After a while, the landscape slid into sameness: gas stations and dead strip malls, cell towers strung along the ridge liketelephone poles from a different century. Even the memories got repetitive.
At some point I dozed off, then woke to the smell of gas station pizza and the sound of Caiden cursing at the pump. My head throbbed with the ache of sleeping upright and the deeper, older ache that came with remembering.
He handed me a bottle of water and a pack of peanut M&Ms. No words, just a look, the kind that asked if I was okay even though he already knew the answer.
"Thanks," I said, peeling open the foil with shaking fingers.
He started the car and headed back onto the road.
I waited, letting the silence fill up the cab, letting it press against my ribs until I couldn’t take it anymore.
"Why do you think we survived?" I asked suddenly, surprising even myself.
He blinked, slow and reptilian. "What?"
"Colorado. The woods. All of it.”
He kept his eyes on the road, but his hand twitched on the wheel. “Because we were tougher than the things that wanted to kill us.”
“You don’t believe in fate, or luck? Just brutality?”
“Luck’s a lie,” he said, face turning hard. “If you get out, it’s because you crawled over someone else’s corpse to do it. No one’s ever rescued. They just escape.”
I thought about that, about the way we’d left the woods in Colorado with our skin still on, but something raw and vital scraped away forever. I thought about the way Caiden stabbed Blake so viciously, and how we left his corpse in that cabin. “So, you think we just outlasted it all?”
He grunted. “We didn’t outlast anything. It’s still there. You just get better at keeping it away from the surface.”
I let the words settle, mixing with the ache in my throat. I remembered the way he’d held me after the lake, fingers digging in like he thought I might dissolve if he let go.
Maybe he was right. Maybe we were nothing but willpower and scar tissue.
“Do you regret it?” I spoke. “That it was me you were stuck with, and that you didn’t leave me behind?”
He was quiet for so long, I thought he would ignore it. “No. That’s the only thing I don’t regret.”
“My mom used to say we only get one life. That you have to decide if you’re gonna spend it running from shit or chasing something better.” The words felt thin, borrowed.
Caiden shot me a sidelong look, not unkind. The sun caught in his eyes, turning them that impossible gray-blue that always made me think of thunderstorms, or the hush right before one breaks.
“I used to wait for things to happen,” I admitted. “I thought if I kept my head down long enough, it’d all just fix itself.”
“Did it?” His hand tightened on the wheel, knuckles pale. “Did playing dead ever fix anything?”
I looked out at the endless blur of pine and asphalt. “No. Just made it easier to stay numb.”
He rolled the window half down, letting the cold air slice between us. “I think you like the pain.”
“Excuse me?”
He shrugged, eyes back on the road, jaw set. “Not in a pathetic way. Just—you want to feel something. Even if it’s bad. You always did.”
It stung, because it was true. Because the only thing worse than hurting was the nothing that came before it.
“Maybe I do,” I muttered. “But you’re not exactly Mr. Stability, either.”
He laughed, low in his throat. “I’m fucked up. I know that.”
A few beats of silence went by.
