I look at him.
He looks at me.
And I see it clearly for the first time, what’s actually happening here: I’m not afraid of him being too young. I’m not even afraid of the gap, the math, the optics. Those are real considerations for later but they’re not the fear.
The fear is wanting something again. The specific vulnerability of letting myself lean toward something warm when you’ve spent fourteen years being my own heat source. I built myself into someone who doesn’t need and I’m proud of that, I earned that, but Cruz Jackson standing at the bottom of a beach walkway with sand on his feet and total sincerity on his face is threatening the architecture of that very carefully.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he says. Easy. No pressure. Just a fact.
“I’ll be on the deck,” I say, like I wasn’t going to be there regardless.
I go up the stairs first. I don’t look back.
But at the top, before the walkway curves toward my door, I hear him still on the beach below and I know without looking that he waited until I was safely up before he started climbing.
That does something to me I don’t have a name for yet.
6
CRUZ
I stand at the bottom of those stairs longer than I need to.
This is becoming a pattern. Me, stationary, watching the space Hannah just vacated and taking stock of what’s happening in my chest. It’s not subtle. It’s not casual. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve felt before and I’ve been alive long enough to know the difference between wanting someone and whatever this specific, accelerating thing is.
I climb the stairs and go inside and drink a full glass of water standing at the sink like a man who has his life together.
I do not have my life together.
I don’t post anything for the rest of the afternoon.
This is notable because my posting schedule is consistent in the way that my actual meals are not. It’s the discipline I apply where I apply it, the routine that keeps the algorithm fed and the brand healthy and the income steady. I have content sittingin my drafts. I have a reel half-edited on my phone that would perform well and take twenty minutes to finish.
I leave it.
Instead, I sit at my drafting table with the Corolla project spread out in front of me and I work. Really work, the kind that makes two hours disappear. I don’t think about Hannah except for the approximately forty-five times I think about Hannah.
The thing she said on the beach keeps circling back:I needed to find out if I still knew how.How to be alone with herself. How to want something for no reason except that she wanted it.
I understand that more than she’d probably expect me to. The influencer version of Cruz Jackson wants for an audience— the food fails, the beach days, the relatable disasters, all of it calibrated for reaction. It’s not fake exactly but it’s not the whole truth either, and somewhere in the last year I’ve felt the gap between the performance and the person widening in a way that got harder to ignore.
Which is part of why I’m here. Alone. Taking a month to remember what I actually am when nobody’s watching.
And then Hannah happened.
Maya calls at five, which means she’s been thinking about our conversation all day and has reached conclusions she needs to share.
“I did some reflecting,” she says, by way of greeting.
“Of course you did.”
“The age gap is actually not that big a deal statistically.”
“Maya.”
“I’m just saying, the data on age-gap relationships?—”
“Please don’t cite data at me about my personal life.”
