“Come on, come on,” I murmur, coaxing her along, giving just enough fuel to keep momentum without breaking traction.
There’s a moment where I feel the whole equation balance on a knife’s edge. Weight, friction, angle, and then it tips in our favor. Faith’s truck rises, nose scraping a little as it clears the shallow lip of the ditch. Snow and ice break away from her undercarriage in clumps.
Boone moves alongside, one hand up in an automatic steadying motion. Nash whoops. Rusty barks his head off. He thinks he’s the one doing the pulling.
“Easy,” Boone calls. “Straighten… there. You’re out.”
I don’t let off until we’re fully on flat ground, then ease the dually to a stop. The strap slacks. I kill the engine and hop out, heart still beating harder than it needs to.
Faith’s truck sits on the shoulder, a little crooked, idling now. Snow clings in dirty clumps along the underside. The crumpled bumper is ugly, but it’s cosmetic.
“She’s free,” Nash says, patting the hood affectionately. “Just a little face damage. Very on brand for this family.”
“I’m gonna tell Mom you said that,” Clay says.
“Please don’t,” Nash says instantly.
Boone crouches by the front tire. “We’ll check the axle first. Probably banged something when she hit the ditch. Let’s get to it.”
We spend over an hour digging out the chassis, checking for leaks, knocking ice out of the wheel wells. Nash slips twice, curses dramatically, and insists the snow is conspiring against him. Clay drops a wrench into a drift, refuses to admit it, and spends five minutes burying his entire arm trying to find it again.
At some point, between digging ice out of the wheel wells and Clay losing a wrench in a drift, Mom steps outside with a bulky canvas bag tucked under her arm.
“This is Faith’s,” she says quietly, pressing it into my chest before I can ask.
That settles wrong somewhere behind my ribs. But worse than that is the looks my brothers are giving me.
They give me looks every few minutes. Little smirks. Raised eyebrows. Silent jokes that spark between all three of them whenever they think I’m not paying attention.
I am paying attention.
I’m just ignoring it aggressively.
Because if I don’t, I’m going to remember that kiss.
The way she tasted of cinnamon. The small, shocked sound she made when I finally stopped pretending I wasn’t thinking about her mouth. The way her fingers fisted in my coat because she needed something to hold on to, and somehow picked me.
She’d looked up at me afterward like she didn’t recognize herself. Which was fair. I didn’t recognize myself either.
I duck under the front end and check the steering linkage again. Focus. Tie rod’s straight. Nothing cracked. This is what I know. Metal, torque, pressure. Things that make sense if you pay attention.
People don’t.
She sure doesn’t.
I don’t know what that kiss meant to her, and I don’t want to find out. Not really. If I ask, if I push, it becomes a thing, with expectations and timelines and the potential to blow my life up if,when, it goes wrong.
After she left last time, I swore I was done with that.
I can still see that morning clear as day. Eighteen and stupid, watching her taillights disappear down Old Mill Road, dust hanging in the summer air, knowing even then that she wasn’t just leaving Buckhorn. She was leaving me.
She’d hugged me on the porch, smelling of vanilla and sunblock and goodbye, said, “It’s just for a little while, Dallas. Dad needs me.”
And idiotically, I believed her.
She didn’t come back. Not really. Holidays, a few days here and there. Always with one foot out the door and her eyes on the city, on the life he picked for her. I tried to stay her friend, tried to be happy for her “opportunities,” tried not to notice that every time she came home, she seemed a little smaller around the edges.
And then she stopped coming much at all. Phone calls got shorter. Texts got farther apart. Somewhere along the line, I figured out I could either sit in that waiting or pull my head out of my ass and move on.
