Page 9 of Born to Run Back

Chapter Seven

Edges of Normal

Theo

The fluorescent lights at Brewed Awakening hummed with the particular frequency of institutional discomfort, washing everything in a harsh, clinical white.

I’d arrived fifteen minutes early, claiming a corner table where I could easily watch the door, my hands wrapped around a to-go cup of black that had already gone cold.

This was a mistake. I’d known it the moment I’d woken up at 6:30 a.m., still tasting her on my lips, my body aching in places that reminded me of exactly what we’d done against the hood of her Honda.

In the daylight streaming through my bedroom windows, the whole thing had felt like something that had happened to someone else.

A fever dream brought on by four months of sleepless nights and too much goddamn bourbon.

But she’d texted at 9:15.

Still want to get coffee? There’s this new place called Brewed Awakening on Diamond Bar Boulevard.

And I’d texted back: Yes. 3:45?

Now, sitting in this sterile new coffee shop with its generic jazz music and the constant hiss of the espresso machine, I couldn’t remember why this had seemed like a good idea in the first place.

The man who’d held her in the rain, who’d whispered her name like a prayer as he moved inside her—that man felt fictional.

I was just Theo Garner, high school history teacher, wearing a soft flannel button-down and jeans that still smelled faintly of sage brush and her vanilla perfume.

When she walked in through the door, I nearly didn’t recognize her.

Gone was the ethereal figure from our moonlit memorial, the woman who’d felt like eternal salvation in my arms. This was just—a person.

Pretty, yes, very pretty, in fact, but also ordinary in the way that daylight made everything ordinary.

She wore dark jeans and a cream-colored sweater with knee-high brown riding boots, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that revealed the sharp angles of her face.

She looked tired. Nervous. Like someone meeting a blind date she wasn’t particularly excited about.

She spotted me across the coffee shop and raised her hand in a small wave, making her way to the counter first. I watched her order— a chai latte with an extra shot , she told the barista—and felt the first stab of something that might have been disappointment.

I didn’t know she liked chai lattes. I didn’t know anything about her except the sound she made when she came and the way her tears tasted like salt and desperation.

“Theo,” she said, sliding into the chair across from me, her latte cradled between both hands like a shield. “Hi.”

“Hi.” I tried to smile, but gave up. It felt too forced, artificial. “How are you?”

“Fine. Good. A little tired, if I’m gonna need to be really honest.” She tucked a lock of dark brown hair behind her ear, a gesture that should have been endearing but somehow confused me even more. “You?”

“Same.”

The silence stretched between us, filled only by the ambient noise of the coffee shop—conversations at other tables, the clatter of coffee mugs and dishes, someone’s phone ringing.

It was supposed to be easier than this, wasn’t it?

We’d already crossed the most intimate line possible.

We’d confessed love to each other in the throes of passion.

But sitting here in this aggressively normal setting, I couldn’t think of a single goddamn thing to say.

“So,” she finally said, her fingers fidgeting with the cardboard sleeve around her cup. “You mentioned in your texts you’re a history teacher.”

“Yeah. Roosevelt High. AP World History, mostly.” I took a sip of my coffee and tried not to grimace. “You’re an accountant?”

She nodded, her ponytail swishing from side to side. “Tax preparation, mostly. Some small business consulting.” A pause. “I swear, it’s not as boring as it sounds.”

But it kind of was, wasn’t it? The woman who’d built elaborate stone memorials and painted rocks with mystical symbols spent her days with spreadsheets and quarterly reports. The disconnect was—jarring. Like discovering your favorite song was actually an advertising jingle or something.

“Do you like it?” I asked, because that seemed like the kind of question normal people asked on normal coffee dates.

“It’s fine. Pays the bills, I guess. I paint, too, in my spare time.”

Of course she did. Everyone had a creative hobby they mentioned to reveal they were more interesting than they seemed on the surface.

I probably should have asked to see her work, shown some interest, but I found myself checking my phone instead, scrolling through meaningless emails just to have something to look at besides her face.

Wendy

This was agony.

Sitting across from Theo in the unforgiving light of midday, I kept searching for traces of the man who’d whispered my name like it was sacred, who’d made me feel like the center of the universe for thirty-seven desperate minutes.

But this person—this perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary and handsome man nursing his black coffee and making small talk about his job—felt like a complete and utter stranger.

Which, I guess, he was.

“What kind of paintings?” he asked, and I could hear the effort in his voice, the way people sounded when they were trying to fill a conversational empty space.

“Abstract, mostly. Landscapes sometimes.” I didn’t mention the accident sketches, the violent charcoal drawings I’d been making for months. Those belonged to the woman who touched herself thinking about him, who’d built shrines to a dead college student and called it love. “Nothing special.”

I’d like to see them sometime,” he said, but the words had the hollow ring of politeness rather than genuine interest.

Another silence. I found myself watching the other coffee shop customers, envying their easy laughter, the natural flow of their conversations.

At the table next to us, a young couple was planning their weekend, their words overlapping in the comfortable rhythm of people who actually knew each other.

Who shared inside jokes and common interests and a host of memories that weren’t all surrounding one terrible night that had altered their lives forever.

They didn’t have to work so fucking hard to find things to talk about.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” I said finally, because pretending otherwise felt absolutely exhausting.

Theo’s shoulders relaxed slightly, the first genuine expression I’d witnessed from him since walking in. “Yeah. Really weird.”

“I mean, we barely know each other.” I laughed, but it came out bitter, strained. “I don’t even know how you take your coffee.”

“Black. Always black.” He gestured to my latte. “Chai?”

“Usually. Sometimes Vietnamese iced coffee if I’m feeling fancy.” Such mundane details. The building blocks of actual relationships, I supposed, rather than whatever fever dream we’d been living. “God, we really don’t know anything about each other, do we?”

“I know that you paint your rocks with nail polish so they catch the moonlight,” he said softly, and for a moment, something flickered between us.

A shadow of the connection that had felt so real, so significant.

But then the coffee shop’s fluorescent lights seemed to brighten, washing out whatever magic had briefly surfaced.

“Right.” I wrapped both hands around my latte, using the warmth to ground myself. “The rocks.”

We both stared into our respective drinks, the weight of four months of obsession settling between us like a tangible, physical thing.

All those Tuesday nights, all those carefully arranged stones, all those dreams and fantasies and late night drives to our sacred memorial—it had all led to this.

Two strangers in a coffee shop, realizing they’d fallen in love with ghosts.

"Maybe we just..." I started, then stopped, not sure how to finish the thought without sounding cruel.

"Needed last night," he completed, understanding immediately. "For closure."

"Yeah." The relief in my voice was unmistakable, and I saw it reflected in his sad blue eyes. "Maybe that's what it was. What we both needed to move on."

He nodded. "The trauma response thing. It makes sense."

"Perfect sense." I was already standing, suddenly desperate to escape this fluorescent purgatory, to get back to my car where I could process the massive disappointment in private. "Thank you for meeting me for coffee.”

"Thank you for... everything." He stood too, and for a moment we hovered there awkwardly, unsure of how to say goodbye. A handshake felt ridiculous. A hug felt like a lie.

"Take care of yourself, Theo."

"You too, Wendy."

I walked out of Brewed Awakening feeling somehow lighter and heavier at the same time. The fantasy was finally dead, the obsession broken by the harsh reality of daylight and small talk and the simple truth that shared trauma wasn't the same thing as compatibility.

But as I sat in my car, watching him through the coffee shop window as he stared down at his phone, I couldn't shake the feeling that we'd just made a hideous, horrible mistake.

That in our rush to be normal, we'd thrown away something that might have been worth fighting for.

Even if we didn't know what the hell it was.