Page 19 of Born to Run Back
You too. Take care.
You too.
Riveting fucking conversation, I know.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t get her out of my head. Not the awkward woman in the cream-colored cashmere sweater who’d ordered a chai latte and made polite conversation about her job. The other her. The one who’d wrapped her legs around my waist and cried my name into the crisp February night air. The one who’d felt both like coming home and losing my mind all at once.
I’d replayed the encounter so many times it had taken on a mythical quality, more vivid than anything that had happened since. The exact sound she’d made when I’d first touched her, taking her beautiful face into my palms. The way her fingernails had dug into my shoulders through my wool jacket. How tight and wet and perfect she’d been, accepting me like we’d bebornfor that moment.
Born to run…
My hand moved almost without conscious thought, sliding down my abdomen to palm myself through my jeans. Already half-hard just from the memory alone, from the bourbon and the late hour and the desperate need to feel something other than this hollow disappointment.
I shut my eyes and let myself remember her face bathed in the cold moonlight, flushed and needy, her dark hair splayed across the hood of her Honda like a fucking Renaissance painting. The way she’d moved beneath me, meeting each thrust with something that felt dangerously close to depravity and deprivation.
The release, when it came, was both relief and shame. I sat there afterward, sticky and pathetic, staring at the ceiling and trying to understand how someone could feel both so crucial and so wrong at the same time.
Wendy
Sunday, 2:18 p.m., same week
Beck’s new gravestone was smaller than I’d anticipated. Just a simple granite headstone in a row of similar granite headstones, the grass around it still patchy from winter.
Benedict Foster
2002-2024
Beloved son and brother
Someone had left artificial flowers, the kind that were bright and yellow and something resembling daisies. They looked garish against the gray headstone.
I’d driven here without really planning to, the same way I’d been doing everything lately. Aimless routes through unfamiliar neighborhoods, past schools and coffee shops and anywhere that wasn’t my apartment with its oppressive, deafening silence and the phantom smell of spearmint that seemed to cling to everything.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the headstone, though I wasn’t even certain what I was apologizing for. For not saving him? For using his death as an elaborate excuse to build something with another complete stranger? For the fact that I’d had helpless, clawing sex twenty feet from where he’d died?
The researching had gotten worse since the coffee shop. Hours spent reading accident reports, scrolling through Beck’s old social media accounts, memorizing details about a life I’d never had anything to do with until the very end.
He’d wanted to be a pediatric surgeon. He’d played guitar and had actually been fairly talented. He’d been dating Delaney, who had seemingly fallen off the face of this planet. But I’d done my due diligence, and had researched what had happened to her.
A mental institution three towns over. That’s where she was.
Andthatwas real grief. Not whatever twisted thing I’d been mistaking for love.
But even sitting here, surrounded by the weight of actual loss, I couldn’t stop thinking about Theo’s large hands roaming my body. The way he’d lifted me so easily, positioning me exactly where he’d wanted me. How he’d felt inside me, thick and demanding and so utterly right that everything else had just sort of… melted away.
My phone buzzed. A text from my mother, asking about Easter plans, if I could fly back to New York for a weekend, at least. I stared at the text without comprehending a single word. Normal life kept trying to intrude, kept demanding I participate in things like holiday dinners and work meetings and all the mundane obligations that felt impossible when your entire world had been reduced to thirty-seven minutes and the memory of a stranger’s touch.
I’d fingered myself to an orgasm three times since the coffee shop, unable to allow the memories fade. Three times, thinking about the weight of him, the urgency in his movements, the broken sound he’d made when he’d come inside me.
And each time followed by the same crushing shame, the same certainty that I was losing myself in something unhealthy and obsessive and completely divorced from reality.
Because the reality was that polite, distant man who’d struggled to make conversation over coffee. The reality was that we were strangers who’d confused a bond born of trauma for human connection, a violent sexual encounter full of desolation for emotional intimacy.
The reality was that I was crouched in a cemetery, talking to a dead boy’s grave because it felt more honest than anything else in my fucked-up life.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I told Beck’s headstone, my voice hardly audible. “And I don’t know how to stop.”
The fake daisies fluttered in the afternoon breeze, offering no answers.
