Page 31 of The Story Between Us

“I didn’t—” He stopped. Frowned. “How did you⁠—”

“You can either let me in, or I’m going to stand on this porch and eat your chicken wild rice while maintaining aggressive eye contact. Your choice.”

He stared at her.

She didn’t blink.

Huck and Finn appeared behind him, tails wagging, clearly thrilled to see their new favorite person again. Traitors. Beautiful, useful traitors.

“This is insane,” Nate said.

“Probably.”

“You stole my dinner.”

“I liberated it. There’s a difference.”

“There really isn’t.”

“Are you going to let me in or not? Because this soup is getting cold, and I didn’t bribe a delivery driver just to face rejection twice in one day.”

Something flickered across his face. Not quite a smile—his mouth didn’t seem to remember how to do that—but something close. A crack in the stone.

“You bribed Jake?”

“Twenty dollars. He proved very reasonable.”

Another pause. The dogs now actively tried to push past him to get to her. One of them—Finn, she thought—had his nose pressed against the soup bag, tail going in frantic circles.

“Fine,” Nate said. And stepped aside.

Livvie walked in before he could change his mind.

The living room held the same chaos she remembered from earlier—books everywhere, blankets on the couch, Emma’s presence scattered through every surface. But something had shifted.

His laptop sat open on the coffee table.

And words filled the screen.

Not many. Maybe a paragraph. Maybe two. But words—actual words—where earlier, nothing but a blinking cursor and blank white space had existed.

She didn’t mean to look. But, well, she couldn’t help herself. Her eyes caught a phrase—the door stood never locked, only heavy—before Nate crossed the room in three quick strides and snapped the laptop shut.

“That’s not—” He stopped. His jaw tightened. “That’s nothing.”

“It didn’t look like nothing.”

“It’s garbage. First-draft garbage. It doesn’t count.”

“All first drafts are garbage. That’s what revision is for.”

He turned to face her, and there it came again—that look. The one she’d seen earlier, right before he’d asked her to leave. The look of someone who’d been caught doing something vulnerable and hated himself for it.

“Why are you here?” His voice came out flat. Tired. “Really. Why?”

Livvie set the soup on the coffee table, next to the closed laptop.

“Because you need to write,” she said quietly. “And I think that terrifies you. And I think you need someone to tell you it’s okay to be terrified and do it anyway.”