Page 14 of Born to Run Back

So I did, my voice pitched low enough that the words became a secret shared between us, the syllables weaving through the space between our bodies like an invisible thread.

When the last line faded into the bookstore’s quiet chaos, she was staring at me with an expression that made my pulse catch against my throat.

“Your students are so blessed,” she whispered. “You make language sacred.”

Wendy

Date Six: Sanctuary of Creation

My apartment had long since been exorcised of its demons, transformed back from a mausoleum to an actual living space where light could breathe and hope could take root.

Theo sprawled across my couch like he belonged there, a glass of ice water balanced precariously on his knee as he studied the paintings that covered my walls like windows into worlds I’d dreamed into existence.

Abstract landscapes that captured the way the sunset bled across the San Gabriel Mountains, experiments in light that traced the silver dance of morning fog across the valley floor.

“This one,” he murmured, his voice thick with recognition as he pointed to a large canvas I’d birthed merely the week before. “Bonelli Park. The overlook where we hiked.”

“You have an artist’s eye,” I observed, settling beside him, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from his body.

Close enough that our knees touched, like a promise.

“I painted it from memory after our morning together. Something about that particular light just demanded to be captured.”

“It’s devastatingly beautiful, Wendy. All of it.” He gestured toward the gallery of my soul spread across the room. “You don’t just paint landscapes. You paint emotion. You make color… sing.”

Heat crawled up my throat like liquid fire. “Um, thanks, but they’re just—”

“No.” His voice carried the edge of something fierce, something protective. “Don’t you dare diminish the magic you create. These paintings… Wendy, they alter the air in the room. They make me believe the world contains more beauty than I dared hope.”

“What kind of beauty?”

He turned to look at me, placing a warm hand on my cheek. His thumb brushed over my cheekbone in that gentle way only he knew how.

“The kind that lives in shadow and light,” he said. “The kind that transforms suffering into something that can heal.” His eyes searched mine, and the intensity made me feel transparent, like he could see straight through to my very core. “The kind that lives in you.”

Theo

Date Seven: Confessions over Carbs

Nonna’s Kitchen was chaos incarnate. Cramped tables, impossibly loud conversation in three languages, the kind of family-owned restaurant where the matriarch still rolled pasta by hand at four in the morning and treated every customer like a grandchild who didn’t visit often enough.

Wendy had marinara sauce painting her chin like war paint and wine-brightened eyes that reflected candlelight like captured starfire, and I had never witnessed anything more magnificent in my thirty-four years of breathing.

“So my sister stages this intervention,” I said, gesturing with my fork in a way that would have made my mother despair of my table manners, “and discovers me almost unconscious at my kitchen table with an empty bourbon bottle and a stack of papers that had been breeding neglect for two weeks.”

“Jesus, Theo.” Her voice carried the twinge of someone who understood full-blown mental breakdowns.

“My finest hour, clearly. But Andie probably prevented me from drowning that night. Forced me to admit that needing help wasn’t the same as being perceived as weak.”

Those starfire eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “Tell me about her. Your sister.”

“Brilliant and ruthless and completely allergic to self-pity, which is precisely what my pathetic soul required.” I took a sip of vibrant wine that tasted like liquid courage, studying Wendy’s face in the flickering light. “What about you? Tell me about your family.”

“Oh, loud enough to wake the dead. Chaotic as a thunderstorm. My mother calls every Sunday to interrogate me about my reproductive timeline, and my father sends care packages filled with Brooklyn bagels and parental anxiety.” She laughed, but something wistful showed in her expression.

“They lose sleep worrying about their daughter living alone in this sprawling desert of strangers.”

“Are they right to worry?”

“They were,” she said, her gaze seeking mine. “But not anymore.”

The words hung between us like a bridge neither of us was quite ready to cross, weighted with implications that made my chest feel tight with something that felt dangerously close to hope.

Wendy

Date Eight: Return to Eden

We drove separately to Bonelli Park again, but this time Theo suggested the trail that wound toward the overlook where teenagers had been making promises and breaking hearts since long before we were born.

Late afternoon light transmuted everything to a hue of gold—the sagebrush, the distant mountains, the man walking beside me, whose presence had become as necessary as oxygen.

The same canyons where we’d once built shrines to our shared madness now witnessed something infinitely more dangerous: the slow burn of two people choosing each other with their eyes wide open.

We walked in companionable silence for the first mile or so, our hands occasionally brushing as we navigated the winding path, each accidental touch sending electricity racing up my arm.

Seven dates. Seven thoughtful, deliberate encounters where we’d learned each other’s minds, each other’s dreams, each other’s carefully guarded hearts. And in all that time, he’d been a perfect gentleman. Respectful. Subdued. Maddeningly restrained.

“Theo,” I said as we paused at a switchback, the canyon holding its breath for me. The question had lived like a flame beneath my ribs for weeks, flickering higher every time he looked at me and did… nothing. “Are you ever going to kiss me again?”

He stopped walking. Entirely. The wind stirred around us, both dry and electric, as he turned to me, his blue eyes finding mine like magnets snapping into place. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” My breath caught low in my throat, the words spilling out like a flood finally breaching the dam.

“We’ve had seven dates, Theo. Seven. We’ve shared long conversations and poetry and pieces of ourselves I didn’t even know I had.

But you barely touch me. You only hold my hand long enough to help me over a boulder.

” My voice faltered, but the ache behind it continued to surge.

“That night, when we dismantled the memorial at the overlook—when we kissed—that kiss felt like the end of the world. And then… nothing. Nothing. Did it scare you? Do I scare you?”

Something flickered in him. Like lightning behind a curtain of restraint.

Hunger. Ache. Fire denied oxygen.

“Scared?” he repeated softly. “You think I’m scared of wanting you?”

“I-I think maybe I don’t live up to the fantasy,” I whispered shakily, hating how raw the words made me feel. “Maybe the real me is too much. Or not enough.”

He moved.

Two long strides and I was pressed to the canyon wall, the red rock scraping my back as his hands rose to frame my face. His tall, wide shoulders blocked out the sun, with eyes wild— undone .

“Don’t live up to the fantasy?” His voice was wreckage, low and sharp. “Wendy, do you have any idea what you do to me?”

Before I could manage an answer, his mouth crashed into mine.

Not gentle. Not hesitant. A collision. A combustion. Months of restraint ripped loose in a single burning kiss that seared through me like wildfire on dry grass.

I met him with the same aching hunger, fists curling into his shirt, my body arching toward him like I was starved for him, and I was.

God, I was. The stone bit at my back as he pressed his body against mine, but I barely noticed.

All I felt was him —the pressure, the heat, the weight of being wanted this much.

He tasted like the bitter warmth of coffee we’d shared at the trailhead, and something only him… spearmint, longing, the flavor of a man who’d been biting down on his own desire for far too long.

“I’ve been losing my mind,” he breathed against my lips, kissing the edge of my jaw and finding the hollow just beneath my ear with devastating control and certainty.

“Every goddamn date. Watching you laugh. Watching me with sparkling eyes when I quote poetry. Hearing you passionately argue with pretentious assholes at art galleries about what color theory really means. Wanting to slam you against the nearest wall and show you— show you—how much I want you.”

“Then why didn’t you?” I gasped as his mouth traced fire down my neck, my frantic pulse a drumbeat against his tongue.

“Because I was terrified.” The confession landed on my thrumming skin, rough and raw. “Terrified that if I touched you the way I wanted to, I’d ruin this. That it would swallow us whole like it did last time. That I’d mistake the chaos for something real.”

He pulled back to look at me. God, his eyes. They were… dark.

“And now?” I asked, my voice a thread.

“Now I’m more afraid of not touching you. Of letting this slip through my fingers because I was too much of a coward to believe it could actually last.”

His thumb brushed my lower lip, still swollen from the wreckage of that kiss.

I caught it between my teeth.

His pupils dilated.

I sucked his thumb, slow, sensual. “I want you to lose control,” I said, barely more than a whisper. “I want you to stop being so fucking noble and touch me like you need me.”

A shadow crossed his face. A promise, but also a warning.

“Be careful what you ask for,” he said, his voice molten.

“I’m done being careful, Theo.”

He kissed me again, harder . His fingers tangled in my hair, angling my face for deeper access, and the kiss turned urgent, messy, devouring. I could feel him against my hip, feel the way he trembled when I scraped my teeth along his swollen lower lip.

“Jesus, Wendy,” he rasped against my mouth. “I want to take you home. I want to taste your skin with my mouth. I want to learn every sound you make when you come for me.”

“Yes,” I whispered, holding onto him as if gravity had already let go. “Please. Take me.”

We kissed like the world was ending, like the sky was splitting open above us and time had started to unravel by the seams. There was nothing gentle about it anymore; it was fierce, almost violent, like we were trying to memorize the shape of each other’s mouths before the earth crumbled at our feet.

His lips moved with mine with a hunger that tasted like panic, like heartbreak, like goodbye.

Even though I knew this wasn’t goodbye, I could still feel the quake of his breath, the tremor in his hands, as if kissing me was the only thing keeping him tethered to this moment.

And I kissed him back with everything I had, because if the world really was ending, I wanted this to be the last thing I felt—the heat, the chaos, the impossible need of him.

Hands over fabric, teeth grazing skin, kissing until there were no breaths left in our lungs. When we finally broke apart, our foreheads pressed together, bodies shivering with the charge that was still running between us.

“My place,” I said, my voice wrecked.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely, and the promise in it nearly undid me.

We walked back down the trail, smiling, breathless, our hands entwined like lifelines. And this— this was what I’d been aching of all along.

Not the chaos of shared pain. But the clarity of moments like these.

Desire that was built not from desperation but from knowing, truly knowing , each other. The difference between clinging to someone to keep from drowning… and choosing someone to swim toward , again and again, with open eyes.

Clarity.

Clarity.

Clarity.

I could see him so clearly.

Tonight, we wouldn’t lose ourselves.

Tonight, we’d find each other.

And we’d burn. Beautifully. Deliberately. Together.