Page 5 of Born to Run Back

Chapter Three

Unspoken Pull

Wendy

The shower water had gone cold fifteen minutes ago, but I stood under the spray anyway, letting the chill shock my skin into some kind of alertness.

My apartment felt like a tomb these days.

Too quiet. Too empty. Filled with the ghosts of conversations I’d never had and the phantom weight of arms that had held me exactly once.

Four weeks.

Four weeks since I’d felt anything resembling human connection, and my body was starting to rebel against the fucking isolation left behind.

The loneliness had taken on a physical quality, like hunger or thirst, something that gnawed at me during client meetings and followed me home each night, curling around my thoughts like cigarette smoke.

Thick. Disgusting. Addicting.

I finally turned off the water and wrapped myself in a towel that smelled like lavender fabric softener and the particular emptiness of a life lived entirely alone.

My reflection in the bathroom mirror looked hollow-eyed, almost translucent.

The kind of woman who bought flowers for dead strangers and called it grief when really it was just an excuse to feel something, anything , that resembled purpose.

Sauntering into my bedroom, I pulled on an oversized t-shirt and climbed under sheets that were always cold, no matter how long I lay in them.

The digital clock on my nightstand glowed 11:52 in accusatory blood-red.

In two hours, I’d be getting dressed again, driving through empty streets to mile marker eighteen to add another rock to our hopeless, impossible conversation.

Our.

As if there was an “our” to speak of. As if thirty-seven minutes of shared trauma was enough to create something real, something sustainable, something that existed outside the fever dream of my increasingly unhinged imagination.

I’d wanted to leave my number, of course.

A handwritten note of some kind, explaining that Yes, I felt it, too.

But something always stopped me. Shame, perhaps.

Or the fear that the person leaving those stones wasn’t even him.

A family member or friend of the deceased, perhaps.

Maybe it was Delaney, returning week after week to the place where she’d lost it all.

I didn’t know shit about shit, so I refrained from embarrassing myself further. I kept my delusions to myself, locked up tight with my active and fucked-up imagination. And besides, I shouldn’t be thinking of him at all.

It wasn’t healthy.

But lying there in the darkness, I let myself remember anyway.

The solid warmth of his hard chest against my cheek.

The way his hand had moved in my hair, fingers threading through the damp strands with a tenderness that had felt both foreign and familiar.

The smell of his aftershave, spicy and clean, mixing with the rain and the sharp sweetness of his breath against my temple when he’d whispered, “I know.”

My hand moved almost without conscious thought, sliding beneath the soft cotton of my shirt, fingertips tracing the curve of my collarbone, circling hardened nipples in the dark.

I’d never been one for elaborate fantasies.

Sex had always been straightforward, practical, a physical need met with efficient partners who knew well enough to leave afterward.

But this was different. This was dangerous.

I closed my eyes and let myself imagine his hands instead of mine.

Large hands, calloused from whatever work he did when he wasn’t kneeling in ravines, trying to save dying boys.

I’d felt their strength that night, the way he’d held me steady when everything inside me was shredding apart.

Now I imagined them moving lower, mapping the contour of loneliness I’d been carrying for so long I’d forgotten what it felt like to be touched with intention.

Wants. Needs.

Aches. Desires.

The fantasy built slowly, deliberately. His voice in my ear, that same low murmur that had anchored me to reality when reality had become unbearable.

“I know,” he’d say again, only this time it would mean something different.

This time, he’d know the exact color of my need, the precise pressure required to make me forget, temporarily, at least, that I was a woman who lived entirely in her own head.

My fingers found my own slick heat, slipping between sensitive, smooth skin, and my breathing changed, becoming something ragged and desperate.

In the darkness behind my closed eyes, he wasn’t a stranger anymore but something more dangerous—a presence that understood the particular brand of emptiness I carried, the way trauma could hollow you out until you were nothing but skin stretched over wanting.

I imagined him above me, those heartbreakingly sad blue eyes focused entirely on my face, reading the map of my violent gratitude.

I imagined the weight of him, solid and real in a way that nothing else in my life had been for a long, long time.

And I imagined him moving inside me with that same careful attention he’d shown that night, the same steadiness that had kept me from floating away entirely.

Then, before I could stop myself, I imagined what it would feel like if he fucked me. Hard. Fast. Rough. That desperation surfacing from deep inside of us.

The climax, when it came, was both release and devastation. My body ached against my own touch, pleasure cresting through me like a wave, leaving me gasping and empty and somehow more alone than ever before.

And then, because I was apparently determined to torture myself in every possible way, I started to cry.

Not the dramatic sobbing of that night in the ravine, but something quieter, more shameful. The tears of a woman who’d just gotten herself off to the memory of a stranger’s kindness, who’d turned thirty-seven minutes of shared humanity into something perverse and terrible and utterly pathetic.

I pulled my hand away as if I’d been burned, curling into myself under the cold sheets.

The satisfaction was already curdling into disgust, the warm afterglow replaced by the familiar chill of self-loathing.

This was what I’d become: a woman who manufactured intimacy from trauma, who confused kindness with connection, who touched herself in the dark and pretended a stranger’s arms were still holding her together, keeping her from falling apart.

But God help me, it had felt so fucking good. It had felt real in a way nothing else had for longer than I cared to admit. And that realization was perhaps the most horrifying thing of all.

I lay there in the terrible aftermath, watching the red numbers on my clock creep closer to 2:30, knowing I’d still go.

Knowing I’d still drive through the empty streets and add my painted rock to the “conversation,” still stand in the place where he’d held me and pretend that stones and flowers could sustain whatever this was between us.

Because the alternative—accepting he was gone, that those thirty-seven minutes were all I’d ever have—was unthinkable.

Even if it was killing me, one sleepless night at a time.

The tears dried eventually, leaving salty tracks on my cheeks and the taste of bitter shame in my mouth. I pulled the sheet up to my chin and tried to convince myself that this was yet another phase, another way of processing grief that would eventually fade into something more manageable.

But I knew better.

I was falling in love with a ghost, and ghosts, by definition, couldn’t love you back.

Theo

Tuesday, 4:30 a.m., mere hours later

The stones sat in the passenger seat, smooth and cold, something that had never known life, laying dead against the leather upholstery.

I’d spent the previous afternoon collecting them from the creek behind the school again, each one chosen with the kind of care I usually reserved for lesson planning—in another life, anyway.

Size mattered. Weight mattered. The way they felt in my calloused palm, solid and real and somehow significant in a way I couldn’t articulate even to myself, it all mattered.

Four stones tonight. More than my usual.

But I’d been having that dream again, the one where her face dissolved into steam and shadow just as I reached for her, and I woke up with my heart hammering and the taste of rain and vanilla in my mouth.

The stones were an offering, a prayer to whatever gods governed chance encounters and impractical, doomed connections.

I parked in the exact spot where her Honda had been that first night, engine ticking in the November darkness, cooling steadily in the crisp desert air. The ritual had its own rhythm now, a liturgy I’d developed without conscious thought.

First, I’d sit in the car for exactly five minutes, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, listening for any sound that might indicate that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t alone.

Then I’d gather the stones and walk to the growing cairn we’d built together, one rock at a time, week after week, laying a foundation for… something, I hoped.

Tonight felt different, though. Charged. Like the air before a thunderstorm during a summer drought, heavy with possibility and the promise of rain.

The flowers were fresh—white roses again, their petals luminous in the dim moonlight. She’d been here recently, maybe earlier tonight. The thought sent electricity jolting through my chest, that familiar and desperate need.

Hope.

We were still circling each other like planets, never quite intersecting but locked in the same gravitational pull, drawn to this sacred ground where everything had changed.

I would never be the same, and the only other person who could understand was a woman who would never be the same either.

I knelt beside the memorial, arranging my stones with an almost religious passion.

Each one had to be perfect, had to communicate something I couldn’t say out loud.

The smooth gray one went at the base. Stable, foundational.

The speckled granite piece sat slightly apart, like a silent guardian.

The river stone, polished to an almost mirror finish, caught the light and threw it back in fractured pieces.

My hands were steadier than they’d been in weeks.

Here, in this ritual space we’d created without ever speaking a single word, I felt like myself again.

Not the failing teacher who’d forgotten how to connect with his students, not the insomniac who drank too much bourbon and stared at his ceiling until dawn.

Just a man who’d witnessed something sacred and was trying to honor it the only way he knew how.

The last stone was different. Smaller, darker, shot through with veins of quartz that gleamed like trapped starlight.

I’d found it yesterday, half-buried in the muddy bank where the water had receded, and something about it had caused me to stop breathing.

It looks like her tears, I’d thought. Crystallized grief, beautiful and terrible and absolutely perfect.

I placed it at the very top of the cairn, the capstone of our impossible cathedral, our place of bastardized, hopeless worship.

Standing there in the silence, I closed my eyes and let myself remember.

Not just the accident—I’d replayed that night a thousand times, maybe more—but the moments after.

The weight of her in my arms, the way she’d trusted me with her brokenness, the sound of her breathing slowly evening out against my chest. For thirty-seven minutes, I hadn’t been so alone.

That had to matter. That had to mean something.

When I opened my eyes, the memorial looked different. Complete, somehow. As if the final stone had been the missing piece of a puzzle I’d been working on my entire life without knowing it.

I understood then what we’d been building here, week after week. Not just a shrine to the dead, but a temple to connection itself. To the dreadful, wonderful possibility that two broken people could find each other in the darkness and make something close to holy from their shared pain.

Walking back to my car, I didn’t look over my shoulder.

I didn’t need to. I could feel the weight of our creation behind me, solid and permanent and real.

Tomorrow, I’d return to my ordinary life, to lesson plans and faculty meetings and the delicate maintenance of forced normalcy.

But tonight… tonight, I’d built something that mattered.

Something that was ours.

Even if she never knew it.