Page 60 of The Route to You

“The risky things you do for your travel shows—they look fun. But aren’t they dangerous?”

“That’s sort of the point.” Even in the dark, he knew it was too honest.

A few more beats of silence passed. “You like danger?”

He was quiet, turning her question over in his mind. His sisters had asked him about this before. Mom and Dad, too. Liddy had even blamed herself once, saying she never should have let her husband Callum teach him how to surf.

Like that was the gateway drug that had started his love of higher-octane sports.

He’d always enjoyed those things. The rush. The edge. But being able to capitalize on that for Pathways had given him more freedom to pursue them.

But lately . . . it hadn’t only been about liking it.

It had been about outrunning something.

“I like to feel alive,” he answered at last, his voice stark in the stillness.

He waited for a response, but Sloan didn’t give one for a few moments. Her thumb shifted against him, slow and thoughtful. “That makes sense.”

He turned his head toward her, surprised. “It does?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t say it with any judgment. “When everything hurts, or feels too big, or too quiet . . . you don’t want to feel numb. You want something that reminds you you’re still here. Still in your body.”

His chest tightened a little.

“That doesn’t suggest you like danger,” she went on. “It sounds like you don’t like disappearing.”

He swallowed.

They lay there in silence for a few minutes, the house creaking softly around them, the world reduced to breathing and warmth, and the place where their hands were joined.

Sloan squeezed his fingers once. “You don’t have to keep proving you’re alive.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “You already are.”

The words hit him harder than any fall he’d taken that day.

He didn’t trust himself to answer.

Her breathing shifted a few moments later, slowing. Evened out. Sleep took her gently, like she’d said what she needed to say and could finally rest. Still holding his hand.

Now he lay awake in the dark, her words echoing in his head in a way that felt dangerous.

He’d missed this. He hadn’t really had any other long-term girlfriends since Sloan. And he’d missed the simple task of going to bed with someone familiar, talking about anything and everything. Talking about the real stuff in life.

And don’t let anyone tell you young love isn’t real. It is. And it breaks your heart just as badly as us old, shriveled prunes . . .

He’d let Sloan go and moved on with his life, but seeing her again?

Somehow, deep down, he knew . . . going back to normal life, the way Davy had suggested, was slipping further from his grasp.

Because Sloan had come blazing back into his life, and he wasn’t sure what came next.

16

SLOAN

Light snow battered the windshield, the wipers ticking back and forth in a steady, hypnotic rhythm as the Jeep cut through the middle of Wyoming. The world beyond the glass had been reduced to shades of gray and white, mountains rising and vanishing again like half-remembered dreams.

Sloan watched from the passenger seat, hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee that had gone lukewarm sometime in the past forty miles. Yet she continued to sip it from time to time, like the caffeine would help with the exhaustion.