She nodded slowly, reading what I hadn’t said in that, and let it settle without pushing further. “And work?” she said, after a moment. “How was your day before all of this happened?”
I thought about it. “Quiet morning. We had a call mid-afternoon, nothing serious—a barn fire out on Route 9,contained fast. But there was a moment when we first pulled up where it looked like it might go a different way, and that stays with you a little.” I paused. “The waiting-to-know part. Before you can see the full picture.”
She was watching me carefully. “Does that happen a lot? That feeling?”
“Often enough that you learn to manage it,” I said. “You get good at staying in the present moment. Focusing on what’s in front of you rather than what might be.” I looked at her. “It’s actually not bad practice for life in general.”
She held my gaze for a beat, something warm moving through her expression. “I never really asked you much about the job,” she said quietly. “What it actually felt like from the inside. I’m sorry for that.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.”
“I want to know,” she said simply. “I mean that. Not just tonight. I want to actually know what your life looks like. Now. I know all about—before. You know, when we were closer.” She said it directly, without hedging, and it landed somewhere important. “What does a regular shift feel like for you?”
So I told her. Not the dramatic version, not the highlights reel, but the actual texture of it—the long slow hours of maintenance and routine, the way the station had its own rhythm and its own quiet, the way a call changed the air in a way that was impossible to describe to someone who hadn’t felt it, the strange intimacy of working that closely with people over that much time. She listened without interrupting, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes on my face, and it occurred to me somewhere in the middle of it that she wasn’t just being polite. She was actually there, actually listening, and that was something I hadn’t let myself want for long enough that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
“Your parents must be proud,” she said, when I’d wound down.
“They are,” I said. “They don’t say it in so many words. But they are.”
She smiled at that, soft and certain. “I’m proud of you, too,” she said. “For what it’s worth.”
It was worth quite a lot. I didn’t say that.
She reached across the small table again, brushing her fingertips across the back of my hand, lighter this time, like she wasn’t sure she was going to do it until she already had. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
We talked more after that, the conversation finding its own current, the way it had started to again lately, easy and unforced, moving from his parents to hers to the town and back again. The pizza disappeared gradually. We cleared the table together, shoulders brushing in the narrow space. Her arm grazed mine and lingered a second longer than necessary. When the empty box was folded and set aside, she turned to me.
“Stay with me tonight,” she said simply. “Please.”
“Okay. I’ll go to my trailer and change. Be right back.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
We met at her bed a few minutes later. The mattress dipped under our weight. She lay on her side facing me, and I stretched out on my back. The sheets were cool at first, then warmed quickly where our bodies lay. We didn’t rush to close the gap. We simply existed there in the dark, breathing the same air, listening to each other settle.
After a while, her hand found mine beneath the blanket. Her fingers were warm. Her pinky hooked around mine. I closed my eyes. My heart thudded hard and steady. I was sure she could feel the rhythm through our joined hands.
Tonight we’d talked. Tomorrow we’ll keep talking.
And somewhere between the shared weird pizza and the quiet promise of a hooked finger, I realized I wasn’t scared I’d push her away anymore. I was exactly where I belonged. I stayed awake for a while, listening to her breathing slow down. When it did, I let myself sleep too.
Chapter 21
Becca
There's no way I'm podcasting about this. I woke up next to Levi Barrett and felt so full of something I had absolutely no words for—which, if you know me at all, should tell you everything
The next morning felt like the aftermath of a storm that never actually hit—everything still standing, but rearranged in ways only I could see.
I woke before my alarm. For a moment, I didn’t move, just lay there in the quiet gray light, and then I remembered why the room felt different, and my heart did something immediate and embarrassing before I’d fully finished the thought.
Levi was still asleep. On his back, one arm at his side, breathing slow and even, completely unaware of the minor crisis happening twelve inches to his left.
I looked at him. Really looked, the way I hadn’t let myself do when he was awake and might catch me at it. The line of his jaw was shadowed with a day’s worth of stubble. The width of his shoulders took up space in my bed with a kind of easy authority that should not have been as devastating as it was. The way sleephad smoothed everything careful and guarded out of his face and left something quieter underneath, something that looked like the boy I used to know before everything got complicated, and also, somehow, nothing like that boy at all.
I became very aware of how close we were. The warmth of him. The steady rise and fall of his chest. The fact that I could have reached out and touched him without fully extending my arm, a fact my hand appeared to be considering independently of the rest of me.
