Chapter 18
Blakelyn
It’s still dark when I wake up. Not from a nightmare this time but because his arm is still around me. Because he’s still here.
His chest rises and falls behind me and his breath warms the back of my neck. His hand is resting just above my hip like he forgot how to be anywhere but here. His body is wrapped around mine like we’re something more than just heat and mistakes.
I don’t know what to do with that. I asked for more.
No, I demanded it and he didn’t run.
Staying the night is not the same as staying, though.
Being held is not the same as being loved.
I close my eyes, just for a second… and let myself pretend.
This—him, here, quiet and real and wrapped around me—isn’t fleeting.
Maybe I’m not just the next temporary in his long line of permanent scars.
Maybe—just maybe—I matter like he swears I do.
But his actions haven’t proven the words he said last night and my heart can’t take it if he really didn’t mean them.
By the time the sun’s up, he’s gone, but he did leave a note.
That’s something. It might be everything.
With Gruene, every action matters… especially the small ones.
The note is just one word. It’s scribbled in slanted, tired handwriting on the notepad I use for my grocery list.
Lunch?
There’s no time. There’s no place… but I’m working, and my lunch hour is a set time.
He asked the question and somehow it feels like more than a hundred apologies ever could.
Folding it in half, I slide it into the front pocket of my purse before heading to school.
The halls feel different now. Or maybe I do.
The kids are louder today. The honeymoon phase is over. I already had a sixth grader tell me my class is boring and another one cry because she forgot her lunch. But even as the day spins, I’m rooted because last night, Gruene gave me something I didn’t think he could.
Not sex. Not closeness. Truth.
It was messy and hard and probably tore something in him wide open, but he said it.
“I don’t want to keep running.”
That has to count for something.
Right?
I catch myself glancing at the office phone during planning period, wondering if he called. I checked my cell phone beneath the desk during a lull.
He didn’t text me either, not that I expected him to but I keep thinking about the way he looked standing at my door last night—raw and vulnerable, like he’d peeled back skin just to show me what was underneath.
Lunch?
I shouldn’t hope… but I do.
When the bell rings and lunch break hits, I find myself walking toward the parking lot without a plan.
It’s hot. Mid-August Texas hot.
The sun is beating down like it’s got something to prove. The kind of Texas heat that settles in your bones and refuses to leave. It’s like a loving, slap to the face.
As I walk out of the office doors, I see it.
His truck.
He’s parked under the shade of a giant oak tree across the road. His driver’s side door is open and one booted foot is hanging out like he’s waiting on the kind of thing he doesn’t wait for.
Me.
Walking faster, I cross the road.
My heart is a mess of questions, but he smiles when I get there.
Just a little. Just enough.
“You hungry?” He asks.
I nod and he hands me a brown paper bag like we’re in high school and he packed my lunch himself.
Inside is a cold Dr Pepper, a turkey sandwich, and a still-warm chocolate chip cookie wrapped in a napkin that has “don’t laugh” scribbled on it in pen.
I look up and his cheeks flush.
“I tried baking. I mean, it’s just the kind you put in the oven.” He blurts out.
I blink. “You what ?”
He clears his throat. “I was in town running an errand and just grabbed some and threw them in the oven when I got back.”
He baked me cookies.
My chest swells because no one but my grandma has ever baked for me.
I take a bite. Crispy on the edges and still raw in the middle, but I like cookie dough so I think it’s perfect.
He tried to bake me freaking cookies.
“Best cookie I’ve ever had,” I say after I eat the whole thing.
His face lights up like I handed him the moon and my heart threatens to leap clean out of my chest at how absolutely gorgeous Gruene Cavanaugh is when he smiles.
Holy shit…
We eat in silence after that, both of us sitting on the tailgate of his truck, legs swinging over the edge like we’re kids again.
He tells me about some tubing group from Waco who clogged up the dock this morning.
I tell him about the seventh-grade boy who asked if I was married, then called me “Miss Fat-Bottom Babe” under his breath
His jaw locked at that. Hard… and I liked it.
He didn’t pretend not to care. He didn’t try to hide the fact that a twelve-year-old boy noticing my figure wasn’t really something he wasn’t affected by.
We don’t talk about us. We don’t talk about anything important. We just talk.
As we do, he reaches over and brushes a crumb off my cheek with his thumb like it matters to him that I feel seen.
For now, that’s enough.
When he walks me across the street back to the school, I don’t want to let go of the thread that’s stretching between us.
Stopping at the edge of the curb, I glance up at him. “You working late again?”
“I’ll probably be done about 6,” he says, dragging a hand through his hair. “We have to patch some tubes and restring some vests tonight. We have a big group coming in tomorrow. Reece will probably stay a bit, and then, I’ll probably restock. Do inventory. It’s going to be a pretty late night.”
I nod. He’s never shared that much with me before.
I sense something tugging at him… something that’s still sitting in the middle of his chest. Finally, he tugs at the base of his neck and says it. “You free Saturday morning?”
That’s three days from now.
It’s also the day I don’t teach.
“It’s the weekend.” I arch a brow at him. “Why?”
He shifts his weight. “I want to show you something.” I wait but he doesn’t elaborate. Something in his voice—tight, like he’s offering me a sliver of something sacred.
I nod. “I’m free.”
He slightly smirks and I forget how to breathe as he mutters, “It’s a date.”
A date… a date with Gruene.
I have a date with Gruene. An actual date… if he shows… if he doesn’t run.
Saturday morning, I’m waiting outside on the porch when he drives up from the shop.
He doesn’t say much after he parks in front of my cabin and leaves the engine on. He just hands me a coffee and tells me to wear something I can walk in.
We drive for twenty minutes—away from the river, up through winding hill roads and dry fields with nothing but oak trees and the distant hum of crickets. After a bit, we pull off onto a gravel turnout near a locked gate with rusted hinges and a private property sign.
I glance at him. He’s tense. “I used to bring them here,” he says. “Before—” He doesn’t finish. He just turns off the engine, gets out, unlocks the gate, and waits for me to join him.
Glancing around, I do. He starts walking, waiting for me and purposefully shortening his strides.
I follow through tall grass and scattered cypress and oak trees until we reach the top of a small ridge that looks down on the river.
It’s not the part where people float. This is quiet. Private. Untouched. And still wild.
A breeze from the river cuts through the heat, and for the first time in days, I can breathe.
We sit in silence. Just existing together for awhile.
He doesn’t look at me. He stares at the water and picks at blades of grass. He seems lost in thought, and then, he says, “This is where I go when I can’t breathe.”
My throat tightens.
He brought me to his place.
I don’t take it for granted. Reaching over, I take his hand. He links his fingers with mine and we sit there for a long time.
Not speaking. Not fixing. Just being.
Gruene
She doesn’t say a word on the walk back. She doesn’t have to. Her hand’s still in mine. Our fingers are woven together, but she’s giving me room… almost like she knows I might try to drop it. I don’t. She holds me there with the only thing that’s ever worked—quiet presence.
Not force. Not pity. Not pleading.
And dammit to Hell, I hate how much I need it.
I haven’t brought anyone here since Molly.
Since Aubree
The air’s thicker now, like it knows what I did—what I allowed .
Her. In my place.
I unlock the truck, but I don’t start it.
I just sit with my hands on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield like maybe I can pretend I didn’t just give her a piece of something I buried years ago.
“Thank you,” she whispers, fully aware that I just tore open my chest and let her see me.
I don’t respond.
I don’t know how to.
My voice is caught in the same place it always is—back in the river, somewhere between the scream I never let out and the silence I buried them in.
I’m trapped in a fucking loop between the past and the present.
By the time we get back to the cabins, the sun’s high and the lot by the dock is full—floaters piling out of SUVs with neon coolers, beer, and too much sunscreen. Reece waves from the rental stand. We wave back but I don’t stop.
I park behind her car.
“I need to grade some papers,” she says, unbuckling. “They only let me know late yesterday that grades had to be entered by tomorrow.”
What? She said she was free the whole day?
I nod but I still don’t say a word.
She reaches for the door handle, but she stops, looking back at me. “You don’t have to say anything, Gruene. But I need you to know—what you gave me this morning? It mattered.”
My jaw tightens.
I want to brush it off.
I want to tell her it was nothing.
But it wasn’t.
And lying about it would be worse than silence.
So, I just nod again. She looks like she wants to say something else, but she doesn’t. She just smiles at me and closes the door before she disappears into her cabin.
I don’t exhale until she’s gone.
The river’s alive by midday.
I’m knee-deep in broken coolers, sunburned tourists, and two grown men fighting over who stole whose dry bag. Reece handles most of it, separating the men and tossing tubes in equal measure while trading barbs with the teenage workers.
I can’t focus. Not fully.
I keep thinking about the way her hand felt in mine.
About the relief in her eyes when I let her sit with me and didn’t run.
About the way she didn’t say my name, didn’t press, didn’t fill the silence with anything but breath and space and presence.
Molly used to talk too much.
She’d chatter through pain, try to soothe it with words. That’s not a bad thing. It just… it was hers.
Blakelyn’s different.
And for the first time in six years, the ache I’ve clung to like penance feels like it’s shifting—like grief’s making room for something else.
Something I don’t trust.
Something I don’t know how to hold onto.
Something I don’t think I deserve.
By five, the dock’s quiet again. The last tubers were just bused back and have left in their cars
Reece packs up early, says he’s got plans in San Marcos. I lock the shed and head back toward the cabins, sweat clinging to the back of my neck and dirt streaked on my arms from hauling tubes all day.
I mean to shower. I mean to be rational. Instead, I find myself walking straight to her porch.
I knock and she opens the door like she was expecting it.
Maybe she was.
Her hair’s in a messy bun. There’s a pen stuck in it, and her lips are pink and soft like she’s been chewing on them while she grades.
I look down—bare feet, shorts, one of my old river shirts half-tucked like she doesn’t realize she’s wearing something of mine.
Or maybe she does. Maybe it was intentional.
“Hey,” she says smiling up at me.
I want to kiss her. I want to drown in her. Instead, I ask, “You eat yet?”
She chuckles. “You gonna cook?”
“You don’t want me to cook. But I was thinking maybe you’d join me in town… for dinner?”
She glances at me, trailing her gaze from my head to my toes and back up again. “You going to shower first?” Her lip is between her teeth and she’s ogling me.
It does something to me and I’m already dying slow. Leaning in, I stop millimeters from her mouth. She inhales and her pupils dilate. “Yeah, I am,” I mutter. My lips lightly brush over hers. “Be ready in ten minutes.”
Turning on my heel, I take the quickest shower in existence in my own cabin and ignore my raging erection.
We don’t talk about this morning over tacos. We don’t talk about the river.
Or Molly. Or Aubree. Or the fact that I wanted to kiss her when she thanked me but couldn’t make my mouth cooperate.
But we do talk. About school. About how one of her students made her a friendship bracelet out of duct tape. About how she used to dream of teaching in places like this, towns where the school counselor also runs the pie shop on Main Street.
She’s funny, sarcastic in this sweet way that sneaks up on you. And when she laughs—really laughs—it cracks something in my ribs wide open… like she’s carving out a place there.
Without asking. Without force. Just being. I want to stay right here beside her.
We walk back to the truck slowly, both pretending we don’t know what’s coming.
The air’s thick again—August heat curling around every breath, cicadas droning in the trees like static.
I should walk her to her door. I should say goodnight. But I don’t.
She doesn’t either. She looks at me. And I can’t not touch her.
My fingers dance on her wrist before slowly trailing up to her elbow. My hand flattens against the side of her neck before snaking around the back and cupping it. She leans in like she’s waiting for me to do it, to kiss her, to pull her in.
I want to let go of every fucking wall still stacked in my chest like bricks I laid myself.
And then… I do . I kiss her.
It’s not rushed. It’s not about sex. It’s not even about grief. It’s about her.
Her mouth softens and opens under mine. Her breath catches when I angle deeper and her head falls back, granting me access. She slides her hands up under the back of my shirt to caress the scars on my skin—not just feel the heat.
And fuck, I let her.
I let her feel every part of me.
We don’t make it to the bed.
I press her against the wall inside her front door Her legs wrap around my waist with her skirt bunching up. Her mouth is on mine like we’ve been starving.
Our clothes hit the floor in pieces—my shirt, her bra, her dress and nude lace panties I want to tear in half. My jeans and boxers join the pile.
She stops me, right before I take her. Right before it becomes more.
Reaching out, she holds my face in both hands and stares into my eyes “I’m not her. I’m not Molly,” she says.
It should cut. It should hurt… but it doesn’t because it’s true. And maybe I need to say it, too. “I know, baby. You’re not Molly. You’re Blakelyn. My Blakelyn. ”
She gasps as I sink into her, and we both fall apart.