Page 68 of The Space Between
Thunder and sunrise.
I push my plate away before I say something I can’t take back.
After helpingher clean up the kitchen, I’m standing on her porch, hesitating again.
She doesn’t say anything. She just waits.
Taking that first step back inside feels like stepping off the edge of something I’m not ready for, but I do it anyway.
She doesn’t press me. She doesn’t ask if I’m staying. She doesn’t invite me to her bed.
She just turns out the light and settles onto the couch beside me, pulling a blanket over her legs.
Reaching over, I pull the edge of her blanket over, so it covers mine, too.
For a while, we sit in the dark with the hum of cicadas outside and the quiet thunder of everything we’re both still carrying as the only sounds in the room.
“I didn’t want to live,” I whisper. “After the crash. I didn’t want it. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even try. I even tried to… you know.” She turns toward me, eyes wide, breath still. “But something wouldn’t let me go. And I hated it. Hated that I was still breathing while they weren’t.” I stare down at my hands. “They pulled me out with broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a memory of their screams I still can’t silence. And then I just… existed. A broken shell of the man I used to be.”
Blakelyn reaches for my hand, and I let her take it. My fingers open, weaving with hers. “You’re not broken, Gruene,” she says.
I look at her with my brow arched, literally feeling the scar through it pull with the movement. “You sure about that?”
“No. You can be fractured, but it doesn’t mean you’re broken. I think maybe you’re more human than anyone I’ve ever met.”
I swallow. Hard. Weighing her words, imagining that they could be true.
Her voice is soft as she says, “Tyler made me feel like nothing. I went from being a whole, happy, confident woman to feeling like an object. Something for him to possess… to control… to break. I was a weight. A mistake. He fractured me, but he never broke me. If he had, I wouldn’t be here now. And if you were broken, Gruene, truly broken, you wouldn’t be here either.” Her voice is steel-wrapped velvet.
“You don’t erase pain by burying it,” she says. “But you can carry it beside someone who doesn’t make you feel small… and together, you can piece the fractured pieces back together.”
I blink, absorbing her words. Then, I nod because she’s not wrong.
We stay on the couch, our limbs tangled, our hearts still bruised, but we’re breathing.
Together.
I wake up before her.We fell asleep on the couch, and I justwatchher.
She’s all long, dark lashes and mussed, dark hair. Her cheeks are flushed and her mouth is slightly open. Her bare feet are tucked under the blanket like she’s part of the furniture now, but her toes peek out.
For the first time in six fucking years, I think?—
Maybe I could want something again.
Not because I deserve it.
Because she does.
But wanting her means giving her all the parts of me.
And I don’t know if I can.
Not yet.
Not fully.
I’m here and she’s still reaching.
