long moment, searching for something I can't give her. Then she nods, blinking hard like she's fighting tears.
"Thanks for understanding."
She goes up on her toes to kiss me—soft, lingering, achingly tender—and I memorize the feel of it because I don't know when I'll get another one. Then she's pulling away, walking to her car, and I'm standing in my doorway watching her leave like I've watched everyone else leave my whole life.
The taillights disappear down the service road, and I close the door.
The cabin feels enormous suddenly, empty in a way it never has before.
Her coffee mug is still on the counter from this morning.
Her jacket—the one she always forgets—hangs on the hook by the door.
Little pieces of her scattered through my space that I'll have to pack up and return, erasing evidence that she was ever here.
I make it to the kitchen before my hands start shaking.
The bottle of whiskey Wyatt gave me for Christmas sits in the cabinet above the fridge, mostly full because I rarely drink alone. I pull it down now, don't bother with a glass. Just twist the cap off and take a long pull that burns all the way down.
It doesn't help.
I sink onto the couch—the same couch where she curls up to work most afternoons, stealing my blankets and propping her laptop on her knees while I do paperwork nearby. Where we've watched movies and argued about dinner and fallen asleep tangled together like we had all the time in the world.
Another drink. Then another.
The burn in my throat is easier to focus on than the ache in my chest, the feeling like something vital has been ripped out and I'm supposed to just keep functioning anyway.
I knew this would happen. Have known it from the start. Mila was always leaving—she said it herself, over and over, in a hundred different ways. This place was never supposed to be permanent for her. I was never supposed to be permanent.
I was just the placeholder before her real life started again.
The whiskey level drops lower. The cabin spins slightly when I close my eyes, but I welcome it. Anything to stop thinking about her face when I told her she should go. The way her smile faltered before she buried it. The hurt I put there because I was too much of a coward to ask her to stay.
But asking would've been selfish. Trapping. The kind of thing that would've made me like those men who try to keep women small so they don't outgrow them.
Mila deserves more than small. She deserves everything—the career she was robbed of, the recognition she never got, the life she was supposed to have before some scandal blew everything up.
She deserves more than a thirty-four-year-old ranch manager who can barely remember what wanting something for himself feels like.
The bottle is half empty now. Or half full, depending on how you're measuring.
I'm measuring in how much it takes to stop seeing her face every time I close my eyes.
Not enough, apparently.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table. I ignore it. Probably Dean or Dad or someone checking in, and I can't handle pretending I'm fine right now. Can't put on the steady, reliable mask and act like my entire world hasn't just walked out the door.
Another drink.
The whiskey isn't helping but I keep drinking anyway, because stopping means sitting with the silence. With the empty cabin that suddenly feels too big, too quiet, too full of memories of her.
I knew I loved her. Have known it for weeks, maybe months. But I never said it out loud because saying it made it real, and making it real meant I'd have to acknowledge how much losing her was going to destroy me.
Well. Now I know.
The destruction feels complete.
I finish the bottle sometime past midnight, slumped on the couch in a cabin that's supposed to be mine but has become ours without me noticing.
And tomorrow I'll wake up hungover and hollow and I'll have to figure out how to go back to the life I had before Mila Torres reorganized my office and accidentally reorganized my entire existence.
Tomorrow I'll be fine. Steady. Reliable.
Tonight I let myself fall apart in the dark, alone, drinking until I can't think about hazel eyes and stolen flannels and the way she says my name like it means something.
Like I mean something.
The empty bottle sits on the coffee table, mocking me.
I close my eyes and the room spins and I know I should get up, go to bed, sleep this off like a rational adult.
But the bed smells like her. Everywhere smells like her.
So I stay on the couch, drowning in whiskey and silence and the knowledge that I just let the best thing that's ever happened to me walk away.
Because that's what I do.
I stand back and let the people I love leave, convincing myself it's for their own good.
And I do it alone.