Page 16 of Born to Run Back
He gently pulled out of me, both of us hissing at the loss of contact, and I scrambled to pull my jeans back up, suddenly mortified by just how exposed I was. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely manage the button.
Theo reached between us, bumping my shaking hands aside, and buttoned my jeans for me as I stared at him, hopelessly obsessed with every little thing he did.
“This is—” I started, then stopped, because I didn’t know what this was. Insane? Beautiful? The worst decision I’d ever made? The only thing that had felt real since that horrific accident? Or perhaps even longer than that?
“Intense,” Theo offered, zipping his own jeans with hands that trembled almost as badly as mine. “This is really fucking intense.”
We stood there awkwardly, me leaning against the car, him a foot or two away, both of us looking anywhere but at each other. The memorial seemed to loom larger in the darkness, all those carefully placed stones bearing witness to what we’d just done. Had we desecrated something sacred, or finally given it the meaning it was supposed to have?
“We should…” I cleared my throat and tried again. “We should probably get coffee sometime. Like normal people.”
The words had come out stiff, formal, and downright ridiculous after what we’d just done. Like normal people? What did normal evenlooklike?
“Normal people,” he repeated, and I could hear the same bewildered tone in his deep voice. “Right. Coffee. Normal.”
“I mean, if you want to,” I added quickly, panic suddenly creeping in. What if this and just been about the fantasy? What if now that we’d finally touched each other, the spell was somehow broken? “We, uh, don’t have to. I-I understand if this was just—”
“Wendy, I want to,” he said just as quickly, stepping closer. “God, yes, I want to. I just… I don’t know how to do this. Any of this.”
“Me neither.” I fumbled for my phone, my hands still shaking. “Numbers? We should probably exchange numbers. That’s what normal people do, right?”
“Right, yeah.” He pulled out his own phone, the screen’s glow illuminating his handsome face in the darkness. He looked about as rattled as I felt, his blonde hair messed up from my fingers, his eyes wide and uncertain.
We typed our information into each other’s cellphones, this mundane act feeling somehow more terrifying than the sex had been. This was real now. Concrete. No more fantasy or ghosts or projections—just two people who’d probably made a terrible mistake and were trying to figure out what came next.
“So,” I said, sliding my phone back into my pocket. “Coffee.”
“Coffee,” he agreed with a nod. “Tomorrow? Or… later today, I guess.”
“Later today.” I opened my car door, suddenly desperate to escape, to process what had just happened in the safety of my apartment, where I couldn’t be distracted by Theo and just how disgustingly attractive he was.
Fuck.
“I’ll text you,” was all I could manage as desire coursed through my veins. I wanted him again, desperately. Come all over his thick, raging hard—
No. No. No.
Go home, Wendy.
“Okay.” He was backing toward his own car now, his movements jerky and uncertain. “Drive safe.”
“You too.”
I climbed into my Honda, my whole body still humming with sensation, with the memory of him thickening inside me as he fucked my goddamn brains out. But as I started the engine and pulled away from our memory, doubt crept in like a fog.
What had we just done? Was this the beginning of something real, or the end of a beautiful delusion we’d been cooking up for four torturous months? In the harsh light of approaching dawn, would we look at each other like strangers? Would the coffee shop conversation be all awkward silences and the growing realization that a shared trauma wasn’t the same thing as compatibility?
I caught sight of his headlights in my rearview mirror as he followed me out of the canyon; my chest tightened with something between terror and… hope.
Four months of obsession had led to this: desperate sex against my car and shaking hands exchanging phone numbers like teenagers after an unexpected hookup at a house party.
Normal people, I’d said. As if either of us had any fucking clue what that meant.
Chapter Seven
Edges of Normal
Theo
