Page 92 of The Story Between Us

The silence stretched. A loon called somewhere across the water, that eerie, lonely sound that always made him think of ghost stories. The sun was cresting the tree line now, bleeding gold into the orange and rose.

“I’m sorry.” His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat. “What I said out there—about thinking you came to help. That was…” He shook his head. “You did come to help. You’ve been helping since the day you showed up. And I threw it in your face because I got scared.” He still couldn’t look at her. “That’s not an excuse. There’s no excuse. I’m just…sorry.”

More silence. The loon called again, closer now.

Then, quietly, she said, “I should have told you sooner. About the deadline.”

He risked a glance at her. She was looking at the lake, her profile lit gold by the rising sun. The tears cut red tracks down her cheeks—dried, but there. Evidence.

“I kept hoping Richard would back off,” she continued. “That I could buy you more time without you having to know. I thought I was protecting you. But I was just…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I was doing. Being a coward, probably.”

“You were trying to help.”

“I was trying to control things I can’t control.” A small, bitter laugh. “Old habit.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. So he didn’t say anything. Just sat there, watching the sunrise paint the lake in impossibly beautiful hues, feeling the distance between them—the physical space of two feet, the emotional space of hurt not yet healed.

“I keep getting stuck,” he said finally. “In the book. There’s this scene—the confrontation—where Aldric has to face the man who killed his mentor. And I don’t know how to write it.”

She turned her head slightly. He could feel her looking at him.

“I think it’s because I don’t know how to do it myself. How do you face something you can’t do?” He rubbed his face with both hands.

“You have though.” Her voice was soft. “The scene you wrote last week—the grave scene. That was you walking through it.”

“That was one scene. This is the whole rest of the book.” He dropped his hands, stared at the lake. “Ten chapters. Fifty thousand words. Five days. I don’t know how to do it.”

“You don’t have to know how. You just have to do it anyway.”

He laughed—a short, humorless sound. “That’s not how it works.”

She glanced at him. “That’s exactly how it works. You sit down and you write garbage until the garbage turns into something else. That’s what you told me, remember?”

He did remember. Years ago, when he’d thought he knew the answers. That night, when they’d sat under the stars.

When she’d declared that she liked him.

The night he should have kissed her.

“You remember that?”

She nodded. “I remember everything.”

Oh. Um.

Yeah, him too. But he looked away and reached for something else. “And it isn’t just me writing. You’ve helped…a lot.”

She nodded, just slightly.

“I wish you could just climb inside my head and fix whatever’s broken.”

“I wish I could too.” She was quiet for a moment. Then, “It’s not broken, you know. Your head. It’s just…crowded. Full of pressure and deadlines and people telling you what you should be able to do. That’s not an environment where creativity thrives.”

Huh. “You’re pretty good at this.”

It earned him a small smile.

The sun climbed above the tree line. The gold spread across the lake, glittering on the gently rippling surface.