Page 13 of Born to Run Back
Chapter Eleven
Light Between Us
Theo
Date One: Coffee Shop Redux
The coffee shop, Deja Brew, felt differently than that fluorescent purgatory where we’d first attempted this complicated dance. Exposed brick walls held the warmth of endless conversations, mismatched vintage chairs worn smooth by bodies that had lingered over stories worth telling and hearing.
Wendy sat across from me, her small, slender hands wrapped around a Vietnamese iced coffee like it was something precious, and for the first time in months, I felt the dangerous possibility of hope unfurl in my chest.
“I despise spreadsheets,” she said, answering my question about her work with the brutal honesty I was learning she possessed.
“Tax season makes me want to burn the world down. But I’m good at making numbers dance in perfect rows, and it pays for the expensive canvas that calls to me from art supply stores. ”
“What kind of expensive canvas?”
“The kind that costs more than a car payment and smells like possibility.” Her smile was devastatingly gorgeous, transforming her entire face into something luminous. “My neighbors probably think I’m cook up meth with all the turpentine fumes seeping under my door.”
The sudden laughter that escaped me felt foreign, rusty from disuse, like rediscovering a muscle I’d forgotten I had. “Better than mine assuming I’m losing my sanity because I grade papers at ungodly hours while talking to myself about the fall of empires.”
“Are you?” she asked, learning forward. “Losing your sanity?”
I smiled. “Absolutely. But it’s a more sustainable madness now.”
After that, the conversation flowed like honey from a broken hive—golden, natural, inevitable.
No frantic grasping for connection, no performative politeness stretched thin over the abyss of a single shared trauma.
Just two souls discovering they could exist in the same space, and for once, without drowning, without using each other as life preservers in an ocean of grief.
I felt… hope.
Wendy
Date Two: Canyon Pilgrimage
The trail behind Bonelli Park carved itself through scrub oak and sage like a prayer written in earth and stone.
Morning light filtered through the branches, dancing with wind-whispered secrets, painting shadows that shifted like living creatures across the path.
Theo moved ahead of me with the fluid grace of a person who had always belonged to these hills, his body reading the landscape like scripture, pointing out red-tailed hawk nests and explaining the ancient difference between wild lilac and chamise.
“You love this place the way some people love their god,” I said, breathless from more than just the climb as I caught up to him at a ridge overlooking the sprawling valley of our city below.
“It’s where the noise in my head finally shuts up. Where everything makes sense.” He turned to face me, and his eyes held the same blue intensity as the October sky that had watched us kneel in rain and blood. “What about you? Where do you go when your soul needs tending, Wendy?”
“My studio. Usually at hours when decent people should be sleeping, when the light is terrible but the silence is perfect.”
“Night creature.”
“Reformed insomniac,” I corrected, and it felt like a confession, like laying down armor I’d carried so long I’d forgotten its weight. “Therapy helped uncover the demons. But having reasons to greet tomorrow instead of merely surviving it— that is what changed everything.”
He studied me with an intensity that should have terrified me but instead made every nerve ending hum with electrical possibility.
“What kind of reasons?”
“The dangerous kind,” I said, staring straight back at him. “The kind that make you want to stick around and see what happens next.”
The wind caught my hair, whipping dark strands across my vision, and before I could move them aside, Theo reached out and tucked them behind my ear with such tenderness it made my chest ache.
His fingertips lingered against my cheek for one heartbeat, maybe two—long enough for me to memorize the warmth of his touch.
“I’m really grateful you decided to stick around,” he said, his voice rough with something that sounded suspiciously like adoration.
So was I. God, so was I.
Theo
Date Three: Sacred Gallery
The Van Gogh exhibition at LACMA pulsed with tortured genius, each canvas a window into a mind that had seen too much pain and too much beauty to contain in flesh alone.
Wendy stood before “Starry Night Over the Rh?ne” like a pilgrim at an alter, her breath fogging the protective glass as she leaned closer to carefully study the brushstrokes that had been laid down by hands which had shaken with both inspiration and madness.
“Look how he constructs light,” she whispered thoughtfully, her voice carrying the reverence reserved for holy things.
“Each star explodes like a tiny sun. Most painters try to capture light by making everything brighter, but Van Gogh understood you have to paint the darkness first. You have to honor the presence of the shadows before the illumination has any meaning.”
I observed her in her element, a smile spreading across my face. God, she was beautiful. “Is that your method?”
“When I paint landscapes, I always begin with what hides in the darkness and work toward what dares to catch fire in sunlight.” She glanced at me, color blooming delicately across her cheekbones like watercolor on wet paper. “Forgive me, Theo. I become insufferable when discussing technique.”
“Never apologize for passion,” I said. “I could listen to you dissect beauty for the rest of my life.”
“Dangerous confessions, Mr. Garner. I might hold you to that promise.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Wendy
Date Four: Kingdom of Learning
Roosevelt High after the final bell felt like a cathedral emptied of congregation, our footsteps echoing and reverberating through the hallways that held ghosts of a thousand teenage dreams and disappointments.
Theo’s classroom appeared to be a shrine to curiosity, with walls papered with student projects that spoke of minds awakening to the vast tapestry of human experience.
Timelines of Renaissance and revolution, essays that dissected the rise and fall of empires, photographs from field trips where history had been touched with trembling hands.
“Your students must adore you,” I said, my fingers tracing the edge of a detailed map of medieval trade routes that some teenager had crafted with obvious devotion. “I can see it in how they write about these ancient souls. They trust you with their intellectual hearts.”
“Trust is the true currency of education,” Theo said. “You cannot counterfeit caring about these young minds. They can see right through you.”
He opened a folder thick with essays, his face illuminated by that particular joy that came from witnessing a transformation.
Page after page of thoughtful analysis, creative interpretation, the building blocks of critical thinking laid down like foundational bricks for the adults these children would become.
“You’re building more than knowledge,” I realized, watching him flip through the evidence of the lives he’d touched. “You’re constructing hope. Teaching them that the past matters because it’s still writing itself through their choices.”
“History isn’t dead, Wendy. It’s breathing. It’s alive. In every decision we make, every pattern we repeat or choose to break.”
Standing there in his domain, watching him speak about his calling with the fervor of a true believer, I felt myself falling not just for his kindness or his devastating hands or the memory of how he’d anchored me in my darkest hour.
I was falling for the man who spent his evenings crafting lessons that would make teenagers fall in love with forgotten wars and dead emperors, who believed that understanding our yesterday was the key to choosing our tomorrow.
And tomorrow, maybe all the tomorrows I had left, I wanted to choose him.
Theo
Date Five: Temple of Words
Booked & Bewitched smelled like intellectual seduction, of coffee beans and aging paper, the particular perfume of stories still waiting to be discovered.
The kind of independent bookstore that hosted poetry readings by local mystics and sold books based on the recommendations of passionate staff who read like they breathed.
Wendy browsed the art section like a scholar researching old sacred texts while I gravitated toward my usual haunts among poets and historians who had tried to capture the human condition in language.
“Treasure hunting?” she inquired, materializing beside me with arms full of books on color theory and contemporary masters whose names I recognized from museum walls.
“Always. Mary Oliver today. Some Pablo Neruda to balance the sweetness with fire.” I showed her the slim volume cradled in my hands. “Do you commune with poetry?”
“Not often enough. Perhaps you could serve as my guide?”
I selected Billy Collins from the shelves, my fingers finding one of his pieces that had sustained me through the worst of my sleepless months. “This one. He has the gift of making the ordinary feel like revelation, like grace hiding in plain sight.”
She read in the amber light filtering in through the dusty windows, her lips moving almost imperceptibly with the rhythm of words, and I found myself memorizing her profile—the elegant curve of her thin neck, the way her eyelashes painted delicate shadows across her cheekbones, the small furrow of concentration between her brows that made me want to soothe it away with my thumb.
“Read it aloud,” she said, her voice carrying a request that felt dangerously intimate.
“Here? With all these strangers?”
“Especially here. Let them overhear beauty.”