Page 25 of Born to Run Back
We’d finally learned the difference between honoring trauma and being imprisoned by it. Between the sacred necessity of grief and the beautiful, terrible trap of making our pain into a religion.
And maybe, just maybe, we’d found something real we could build together. Something that could exist in the light of day, in coffee shops with good lighting, in the ordinary sacred space of two people who’d chosen to know each other slowly, deliberately and conscientiously, with all the patience that real love required.
Chapter Eleven
Light Between Us
Theo
Date One: Coffee Shop Redux
Thecoffeeshop,DejaBrew, felt differently than that fluorescent purgatory where we’d first attempted this complicated dance. Exposed brick walls held the warmth of endless conversations, mismatched vintage chairs worn smooth by bodies that had lingered over stories worth telling and hearing.
Wendy sat across from me, her small, slender hands wrapped around a Vietnamese iced coffee like it was something precious, and for the first time in months, I felt the dangerous possibility of hope unfurl in my chest.
“Idespisespreadsheets,” she said, answering my question about her work with the brutal honesty I was learning she possessed. “Tax season makes me want to burn the world down. But I’m good at making numbers dance in perfect rows, and it pays for the expensive canvas that calls to me from art supply stores.”
“What kind of expensive canvas?”
“The kind that costs more than a car payment and smells like possibility.” Her smile was devastatingly gorgeous, transforming her entire face into something luminous. “My neighbors probably think I’m cook up meth with all the turpentine fumes seeping under my door.”
The sudden laughter that escaped me felt foreign, rusty from disuse, like rediscovering a muscle I’d forgotten I had. “Better than mine assuming I’m losing my sanity because I grade papers at ungodly hours while talking to myself about the fall of empires.”
“Are you?” she asked, learning forward. “Losing your sanity?”
I smiled. “Absolutely. But it’s a more sustainable madness now.”
After that, the conversation flowed like honey from a broken hive—golden, natural, inevitable. No frantic grasping for connection, no performative politeness stretched thin over the abyss of a single shared trauma. Just two souls discovering they could exist in the same space, and for once, without drowning, without using each other as life preservers in an ocean of grief.
I felt… hope.
Wendy
Date Two: Canyon Pilgrimage
The trail behind Bonelli Park carved itself through scrub oak and sage like a prayer written in earth and stone. Morning light filtered through the branches, dancing with wind-whispered secrets, painting shadows that shifted like living creatures across the path. Theo moved ahead of me with the fluid grace of a person who had always belonged to these hills, his body reading the landscape like scripture, pointing out red-tailed hawk nests and explaining the ancient difference between wild lilac and chamise.
“You love this place the way some people love their god,” I said, breathless from more than just the climb as I caught up to him at a ridge overlooking the sprawling valley of our city below.
“It’s where the noise in my head finally shuts up. Where everything makes sense.” He turned to face me, and his eyes held the same blue intensity as the October sky that had watched us kneel in rain and blood. “What about you? Where do you go when your soul needs tending, Wendy?”
“My studio. Usually at hours when decent people should be sleeping, when the light is terrible but the silence is perfect.”
“Night creature.”
“Reformed insomniac,” I corrected, and it felt like a confession, like laying down armor I’d carried so long I’d forgotten its weight. “Therapy helped uncover the demons. But having reasons to greet tomorrow instead of merely surviving it—thatis what changed everything.”
He studied me with an intensity that should have terrified me but instead made every nerve ending hum with electrical possibility.
“What kind of reasons?”
“The dangerous kind,” I said, staring straight back at him. “The kind that make you want to stick around and see what happens next.”
The wind caught my hair, whipping dark strands across my vision, and before I could move them aside, Theo reached out and tucked them behind my ear with such tenderness it made my chest ache. His fingertips lingered against my cheek for one heartbeat, maybe two—long enough for me to memorize the warmth of his touch.
“I’m really grateful you decided to stick around,” he said, his voice rough with something that sounded suspiciously like adoration.
So was I. God, so was I.
