The kind that changed everything.
Twenty
Savannah woke up to the sound of the plow scraping past her building.
For a second, she didn’t remember why her chest hurt. She lay still, eyes on the ceiling, listening to the low grind of metal against packed snow, the rumble of the truck, the faint rattle of her bedroom window. The world outside was white and loud and far away.
Then the truck, the heater, the storm, Tilly’s coat in her hands — all of it — slammed back into her.
She covered her face with both palms and groaned.
“God.”
The word was small in the dark room.
Her mouth still felt wrong, like it remembered a shape she wasn’t ready to think about. Every time her brain tried to replay the kiss, she flinched away from it. No. Not that. Not yet.
She rolled onto her side and pulled her phone from the nightstand. Too early, but not by much. Her alarm would go off in ten minutes. The notification bar was blissfully empty. No texts from Harper. No overnight updates from the station.
Nothing from Tilly.
She told herself that was good. She didn’t know what she’d do if their name had popped up.
She also didn’t know what to do with the hollow feeling that followed the thought.
Savannah dropped the phone back onto the table and stared at the wall. The storm outside sounded like static. She tried to piece last night together, but everything after her hand on Tilly’s coat blurred into sensation.
Their mouth.
Their hand in her hair, firm and sure.
The way they hadn’t hesitated, not for a second.
She’d been so sure — all the time she’d spent complaining about them — that if anything ever happened, Tilly would be the one who lost their balance. The flustered one, apologizing, stumbling through it.
They’d looked steadier than she had.
The memory of their face in the truck — close, calm, focused, certain — made her stomach twist.
“Stop,” she muttered to herself. “Just stop.”
There was work. Scripts. Packages to cut. Meetings to sit through. Things that didn’t involve replaying the way Tilly’s thumb had brushed her jaw.
She pushed herself out of bed and shuffled to the shower.
Hot water helped a little. It gave her something else to focus on besides the buzzing in her skin. She scrubbed shampoo through her hair with more force than necessary, as if she could wash the night off her.
In the fogged mirror, her cheeks were still a little pink from the heat. Her eyes looked tired.
“You didn’t plan this,” she told the mirror quietly. “You didn’t mean it.”
The mirror didn’t argue.
She dressed more carefully than usual — a simple dark sweater and blazer, jeans that weren’t too tight, boots that could handle the leftover slush. She styled her hair more smoothly than she needed to for a day inside a newsroom.
Professional. Neutral. Forgettable.
Nothing about this said‘I kissed my coworker in a live truck.’
