Page 27 of Born to Run Back
“Especially here. Let them overhear beauty.”
So I did, my voice pitched low enough that the words became a secret shared between us, the syllables weaving through the space between our bodies like an invisible thread. When the last line faded into the bookstore’s quiet chaos, she was staring at me with an expression that made my pulse catch against my throat.
“Your students are so blessed,” she whispered. “You make language sacred.”
Wendy
Date Six: Sanctuary of Creation
My apartment had long since been exorcised of its demons, transformed back from a mausoleum to an actual living space where light could breathe and hope could take root. Theo sprawled across my couch like he belonged there, a glass of ice water balanced precariously on his knee as he studied the paintings that covered my walls like windows into worlds I’d dreamed into existence. Abstract landscapes that captured the way the sunset bled across the San Gabriel Mountains, experiments in light that traced the silver dance of morning fog across the valley floor.
“This one,” he murmured, his voice thick with recognition as he pointed to a large canvas I’d birthed merely the week before. “Bonelli Park. The overlook where we hiked.”
“You have an artist’s eye,” I observed, settling beside him, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from his body. Close enough that our knees touched, like a promise. “I painted it from memory after our morning together. Something about that particular light just demanded to be captured.”
“It’s devastatingly beautiful, Wendy. All of it.” He gestured toward the gallery of my soul spread across the room. “You don’t just paint landscapes. You paint emotion. You make color… sing.”
Heat crawled up my throat like liquid fire. “Um, thanks, but they’re just—”
“No.” His voice carried the edge of something fierce, something protective. “Don’t you dare diminish the magic you create. These paintings… Wendy, they alter the air in the room. They make me believe the world contains more beauty than I dared hope.”
“What kind of beauty?”
He turned to look at me, placing a warm hand on my cheek. His thumb brushed over my cheekbone in that gentle way only he knew how.
“The kind that lives in shadow and light,” he said. “The kind that transforms suffering into something that can heal.” His eyes searched mine, and the intensity made me feel transparent, like he could see straight through to my very core. “The kind that lives in you.”
Theo
Date Seven: Confessions over Carbs
Nonna’s Kitchen was chaos incarnate. Cramped tables, impossibly loud conversation in three languages, the kind of family-owned restaurant where the matriarch still rolled pasta by hand at four in the morning and treated every customer like a grandchild who didn’t visit often enough.
Wendy had marinara sauce painting her chin like war paint and wine-brightened eyes that reflected candlelight like captured starfire, and I had never witnessed anything more magnificent in my thirty-four years of breathing.
“So my sister stages this intervention,” I said, gesturing with my fork in a way that would have made my mother despair of my table manners, “and discovers me almost unconscious at my kitchen table with an empty bourbon bottle and a stack of papers that had been breeding neglect for two weeks.”
“Jesus, Theo.” Her voice carried the twinge of someone who understood full-blown mental breakdowns.
“My finest hour, clearly. But Andie probably prevented me from drowning that night. Forced me to admit that needing help wasn’t the same as being perceived as weak.”
Those starfire eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “Tell me about her. Your sister.”
“Brilliant and ruthless and completely allergic to self-pity, which is precisely what my pathetic soul required.” I took a sip of vibrant wine that tasted like liquid courage, studying Wendy’s face in the flickering light. “What about you? Tell me about your family.”
“Oh, loud enough to wake the dead. Chaotic as a thunderstorm. My mother calls every Sunday to interrogate me about my reproductive timeline, and my father sends care packages filled with Brooklyn bagels and parental anxiety.” She laughed, but something wistful showed in her expression. “They lose sleep worrying about their daughter living alone in this sprawling desert of strangers.”
“Are they right to worry?”
“They were,” she said, her gaze seeking mine. “But not anymore.”
The words hung between us like a bridge neither of us was quite ready to cross, weighted with implications that made my chest feel tight with something that felt dangerously close to hope.
Wendy
Date Eight: Return to Eden
We drove separately to Bonelli Park again, but this time Theo suggested the trail that wound toward the overlook where teenagers had been making promises and breaking hearts since long before we were born. Late afternoon light transmuted everything to a hue of gold—the sagebrush, the distant mountains, the man walking beside me, whose presence had become as necessary as oxygen. The same canyons where we’d once built shrines to our shared madness now witnessed something infinitely more dangerous: the slow burn of two people choosing each other with their eyes wide open.
