Page 2 of Born to Run Back

Chapter One

What Lingers

Wendy

Two days later, Thursday afternoon

I told myself I was purely curious about the accident site as I turned onto Hacienda Road, my hands gripping the steering wheel tighter than necessary.

I maneuvered the curves with practiced ease; driving had become second nature by this age, and sometimes I liked to forget just how old I was starting to become, with age creeping up on me as chains I wasn’t certain I could break myself free from.

Thirty-six, with grays prematurely lining my temple, fine lines overtaking the corners of my mouth and eyes.

Age sat like a stone in the pit of my belly, impossible to ignore yet so, so easy to.

Just curious , I thought again, fluidly guiding my Honda down the road. The excuse sounded reasonable enough in my head: I wanted to see it in the daylight, wanted to understand what had really happened that night. It was natural to be curious, wasn’t it? After something like that?

The lie tasted as metallic as fresh blood on my tongue.

I pulled over at the exact spot where I’d parked my Honda that night, my engine idling as I stared down into the ravine.

In the late afternoon sun, everything looked different.

Smaller, somehow. Less sacred. The gouges in the earth where the sedan had been looked like any other scar on the hillside.

Virtually invisible to the average passerby.

But my eyes could still see it. The steam rising from the wreckage. His hands, so steady and sure as he worked. The weight of him when I’d collapsed into his chest, sobbing like a moron.

I cut the engine and sat in silence, waiting for something I couldn’t name. A sign, maybe. Some indication that night had been real, that it mattered .

The flowers I’d bought at Pavilions sat wilted on my passenger seat.

White roses and baby’s breath, wrapped in cellophane that crinkled every time I so much as fucking breathed.

For the victims , I’d told myself, though the words felt hollow even to me.

I’d never met Beck or Delaney before that night.

I didn’t even know if Delaney had survived.

But I knew the manner in which he’d whispered “I know” into my hair, his breath smelling of spearmint. I knew the rhythm of his heartbeat against my cheek, pounding, ricocheting. The soundtrack to all my recent daydreams.

So steady. So strong. Yet still so fucking broken, just like me.

My fingers closed around the flowers, the cellophane protesting with those horrible crinkling noises again.

I walked to the guardrail, my heels sinking slightly into the rain-softened earth.

This was where we’d sat together afterward, observing the first responders work, saying nothing because there had been nothing to say.

I could almost feel the phantom warmth of his dark jacket, somehow brightening his pale features in the night.

Blonde hair, falling into bluer than blue eyes, the saddest I’d ever seen.

The flowers looked positively absurd in my hands, too bright against the muted colors of the canyon after fresh rain.

But I carried them down the embankment anyway, placing them carefully where the car had come to rest that night.

The gesture felt both necessary and absolutely ridiculous, like praying to a god you weren’t sure existed.

Standing there in the silence, I waited for some kind of peace to wash over me. For closure, maybe, or understanding. Instead, I felt only the hollow ache of something left unfinished, like a song cut off mid-note.

I didn’t know his name.

I didn’t know anything about him except the way he moved, the certainty in his voice when he’d said he had medical training, the gentle pressure of his hand against my trembling scalp. It should have been enough, this nameless connection, this moment of shared humanity.

It wasn’t enough.

Walking back to my car, I caught myself scanning the road for any sign he’d maybe been here, too. Tire tracks that might be his Subaru’s. Some indication that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t fucking let this go.

But there was nothing. Just me and my wilted flowers and the growing certainty that I was for sure losing my mind, one carefully rationalized excuse at a time.

The drive back to my apartment somehow felt longer than usual, maybe because I found myself taking the surface streets instead of the freeway, as if speed might somehow dilute what I was feeling.

As if anything could fucking achieve that at this point.

At a red light in Diamond Bar, I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror—hollow-eyed, distracted.

The kind of woman who bought flowers for the wrong strangers for the wrong reasons and called it normal.

Two days. It had been two days, and I couldn’t stop thinking about a man whose name I didn’t even know.

God, this was so unlike me. I didn’t do this.

I didn’t form attachments to anybody, much less strangers.

I didn’t manufacture meaning from random encounters with random people off the street.

I’d built my entire adult life around the careful maintenance of distance, the comfortable predictability solitude granted me.

But that night had broken something open in me, something I’d thought I’d sealed shut years ago. And now I was standing in grocery stores buying flowers for dead boys, telling myself it was about civic duty and human decency when really—

Really, it was the way he’d held me, like I was something precious. Something worth saving.

And the terrible, awful, wonderful possibility that he might be standing in another grocery store somewhere in the city, thinking of me, too.

Theo

Friday, early morning, 3:29 a.m.

Sleep had become a foreign concept, something other people did while I lay in my bed, staring at the acoustic tile ceiling of my rental house, counting the tiny holes until my eyes fucking burned.

Three days since the accident, and I hadn’t been able to manage more than an hour at a stretch.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that kid’s face—Beck—the way his breathing sounded all wrong, wet, labored.

The way his pulse had felt under my shaking fingers, already too fast, too far fucking gone.

But worse than that, I saw her.

The woman who’d knelt beside me in the rain, whose name I’d never learned.

The way she’d broken apart when they’d zipped up that body bag, like something inside her had shattered after a long time.

The way she’d felt in my arms afterward, solid and real and fundamental in a way I still couldn’t explain three nights later.

I gave up on sleep entirely and pulled on a worn pair of jeans and a university hoodie.

My keys felt heavy as an anchor in my hand as I walked to my car, the October air sharp enough to make me shiver.

I told myself I was only driving to clear my head, the same excuse I’d been using for years and years of restless insomnia-induced nights.

The canyon roads were good for that. Dark enough to let your mind wander, winding enough to demand your attention.

But my hands turned the wheel toward Hacienda Road without any conscious thought, muscle memory guiding me back to mile marker eighteen.

The guardrail hadn’t been repaired yet, a strip of gleaming metal missing on the side of the road where the BMW had gone down.

The gouges in the earth were still visible, dark scars cutting through the scrub brush.

I parked where her Honda had been that night and sat in my car for longer than I could later recall, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

This was insane. I was a high school history teacher, for fuck’s sake. Thirty-four years old, responsible, rational. I didn’t do things like this, didn’t drive to accident sites at three in the morning, chasing ghosts and the memory of a stranger’s tears.

But I got out of the car anyway. I didn’t know why, but I did.

The night was eerily quiet, just the distant hum of late-night traffic on the 60 freeway and the rustle of wind between the canyon walls.

I walked to where we’d sat together on what was left of the guardrail, half-expecting to see some trace of her, some sign that I wasn’t the only one who just couldn’t let this go.

That’s when I saw the white flowers, laid carefully at the bottom of the embankment, exactly where the BMW had been that night. Roses and baby’s breath, the cellophane wrapper catching the moonlight like a million scattered diamonds. They were fresh, maybe hours old.

My heart completed a complicated leap in my chest, a combination of relief and fear and desperate hope that made my hands shake as I lit a cigarette. She’d been here. Today, probably. The woman who’d held that teenage girl’s hand while I’d tried to save a kid who was already gone.

I stood there, smoking—yeah, disgusting as fuck, I know—and staring at those flowers until my cigarette burned down to my fingertips. She’d come back, just like I had. We were both circling this place like planets around a dying star, drawn by gravity we couldn’t deny even if we wanted to.

The rational part of my mind, the teacher part that graded papers and attended faculty meetings and lived a perfectly ordinary and boring life, knew this was—unhealthy. Obsessive. The kind of behavior normal people sought therapy for.

But standing there in the inky darkness, looking down at her wilting flowers, I felt more connected to another human being than I had in years. Since… well, since.

She was out there somewhere, probably lying awake like I had been, thinking about that night.

About the weight of tragedy and this strange intimacy of a shared grief neither of us had signed up for.

About the way we’d moved together without speaking a word, two strangers united by nothing but the terrible need to answer a call for help.

I stubbed out my cigarette and ground it under the heel of my shoe, then walked back to my car.

But I didn’t start up the engine right away.

Instead, I sat in the darkness and tried to memorize everything.

The curve of the road, the smell of sage and rain-washed canyons, the exact spot where she’d placed that miserable bouquet, reaching with each petal, as if grasping for that connection again.

I understood. I was desperate for her, too.

Tomorrow I had lesson plans to write and tests to grade, a normal life to return to, a routine that didn’t include midnight vigils at sites of tragic accidents. But sitting there with dawn approaching, watching those white flowers glow in the silver moonlight, I knew I’d be back.

We both would be.

The drive home felt like waking from a distant dream, the ordinary streets of my neighborhood suddenly foreign after the solemn emptiness of those dipping hills and red canyons.

I pulled into my driveway and sat there for a long while, keys still in the ignition, trying to hold on to a link that was already starting to fade.

Inside, I poured myself three fingers of bourbon and sat at my kitchen table, staring at the stack of ungraded World History tests I’d been avoiding for a solid week.

The Ottoman Empire. The Industrial Revolution.

Dead civilizations and distant wars that had nothing to do with the taste of rainfall and the memory of vanilla-scented hair.

I couldn’t concentrate, not on any of it. All I could think about was the tender, attentive way she’d arranged those flowers, the reverence in the gesture. The possibility that somewhere across this sprawling valley, maybe, just maybe, she was lying awake thinking about me, too.

I was losing my mind, one sleepless night at a time. And the strangest, most damning part?

I didn’t want to stop.