Page 8 of Born to Run Back
She studied me for another long moment, then shrugged. “Okay, if you say so, boss. But if you need anything—someone to cover a class, someone to talk to—you know where to find me.”
After she left, I gathered my things mechanically, shoving papers into my messenger bag without looking at them. The drive home felt almost surreal, like I was piloting my car from a great distance, watching myself navigate familiar streets while my mind remained fixed on that stretch of canyon road where everything had changed.
At home, I poured myself a bourbon—earlier than usual, but who was keeping track?—and sat at my kitchen table, staring at the stack of smooth stones I’d been collecting for the last few weeks. River rocks, mostly, gathered from the creek behind the school during my lunch breaks. God knew I couldn’t fucking eat, and besides, I did a good job of telling myself it was merely giving me something to do with my hands.
But I knew better.
Tonight was Tuesday. Sometime tonight, maybe shortly after midnight, I’d be back at mile marker eighteen, adding another stone to our strange, silent conversation. Another offering to whatever this was between us; connection or madness or something that lived in the space between the two.
The bourbon burned on the way down, but not enough to quiet the voice in my head that sounded increasingly like my sister’s, the one that said normal people didn’tdoshit like this. Normal people didn’t build shrines to strangers or skip meals because they were too busy researching accident statistics or lie awake counting the hours until their next ritualistic visit to a roadside memorial.
This isn’t fucking normal, Theo.
She’d said it first four years ago, shortly after the insomnia had taken over. Shortly after our mother had died. Shortly after everything had fallen apart.
But I wasn’t a normal person, was I? I hadn’t been long before that broken woman had collapsed on my chest, sobbing like the world was ending—because to her? It kind of had. Watching kids die fucked anybody up.
I hadn’t been normal then, hadn’t even been normal the moment I’d realized that holding her was the most important thing I’d ever done, would probably ever do.
I was a history teacher who’d forgotten how to teach history, a man who’d spent his entire life maintaining careful boundaries, now losing himself in the dangerous territory of unnamed longing.
Yearning.
And the worst part? The absolute worst part was that Istilldidn’t want it to stop.
Not even if it killed me.
Chapter Three
Unspoken Pull
Wendy
Monday,11:47p.m.,fourweeks after the accident
The shower water had gone cold fifteen minutes ago, but I stood under the spray anyway, letting the chill shock my skin into some kind of alertness. My apartment felt like a tomb these days. Too quiet. Too empty. Filled with the ghosts of conversations I’d never had and the phantom weight of arms that had held me exactly once.
Four weeks.
Four weeks since I’d felt anything resembling human connection, and my body was starting to rebel against the fucking isolation left behind. The loneliness had taken on a physical quality, like hunger or thirst, something that gnawed at me during client meetings and followed me home each night, curling around my thoughts like cigarette smoke.
Thick. Disgusting. Addicting.
I finally turned off the water and wrapped myself in a towel that smelled like lavender fabric softener and the particular emptiness of a life lived entirely alone. My reflection in the bathroom mirror looked hollow-eyed, almost translucent. The kind of woman who bought flowers for dead strangers and called it grief when really it was just an excuse to feel something,anything, that resembled purpose.
Sauntering into my bedroom, I pulled on an oversized t-shirt and climbed under sheets that were always cold, no matter how long I lay in them. The digital clock on my nightstand glowed 11:52 in accusatory blood-red. In two hours, I’d be getting dressed again, driving through empty streets to mile marker eighteen to add another rock to our hopeless, impossible conversation.
Our.
As if there was an “our” to speak of. As if thirty-seven minutes of shared trauma was enough to create something real, something sustainable, something that existed outside the fever dream of my increasingly unhinged imagination.
I’d wanted to leave my number, of course. A handwritten note of some kind, explaining thatYes, I felt it, too.But something always stopped me. Shame, perhaps. Or the fear that the person leaving those stones wasn’t even him. A family member or friend of the deceased, perhaps. Maybe it was Delaney, returning week after week to the place where she’d lost it all.
I didn’t know shit about shit, so I refrained from embarrassing myself further. I kept my delusions to myself, locked up tight with my active and fucked-up imagination. And besides, I shouldn’t be thinking of him at all.
It wasn’t healthy.
But lying there in the darkness, I let myself remember anyway. The solid warmth of his hard chest against my cheek. The way his hand had moved in my hair, fingers threading through the damp strands with a tenderness that had felt both foreign and familiar. The smell of his aftershave, spicy and clean, mixing with the rain and the sharp sweetness of his breath against my temple when he’d whispered, “I know.”
