“Bossing.”
“You had a granola bar before jumping off a cliff.”
“It had oats.”
“It was not breakfast yesterday. It’s not breakfast today.”
“You are weirdly passionate about nutrition.”
“I’m passionate about people not passing out on my watch.”
“Useful things again?”
“Yes.”
She studies me from where she sits on the dock, one knee tucked under her, damp braid over her shoulder, green eyes too thoughtful.
“What?” I ask.
She looks away toward the lake. For a second, I think she won’t answer.
Then she says, “Do you ever get tired of feeling like you don’t have one home to go to?”
There’s no accusation or judgment in her voice. I don’t get the feeling she’s suggesting I should fix myself by choosing one zip code and staying there. She asks like she is wondering how freedom feels from the inside after dark.
I look out over the lake. Cabins behind me. Water in front of me. Mountains rising beyond it. A place I know better than I know most people. I could say Cady Springs is home. It is, in a way.
My cabin sits back in the trees on the far side of town, locked up half the year, waiting for me like an old dog that never asks why I leave. I know the bends in the trails, the bad rocks, the best fishing spots, the places where the lake warms first in June and turns cold first in September.
But I also know the Gulf Coast at sunrise. Desert nights in January. Georgia rain on a tin roof.
Home has always been less of a place and more of a direction forward. Moving away before stillness gets its hands around my throat.
“Sometimes,” I say.
Layla’s gaze comes back to me. It feels like I’ve handed her more than I meant to.
“I think I understand that more than I probably should,” she says.
The dock, the lake, the whole damn morning seems to shift beneath my feet. A second-grade teacher with soft curves and ugly-toe shame and a safe ex-husband named Harold should not understand that. She should want one town. One school. One house with flower beds and a pantry full of labeled bins. She should want Christmas lights on the same porch every year. She should not look at my half-wild, half-working, never-quite-still life and see anything but a temporary thrill.
But the way she’s looking at me now?
She sees the lonely parts too. And she isn’t flinching.
Wanting her body was easy. Wanting her to understand me is the dangerous part.
I clear my throat and reach for the loose board near the kayak rack because fixing something is easier than standing here with my chest cracked open. Layla follows.
“You don’t have to trail me around while I work,” I say.
“I know.”
“But you are. Why?”
She shrugs, but there’s nothing careless about it. “I like watching you make things safer before anyone knows they needed it.”
I stop with the screwdriver in my hand and look at her. Layla’s face is open in a way that makes me want to touch it. Push the damp hair from her cheek. Find out whether her mouth tastes like lake water and nerves and that wild laugh she let loose after the jump.
