Chapter 11
Kassidy
Don't let me run, I told him.
I'm running.
Morning arrives like a spotlight on a crime scene, and the first thing I see when I open my eyes is Tucker Brennan's chest—bare, warm, rising and falling with the deep rhythm of someone who sleeps like the dead.
My head is on his shoulder. My hand rests on his ribs.
Our legs are tangled in sheets that smell like last night, and the intimacy of the position is so complete, so domestic, that panic explodes in my stomach like a flashbang.
What have I done?
The mental inventory begins before I'm fully awake. Facts first, feelings later—that's the Kassidy Monroe emotional processing protocol.
Fact: I slept with Tucker Brennan. Fact: It was transcendent.
Fact: He is a man I've known for five days who lives a different life in a different world and who, by the end of today, will be driving back to wherever Salt & Steel is headquartered while I drive back to my apartment in Charleston with a half-finished manuscript and a full-blown identity crisis.
Fact: I told him not to let me run, and now every cell in my body is screaming at me to grab my suitcase and sprint.
I extract myself from the bed with the careful precision of a bomb technician. Slide my leg free. Lift his arm. Roll to the edge of the mattress and stand without breathing. Tucker doesn't stir. He sleeps like a man accustomed to grabbing rest in hostile conditions—deep, complete, efficient.
In the bathroom, I grip the sink and stare at my reflection. My hair is a catastrophe. My mascara has migrated south. There's a mark on my collarbone—faint, tender—that makes my stomach flip with equal parts arousal and alarm.
"Get it together," I whisper to the mirror. "You are a grown woman. You can handle this."
The mirror doesn't look convinced.
By the time Tucker wakes, I'm dressed, packed, and sitting at the desk with my laptop open, performing a very convincing impression of a woman who did not spend the last forty minutes spiraling.
I've brushed my hair, applied fresh makeup, and arranged my expression into something I hope reads as composed and breezy rather than on the verge of a psychological event.
"Morning." His voice is rough with sleep, and the sound of it sends a pulse of warmth through me that I ruthlessly suppress.
"Morning. Roads are open. Renee texted—the group is heading back to Hargrove House to collect our cars, and then everyone's free to go."
He sits up. The sheet falls to his waist, and the sight of him—rumpled, golden in the morning light, watching me with those steady green eyes—is so unfairly beautiful that I have to look at my laptop screen to survive it.
"You're packed," he says.
"I'm an efficient packer."
"You were packed when I was still asleep."
"I'm a very efficient packer."
A beat. He reads the room the way he reads everything—carefully, completely, with an attention to detail that misses nothing.
"Kassidy."
"Hmm?" Eyes on the screen. Typing nothing. The cursor blinks in an empty document like a tiny, judgmental metronome.
"Are you okay?"
"Fine. Great. Last night was... great." The word great tastes like cardboard. Last night was all-consuming and terrifying and the most alive I've felt in years, and I'm reducing it to great because anything more honest would crack me open, and I need to hold myself together for the drive home.
Tucker swings his legs out of bed, pulls on jeans, and crosses to where I'm sitting. He doesn't touch me. Just stands close enough that I can feel the warmth of him, and waits.
"Talk to me," he says.
"I don't know what to say."
"That's a first."
The joke should defuse the tension, but it doesn't. It lands on the taut wire between us and vibrates.
"I'm not good at this part," I say, and the honesty surprises me, leaking through a crack I didn't know was open.
"The morning after. The what now. In my books, I skip ahead.
Fade to black, chapter break, and when we pick up again, everyone knows what they want and the conversation is witty and the feelings are clear. Real life doesn't have chapter breaks."
"No. It doesn't."
"Tucker, I need—" My voice falters. Ryan's words crawl through my head like insects: too rigid, too predictable, married to her outlines. "I think we should take this slow."
The silence that follows is brief, but I see the hurt flash through his eyes—quick, barely visible, immediately controlled. He's a man trained to absorb impact without flinching, and watching him do it with something I've said is worse than any argument.
"Slow," he repeats.
"We got swept up. The hurricane, the forced proximity, the—" I gesture at the bed, at the room, at the wreckage of a pillow wall that was never going to hold. "It was intense. And intensity can feel like something it's not."
"You think this isn't real?"
"I think I need time to figure out if it is."
He nods. Not the sharp, decisive nod of a man agreeing—the slow, careful nod of a man accepting something he doesn't want. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"I'm not going to push you, Kassidy. If you need time, take time."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that."
It should be a relief. It's not. His willingness to give me space makes the space feel wrong—like I asked for exactly the thing I didn't want and now I'm stuck with it.
The drive back to Hargrove House is efficient and silent.
Tucker drives. I ride in the back with Diana, who is either asleep or performing a masterful impression of it.
The coastal road is littered with debris—fallen branches, scattered shingles, a mailbox lying in the middle of the lane—and the sky has that rinsed, apologetic look that comes after a storm.
At Hargrove House, the damage is visible but not catastrophic. A few broken windows. The veranda railing torn away on the south side. The garden reduced to a tangle of sand and sea grass. My rental car sits in the parking area, untouched, coated in salt spray.
The retreat attendees disperse with the shell-shocked efficiency of people emerging from a shared ordeal.
Hugs, exchanged numbers, promises to stay in touch that may or may not survive the drive home.
Diana presses a business card into my hand and says, "Finish the book. Send it to me when it's done."
Tucker loads my suitcase into the rental. I stand by the driver's door and watch him, and the moment stretches like taffy—elastic, sweet, on the verge of breaking.
"I'll call you," he says.
"Okay."
"Not as a line. As a fact. I will call you."
"I know."
He takes a step closer. His hand lifts, and for a second I think he's going to kiss me—a proper goodbye, the kind that makes airport scenes in movies unbearable. Instead, he tucks the curl behind my ear. The gesture is so gentle, so specific, that my throat closes.
"Drive safe," he says.
"You too."
He steps back. I get in the car. The engine starts with a mundane reliability that feels offensive given the circumstances.
The kiss he gives me through the open window is chaste. A brush of lips. A promise or a farewell—I can't tell which, and the ambiguity is the worst part.
I drive.
For the first thirty minutes, I'm fine. Focused. Hands at ten and two, eyes on the road, mind on logistics. The drive to Charleston is three hours. Enough time to plan the rest of the week: laundry, groceries, the manuscript that now has fifteen new chapters and a beating heart.
At mile forty, the first tear falls. I don't know why—nothing triggered it, no song on the radio, no memory surging up—just a single tear that traces my cheek and drops onto the steering wheel.
At mile fifty, the tears become consistent. Not sobbing. Just a steady, quiet leak, like a pipe that's been under pressure too long.
At mile seventy, I pull into a gas station, park behind the building, and cry properly. Face in hands, shoulders shaking, the ugly, cathartic kind that ruins mascara and clears the chest.
Because here's the truth that I've been running from since I woke up this morning:
Tucker Brennan is not Ryan. Tucker is not a man who would call me predictable and mean it as an insult.
He's a man who carried my suitcase and evacuated me from a hurricane and read my unfinished manuscript and recognized himself in it and said who said anything about casual with absolute certainty.
And I just drove away from him. Because I'm scared. Because the last time I let someone in, he rewired my self-worth so thoroughly that I couldn't write a sentence for three months. Because vulnerability feels like a trapdoor, and every time I've fallen through one, the landing has gotten harder.
My phone sits on the passenger seat. His number is in it. He's probably still at Hargrove House, loading equipment, briefing Decker, being professional and steady and patient in the way he does everything.
I pick up the phone. Put it down. Pick it up again.
Me: Thank you for everything. I'm sorry I'm like this.
His reply comes in sixty seconds:
Tucker: You're exactly like you. I like exactly like you. Take your time.
And somehow, that simple, quiet sentence makes the crying worse.
My apartment in Charleston is exactly as I left it—clean, organized, lifeless. The silence hits the moment I drop my keys on the counter. No storm. No jukebox. No reading glasses on the nightstand.
The laptop bag sits by the door. Inside it is a manuscript more alive than anything I've written in years—and a truth I keep trying to outline my way around.
I'm falling for Tucker Brennan. I drove three hours in the wrong direction to avoid admitting it, and my mascara is wrecked, and my apartment has never felt this empty.
I pour a glass of wine. Sit on the couch. Open the laptop.
The cursor blinks and I start typing.