5. My Knees Have Left the Chat #3
Before I could form a coherent excuse, I noticed the woman from the dance floor—the beautiful one, the one with the effortless hair and blinding smile—floating toward us.
Her walk was deliberate, all grace and confidence, and she was looking right at Dawson.
For some reason, the sight of her made my stomach twist. Maybe it was jealousy, maybe it was relief, maybe something worse, but I knew I couldn’t bear to be introduced to her.
I’d kept it together long enough, any longer and my mask would slip.
“I should go,” I blurted. “I need to check on Buddy. Nice to see you again.”
He opened his mouth—maybe to protest, maybe to ask more questions—but the woman was already at his side, hand on his arm.
“Dawson.” She said his name with practiced intimacy, and he straightened a fraction, turning toward her. He looked back at me, tried to say something with his eyes. I ignored it.
“Take care,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. I turned on my heel and walked away, careful not to break into a run.
I made it all the way to the front of the house before the adrenaline ebbed and my hands started to shake in earnest. The evening air felt different out here—drier, sharper—and I gulped it down like water after a marathon.
I didn’t look back. I told myself that if I just kept moving and didn’t think, eventually the ache in my chest would dissolve into something smaller, more manageable, like a papercut you stopped noticing.
I pulled out my phone from the pocket of my dress, thumbed it awake, and opened the ride-share app. My vision blurred slightly as I jabbed at the screen, only for a familiar voice to snap me out of it.
“You making a break for it?”
I turned to find Gio Russo walking towards me, eyes crinkled in concern rather than mischief.
“I’m heading to the hospital. I need to check on Buddy.” It was technically true, but mostly I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Dawson Lockhart as possible. My hands trembled, not from the night air, but from the aftershocks of the encounter. I hoped he didn’t notice.
He stepped closer, just enough to lower his voice. “You want a ride? I can take you.”
I hesitated, shifting from foot to foot. “Are you sure? I don’t want to make you miss the—”
He cut me off with a gentle wave of his hand. “I wasn’t even technically invited. I went full Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn.”
My brows lowered as I tried to figure out what he meant.
“Wedding Crashers,” he offered, explaining the reference to the actors who starred in the movie.
“Oh right.” I smiled, and he extended his arm towards what I assumed was his vehicle.
“Shall we?”
“Yeah, thanks, if you’re sure.”
He opened the passenger door of his SUV dramatically and bowed, like a chauffeur in a black-and-white movie.
That made me laugh—a short, sharp sound that shook off some of the tension coiled in my chest. I slid into his Audi.
It still smelled new, leather and ozone and some faint citrus from an air freshener he’d probably bought on a whim.
Gio got in, started the engine, and pulled away from the ranch.
We drove away from the farm, the fairy lights, and the distant, pulsing hum of wedding music, which faded in the rearview until it was just another echo in the dark.
Neither of us spoke for the first mile. I watched the beams of the headlights paint the road in yellow stripes, watched them dip and bounce as we hit the gravel.
I was waiting for my brain to catch up with my body.
It felt like my heart was running on one set of instructions—get out, get away—while my mind lagged a few steps behind, still replaying the last ten minutes on a loop.
I glanced at Gio. He was alert, but relaxed, one hand on the wheel, the other tapping a casual rhythm on the console as if he were perfectly at home in this situation. Maybe he was. Small towns had a way of making you believe everything was under control, even after a decade of chaos.
He cleared his throat and finally broke the silence. “You want to talk about it, or should I put on some music?”
I considered pretending nothing happened, but that was pointless. Gio, of all people, would see right through it. “I’m fine,” I said, which was a lie, but not a dangerous one. “It was just weird, seeing him again.”
He nodded like he understood the full weight of that sentence.
Maybe he did. It wasn’t just the seeing.
It was the way Dawson’s presence had consumed me, the way his voice had made the years fall away, the way my body had instantly remembered what it was like to be his.
I’d told myself I was over him, that I’d moved on, that high school heartbreak didn’t count in the real world.
But my lungs were still filled with the smoke and memory of him, and I didn’t know if I would ever truly clear the air.
But at least I hadn’t fallen to pieces. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I nailed the reunion, but I hadn’t been reduced to a blubbering mess of unresolved feelings. At this point, I was counting that a win.
I stared out the window and tried to make sense of the landscape, tried to anchor myself to the present.
The fields were silvered by moonlight, the houses spaced wide apart, the ocean a black promise just beyond the hills.
Nothing here was the same as I remembered, and yet it all felt inevitable, as if my return to this place had been written in some small-town DNA code that refused to let go.