honey 🫧

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𓆰♱𓆪 ⛪︎

Half a mile south of the railroad trestle, on the straight stretch between nowhere and Winslow, you found yourself standing in the parking lot of a sideroad motel. A neon sign flickered above you, throwing pale light across the pavement. Your mind was still spinning from the nightmare; this time you couldn't reach for Hollis, couldn't press yourself against him to make it stop, because in the dream it was him. He'd gone through a double door and you'd heard gunshots and he never came back out.

You'd woken up with your phone already in your hand. A childish, desperate wish to call home had flooded you, and before you could bring any sense to it you'd dialed your mother's number and slipped out into the night.

It was so late you didn't think she'd pick up. One ring, two, three and then: "Hello?"

You opened your mouth. You squeezed the phone in your hand. Your voice never came.

"Y/n? Is that you?"

The worry in her voice was immediate and specific, the kind only a mother carries, and you had to cover your mouth so the sound of you sobbing wouldn't travel through the speaker.

"Baby, where are you? We've been so worried, we... "

You hung up.

And then you really cried — properly crumbled, right there in the parking lot, bracing yourself against the wall of the motel and pressing the back of your hand to your mouth so you wouldn't be loud enough to wake anyone. The cold night air came in around you, the breeze picking up, the temperature dropping in that particular desert way that felt personal. Your nose went red, your cheeks ached with it. You stood there until the worst of it passed and then you tried to put yourself back together — wiped your face, steadied your breathing, told yourself it was just a nightmare, just a phone call, just the middle of the night.

By the time you slipped back into the room you thought you'd managed it. Careful with the door, light on your feet, everything slow and quiet.

But Hollis was awake.

He was leaning against the window with a cigar between his fingers, the dim orange glow of it the only light in the room besides the neon bleeding through the curtains. His expression was tired in a way that went beyond the hour.

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything first. So he did.

"Who were you calling?"

"Nobody," you said, not looking at him. You took off your coat slowly, your blood loud in your ears, something like shame moving through you.

He took a drag, exhaled slowly. "So now you're hiding things from me." It wasn't quite a question. There was a faint, dry humor in it that didn't reach his eyes. "Should I be worried?"

You stood there for a moment looking at him — the hollows of his cheeks as he smoked, his long fingers around the cigar, the dark circles under his eyes, the half-empty glass of bourbon on the nightstand. He was tired. You were tired. The room smelled like alcohol and like the particular dragging feeling of too many nights in too many rooms like this one.

"I called home," you said. Low. Ashamed of it.

A full minute passed before he said anything. "Home. You mean... "

"My mom. I don't know why, I just... " Your voice was still unsteady, the knot in your throat threatening to come back.

He took a final drag and stubbed the cigar out on the window ledge, tossed it outside. "I thought you wanted to leave all that behind."

"I did. I do." You looked at your hands. "Things have just been so... "

"So?"

"Weird." You looked up at him.

"You've certainly been weird," he said, and it landed immediately — the offhand quality of it, the way it reduced something real to a behavioral observation. It stung more than it should have. “I've been doing my best to make you feel comfortable. To keep you safe.”

"Have you?" The words came out before you could stop them.

His brows pulled together. "Have I not?"

You took a breath. "We barely talk."

"What?" The offense in his voice was immediate. "We talk."

"About real things. Not the road, or an itinerary. About ourselves. About you, about me." You were keeping your voice low and even, trying to. "I feel like I overshare and you just... take."

"What does that even mean?" 

Again. You just had to start over. Your fingers were twitching, you intertwined one hand with the other. “Do you ever think about how it's going to be? After this. When we actually get somewhere." 

"You mean California." He said it flatly.

"Yes."

"Sometimes." He shrugged.

You sighed. Defeated. Again, he gave nothing away. You let your gaze drop. You turned and walked to the bed and sat on the edge of it and took off your shoes without looking at him. 

"What is it?" His voice came from behind you, quieter now.

"I'm tired," you said.

"No you're not." His weight settled on the mattress beside you. His hand found your arm, his fingers warm against your skin, and you looked at him despite yourself. "You've been doing this a lot lately. Spacing out. Keeping things back." 

The irony of it.

"I just feel like it's useless," you said. "Whatever I say. It won't matter." 

"Of course it'll matter." He tried a small smile. You didn't follow him and it died at the corner of his mouth. 

The more you looked at him, the more you felt the familiar division of it. On one side, you had the nights he'd held you so tight you forgot to be afraid. His hand finding yours without being asked. His laugh, his soft words, even the way he simply said your name. And then the other side of it, the times you'd tried to reach him and found a closed door, the secrets you knew he was keeping, the morning you'd brought up your concerns over the robberies and watched him smile like you were being endearing rather than serious. 

You took a breath. "I just feel like sometimes I don't know what I actually am to you. Like you don't trust me enough to let me in." You paused. "Sometimes I feel like I'm just… convenient."

A silence opened up. His brows lifted slightly, something between surprise and the beginning of offense moving across his face. "Convenient."

"I don't mean like... "

He cut you off, his voice dropping into that low register. "Say exactly what you mean."

You could have stopped there. You could have softened it, walked it back, found a safer word. But he was looking at you with that stillness that could go either way, and something in you was tired of finding safer words. "Sometimes I feel like I’m only good for one thing. To keep you company but that’s it. Some sort of fuck toy.”

The room went very quiet.

He looked at you for a long moment. Then he did something that was almost worse than anger — he laughed. Short, humorless, dry, the sound of someone who's been handed something they didn't expect and doesn't know where to put it. "Right," he said. "Is that it?"

"That's not... "

"No, I get it." He stood up and it made something twist in your chest. "You're unhappy. You've been unhappy. And apparently I'm the reason." He brushed his hair back, frustrated.

"I didn't say that," you said, and your voice came out smaller than you wanted. "I'm trying to talk to you. That's the whole point, I'm trying to... "

"And what do you want me to say?" He looked at you then, and there was something genuinely tired in it, not cruel, which was almost harder to take. "What answer am I supposed to give you that fixes this?"

"I don't need you to fix anything. I just need you to… " you stopped. Felt the thing you actually meant sitting right there, the real thing underneath all of it. "I need you to listen to me. Not just… want me."

He stood there a moment, staring at the wall. You waited for him to turn around, to come back to bed, to say something that would undo the last five minutes. Instead he reached for his jacket, picked up the keys, and with his back still to you: "I'm going out."

You barely got "Don't... " out before the door closed.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

The silence he left behind had a shape to it. It sat in the room like a third person, filling up the corners, pressing against the walls.

You didn't move for a while. Just sat on the edge of the bed with your hands in your lap and let the quiet settle over you. The AC hummed, and beneath it all you could hear the echo of his voice, that offended tone, the way his expression had shuttered closed. Then, because you needed something to do with yourself, you reached for your bag and started going through it — reorganizing what was already organized, checking products you already knew were empty. It gave your hands something to do. It didn't give your mind anything.

You checked the window. His car was still in the lot. You turned the TV on and sat in front of it and watched nothing. Some late-night show with a host whose mouth kept moving, whose audience kept laughing at things you couldn't hear as anything but noise. You turned it off. The silence came back.

You went to the window again. Still there. The car, solid and still under the parking lot light. You pressed your forehead to the glass and watched it for a while.

The spiral started slowly and then all at once. First you blamed yourself — you'd pushed too hard, said it wrong, should have found a better word than the one you chose. Then you blamed him — he'd walked out, avoided the matter, and that was on him, not you. Then your parents, somehow, because they'd taught you that wanting things was dangerous and you'd gone and proved them right. Then yourself again, because where else did it always end up.

And then, somewhere past the second hour, you found yourself at the window again. Something in your chest came apart slowly with the thought of him just leaving. Not coming back, like in your dream. Disappearing from your life as easily and suddenly as he'd entered it. The thought planted itself and grew fast, and what grew out of it was this: if he left, what would you have left of yourself? On all those nights you'd stayed awake considering leaving him, it had never once occurred to you that he might do the same. That he might already be thinking it. 

Somewhere between Oklahoma and Utah and all the nowhere in between, he had become the whole architecture of your days, and you hadn't noticed it happening until right now, standing at a motel window at two in the morning in the dark, watching his car in the lot as if it was the only string of hope that he’d come back. 

You sat down on the floor with your back against the bed and you prayed, which felt stupid and desperate and true all at once. You prayed the way you hadn't since you were a child, not the rote verse-recitation of Sunday mornings but something raw and shapeless, more like begging than prayer. Please bring him back. Please let him come back. And then, somewhere in the middle of it, you became aware of what you were doing — you were on the floor of a motel room, asking God to bring back the man you'd run away with, the man who robbed gas stations and carried a gun and had walked out two hours ago because you'd told him the truth about how you felt. You thought about what the preacher would say. You thought about your mother's face. But underneath the absurdity of it all, beneath the desperation, you also thought: I would do it again. Every single part of it. I would do it all again.

Sleep was finally beginning to pull at you, your body giving up on the vigil your mind refused to abandon, when you heard the door.

Hollis came in quietly, moving with the careful deliberateness of someone trying not to be obvious about how unsteady they were. You sat up from the floor and got to your feet before he'd fully made it through the door. He passed through the glow of the bedside lamp and you saw it — and before a single word formed in your mind your body reacted first, something dropping in your chest, something that was equal parts relief and a new, different kind of dread. The bruise sat high on his cheekbone, the skin around it already swollen and darkening at the edges.

He was right there and still seemed somewhere else entirely, eyes on the ceiling as he dropped onto the bed, oblivious or pretending to be.

"What happened to your face?" Your voice came out smaller than you wanted.

"Nothing."

"Hollis." He groaned.

"Some guy at the bar thought I was looking at his girl." He almost smirked, then winced at the movement. "Not that it was worth looking at.”

You rolled your eyes at him.

"So you got into a fight." You exhaled. "Were you carrying?"

"The fuck?" He turned to look at you. "You think I'd shoot someone over a bar fight?"

"I don't know. You're drunk."

"I'm fine."

"You've been drinking a lot lately." You kept your voice careful, low. "More than usual."

"I'm fine," he said again, back to the ceiling.

"And the other thing." You kept going, quieter. He went still in a way that told you he knew exactly what you meant. "I saw you. A few nights ago, at the gas station. I was going to say something and then I… I didn't. But I saw."

"It's nothing." His jaw tightened. Not angry exactly. More like a door shutting, smooth and final. "It takes the edge off. That's all."

"But..."

"I'm fine, y/n." His eyes found yours — not soft, not reassuring the way they usually were. A line drawn clearly in the space between you. A subject closed. "Go to sleep."

"What? I can't just... " Your brows pulled together and everything you'd been holding for the past three hours rushed up at once. "You were gone for hours, and you come back looking like that, and you just want me to go to sleep?"

"Yes."

The dryness of it stung somewhere deep. Your breath caught. "I was scared," you said, and hated how small your voice was. "I didn't know if you were coming back."

Something moved across his face. That sharp, closed-off expression faltered — just for a second, just barely. He opened his mouth and closed it again. You felt the tears coming and couldn't keep fighting them, so you just turned away, rolled onto your side, pulled your knees up, and squeezed your eyes shut.

His weight shifted on the bed. For a long while he said nothing, and you thought he might just let sleep take him, leave the whole thing unfinished until morning. But then his voice reached you, low and careful.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"You left," you said, barely above a whisper.

Silence stretched. A long minute of it, just his breathing in the dark. "I needed air."

You could feel two things simultaneously — the warmth and the withholding. Him trying to reach you and holding back at the same time, both happening in the same quiet sentence. 

You turned to face him. He was close enough that you could see every detail of the bruise, the precise edges of the swelling. You reached up and touched it carefully, just the fingertips, and something in your chest ached with it — this specific ache of tenderness for someone who frustrates you, which you were starting to understand was just what caring about a person felt like when they were this difficult to reach. 

His eyes found yours in the dark, steady and unguarded in a way they rarely were, and something in you went still. Like a shared secret between the two of you just by looking at each other.

"I'm afraid," he said, so quietly you almost missed it. 

It caught you completely off guard. He never seemed afraid, or concerned, or conflicted by anything. “Of what?”

“That you wanna leave me,” He closed his eyes briefly, and that small gesture told you more than the words did — how much it had cost him to say it. "When you called your mom. When you said what you said." 

"I didn't mean it like that," you said quickly. "I really didn't.”

“I know what you meant,” his eyes opened again. “I hear you. I do.”

You nodded. You needed to believe him. Whatever this night had been — the nightmare, the parking lot, the phone call, the argument, the waiting — it had made one thing clear that you hadn't known how to say before tonight: you couldn't do this without him. You didn't want to.

Sometime deep in the night, when sleep had almost taken you, you felt his hand find yours. His palm settling over yours, his fingers fitting between yours with a naturalness that felt like it had always been there. He drew a slow, shapeless pattern on the back of your hand, and it was enough. It pulled you under.

It wasn’t a resolution, nothing was solved but he was right there, like you prayed.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

The argument dissolved into the next morning as a thin line of tension between you. Hollis pretended nothing had happened, woke up to the same routine as always — packing the bags, loading the car, checking out of the motel, taking the road. The only difference was the way he moved around you, careful and measured, like you were some kind of wounded animal that might run or bite back if he came too close too fast.

On the road, the landscape did something you hadn't expected. Down the heart of Arizona the terrain had been shifting for days — the green thinning out, the soil going pale orange, the horizon filling with flat-topped rock formations that had no equivalent back in Oklahoma. But this morning, watching it move past the window with your chin resting on your hand, it landed differently. You understood, in a way that was physical rather than intellectual, how far you actually were. Not just from Collinsville. The canyons sat in the distance, enormous and indifferent, and you looked at them and felt something release in your chest. Something that had been held for a long time.

Hollis drove. The radio played low. You didn't say anything and neither did he, and it was the good kind of quiet.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

The town was larger than the usual stops — still small, but it had an actual main street with actual stores, people moving along the sidewalks without any particular urgency.

"We have a few hours," Hollis said, cutting the engine.

Something in his tone gave it away. This was intentional. Time — actual time, in an actual place, with nowhere to be for a few hours. You understood what he was offering without him having to say it, and you didn't make anything of it, just got out of the car.

You walked side by side down the main street, your eyes moving over the shop windows. At one you slowed without meaning to. A light blue dress on a mannequin, simple and pretty, the kind of thing you'd have saved up for back home and probably never bought. You were still looking at it when you registered that Hollis had already stepped inside. You followed.

"Pick whatever you want," you looked up to him for a moment wondering if he meant it, he didn't look back; just walked around and you knew it was his way to say he meant it.

You started carefully — the dress, then a soft blouse on the rack beside it that you held up and liked immediately. Then a pair of shorts that actually fit right, fitted rather than the loose practical things you'd been making do with. And then, on a circular rack near the back, a short skirt — rounded, full, the kind that moved when you turned. You held it against yourself and looked in the small mirror propped against the wall and felt something you hadn't felt in a while, something girlish and uncomplicated. You put it in the basket without deliberating. 

When you found yourself at the lingerie section you glanced back. Hollis was far enough away. You took your time here, more than anywhere else — not rushing, not grabbing the first things you touched. You chose carefully, things that made you feel like something different than your usual self. Something lacy, something soft, something in a color you liked. You wanted to look nice for him. The thought made your cheeks warm.

At the hair products display you spent too long reading labels, deliberating, until a hand reached past you and placed two bottles in your basket without ceremony. You looked up.

"How did you know?" you asked, half smiling.

"You've been complaining about your hair for a week." He was already moving away. "Still looks nice though."

You turned before he could see you smile.

At the perfume counter you found one you actually liked — sweet without being heavy, something that reminded you of wildflowers opening in early spring back home, back when spring meant something good. You turned the bottle over and checked the price and put it back.

Hollis stepped closer. He took your wrist gently — the one where you'd sprayed it — and brought the inside of your wrist to his nose. He held it there for a moment and you felt the touch of his fingers in such a careful way, the specific tenderness of a person handling something they don't want to damage. After last night, after everything, it landed somewhere deep.

"Did you like it?"

You nodded.

"Then take it."

"It's too expensive."

"Take it."

You took it. And you didn't argue, and he didn't make anything of it, and that small unremarkable exchange felt like something being quietly tended to between you. Not fixed. Just tended.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

He paid for everything and carried the bags and you walked down to a diner a few blocks along the main street. You sat across from each other at a window table, the afternoon light coming in sideways, and the silence between you was the comfortable kind — not empty, just unhurried. Hollis wasn't tense anymore. Just present.

The waitress was blonde with a lip piercing and a smile that reached her eyes without any effort. She took your orders and you couldn't help smiling back at her, the ease of it catching you slightly off guard.

When she came back later she leaned in a little, friendly and genuinely enthusiastic. She suddenly pointed to your bags. "Are those from the store on the corner?"

"I think so, yeah," you said.

"I've been meaning to get over there for weeks. They're so good." She glanced at Hollis briefly, unbothered, then back to you. "You two just passing through?"

"Just for today," you said, since Hollis wasn't going to.

"Then you have to go to the hot spring before you leave." She said it directly to you, like she'd already clocked who'd appreciate it. "Twenty minutes out, past the edge of town, most people don't even know it's there. Best thing in a hundred miles, I promise."

"We'd love to," you said, and meant it.

She talked about it with the enthusiasm of someone sharing something genuinely precious, and then, because she wanted you to actually find it, she pulled out her order pad and drew directions on a napkin — a small map with a bent tree and a large rock and an X, the handwriting looping and confident. It made you laugh. You folded it carefully and put it in your pocket.

When she was gone the feeling settled over you slowly. How long it had been since you'd had a conversation like that — easy, unguarded, with someone who had no reason to be anything other than what she was. You hadn't had many friends back home. But you'd had this — the casual warmth of ordinary contact, a stranger who smiled at you like you were just a person in a diner — and you hadn't known how much you missed it until just now. You sat with that for a moment, not sadly exactly, just feeling it.

You looked at Hollis. He was watching you with that quiet attention he sometimes had, not quite a smile, and you wondered briefly how long he'd been looking.

"Can we go?"

"Go where?" He'd barely been listening.

"The hot spring." You couldn't keep all the excitement out of your voice.

He considered it in the unhurried way he considered things. Then: "Sure, honey."

Honey. Something filled your chest that didn't have a clean name. You looked out the window and let it stay there.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

On the walk back to the car you glanced across the street and slowed without meaning to.

A white wooden church, modest, a verse on the sign out front in the font churches always used. People were coming out into the afternoon light — families mostly, dressed carefully, children pulling at their parents' hands. A woman stopped on the steps to fix her daughter's collar, the girl squirming and the mother patient and the whole small scene so familiar it made something tighten briefly behind your sternum. A family you recognized the shape of, even if it had never felt like yours. The distance between that life and the one you were living settled over you for just a moment — not as loss, not as longing, but as fact. Clear and specific and surprisingly bearable.

You thought, briefly, of the motel room floor. Of begging. Of I would do it all again.

When you came back to yourself Hollis had stopped a few steps ahead. He said nothing. He just turned and held out his hand.

You quickened your steps and took it. He laced his fingers through yours and held on all the way back to the car, warm and steady, and you held back just as firmly, and neither of you said a word about any of it.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

On the drive out you tried reading him the napkin directions and kept losing the thread of the girl's handwriting, which made him laugh — properly, from somewhere unguarded — and then made you laugh at yourself, and for a stretch of desert road you were both laughing at nothing much and it felt like the first fully clean moment you'd had in days.

"Okay," he said, still smiling, "the big bent tree next to the large rock. I've got it."

And there it was, exactly as described. The bent tree. The absurdly large rock. And beside them, a chain-link fence with a no trespassing sign rusted at the corners from years of sun and indifference.

You stopped. Hollis kept walking.

"Hey." You fell into step beside him, watching him scan the fence for the loose section. "Won't we get in trouble?"

He looked back at you with an expression of such patient, almost gentle reasonableness that you felt the answer coming before he said it. "My angel, we've done considerably worse shit than jumping a fence."

Which was entirely true. The foolishness of the worry landed on you and you smiled despite yourself — that was what he did, made you feel like the caution was the strange choice, dissolved your hesitation with that particular easy humor, and you loved it and resented it in equal measure and he knew both things.

He lifted the fence. You ducked under. He followed, and you walked the short trail through low scrub until the spring opened up in front of you.

It was smaller than you'd imagined and more beautiful — a natural pool set in smooth worn rock, the water still and steaming faintly in the dry afternoon air, surrounded by sparse desert vegetation gone gold at the edges. The silence out here was different from road silence — fuller, somehow, the absence of engine noise replaced by something older. A bird somewhere. The faint sound of water moving against rock. You stood and took it in.

You were still taking it in when Hollis stepped past you and started undressing. You watched him without quite meaning to — his shirt coming off, the afternoon light doing what it always did to him, the lean definition of his shoulders and arms, that particular physical ease he had in his body that you'd never stopped finding slightly astonishing. He was so effortlessly, almost unreasonably beautiful.

You became aware you were staring when he caught you. Said nothing. Just the faint curve of a smile before he turned toward the water.

"Come on," he said.

You undressed to your underwear and followed. He looked at your body before he looked at your face — the way he always did, unhurried and unashamed, like he was taking stock of something he was glad to have — and you felt it everywhere.

The water closed around you and you made a sound that surprised you — involuntary, something genuinely released, a breath you'd been holding since the motel room two nights ago finally let go. Warm and pressured in a strange, good way, the kind of warm that goes all the way through.

"It feels so nice," you said, walking until it reached your chest. "And weird."

Hollis laughed, moving further out until the water was at his shoulders. You stopped where you were — past that point and it would cover your head entirely — and he registered it without being asked, reaching back and taking your hand, drawing you toward him slowly, one arm keeping you afloat while your hands found his shoulders on instinct. His other hand found your thigh under the water, guiding your legs around his waist until you were anchored against him and the water was taking your weight and his arms were doing the rest.

"I got you," he said, looking at you from so close you could see yourself in his eyes. "And yeah, it sure does feel nice."

His forehead came to rest against yours.

The silence out here was so complete. Just the water and the bird somewhere and his breathing close to your face.

His thumb moved against your skin in those slow shapeless patterns, the ones he drew without seeming to notice, and you felt your body settle into him the way it had learned to.

"Thank you," you whispered.

"Don't thank me." The thumb kept moving. "Things will be better. I promise you."

"Hollis, you don't have to... "

"I want to." His hand moved to your face, careful and deliberate. "I don't know where the hell I'd be if you hadn't come all this way with me. I mean it." A pause — not searching for words exactly, more like deciding how many to give. "I know I'm hard to deal with, but I need you with me. And I need you happy.”

You stayed still. Just received it. Let it land in the full weight of what it was — the most he'd given you voluntarily, the closest thing to an opening he'd offered since Utah, maybe since the beginning. You felt it move through you and didn't rush past it.

Then you kissed him. More urgency than you intended, something close to desperate underneath it, almost a plea. He felt it. He pulled you in with both arms and kissed you back with the same weight, and the water held you both, and maybe the three words your heart had been saying found their way through anyway — through his hands and your mouth and the way you held on — without either of you having to say them out loud.

Maybe he heard them anyway.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

"I need a shower," you announced as you stepped into the motel room. Hours of road behind you and you could still feel the water from the hot spring on your skin, in your hair, that mineral warmth that had seeped into everything.

You were already heading toward the bathroom when you felt his arms come around you from behind. "We have a problem," he said, his voice low above your ear, "because I also need a shower."

The sound of it sent a shiver down your spine, your lower belly turning over in that way it always did. "You want to go first?" You knew exactly what he meant. You played dumb anyway.

"Nah." His mouth curved against your neck. "I think we fit just fine in that bathroom."

He walked you there with his arms still around you and you laughed at how completely unashamed he was about it. He undressed you both unhurriedly, taking his time, and as he did he kissed your body — your shoulder, the curve of your neck — and you heard it, low and almost to himself: you're gorgeous.

You would have told him to shut up, except he pulled you into his arms and carried you into the shower before you could.

The hot water came down over both of you. His lips found your neck, your shoulder, moving slow and deliberate. He turned you in his arms, your back to him, and kept going — kissing down your spine, your lower back, until he reached your ass and grabbed you without restraint, both hands, groping and squeezing and kissing your skin. It felt so natural that your body answered before you decided to — you curved back into him, and he lowered his face, and when you felt his tongue it undid you completely.

You pressed both hands flat to the tiles. He parted you and dragged his tongue all the way through, circling your clit, sucking lightly in a way that turned you into a mess of small helpless sounds. The water ran hot down your back and you couldn't think past what his mouth was doing to you.

"Holli," you begged, trying to look back at him, getting nowhere. Your hips wavered, some instinct to escape the overwhelming sensation, and he responded by gripping you harder with one hand and bringing the other down across your ass — heavy, deliberate, the sting of it blooming through you. You cried out his name.

"Fuck, I need you so bad."

He pulled away and gave you less than a minute to catch your breath before he turned you in his arms. His hands gripped your waist, large and certain, and he leaned down to kiss you. He tasted like you, and that alone made you whimper against his mouth. Your hand traveled from his stomach downward, loving the way his muscles tensed under your fingertips the closer you got, and when you wrapped your hand around his cock his breath caught between your lips. You stroked him slowly and pulled back just far enough to look at his face — those hazel eyes on you, gleaming, like you were the only thing he needed.

No words. He gripped your thigh and lifted it to his waist, lowering himself to fit between your legs. That feeling — the anticipation of being stretched open by him, filled completely in that aching, overwhelming way — always got you weak before it even started. You grabbed his shoulders as he began to move. Slow, deliberate thrusts, like he was memorizing the feel of you. When you tried to hide your face against his chest he caught you by the jaw and held you there, made you look at him. He didn't kiss you. Didn't say anything. Just watched you come apart because of him — your whimpers, your moans, landing against his mouth as he breathed them in and gave his own back.

It was too much. The eye contact, the slow pace he held for longer than was fair, the way his hands moved over your body like he owned it and knew it and wanted it all at the same time. The specific torture of being taken slowly when every part of you was demanding more.

When he finally shifted and let himself go faster it felt like release — like something that had been pulled taut finally giving way. Your nails dragged across his arms as he drove into you harder, deeper. He kissed you then, urgent and sloppy and completely without restraint, and beneath his mouth your body broke apart in waves of spasms that left you shaking and loud — entirely his.

You clenched around him, holding him tight inside you as he kept going, relentless, until he lost himself too — his rhythm faltering, his grip going almost painful. He pulled out and as he moved to finish himself you got there first, wrapping both hands around him, and he pulled you in with one arm, caging you against him as you worked him fast and firm. His fingers pressed into your skin hard enough to mark. You didn't mind. You felt him spill across your fingers with a low, wrecked sound above your ear.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

A few days later, further west, you were nearly asleep in the passenger seat when Hollis pulled the car over on a bridge and cut the engine.

You came awake slowly, squeezing your eyes against the light, and then the view registered.

A bridge between two canyons. Below, impossibly far below, a thin thread of river catching the light. The landscape was orange and rust and faded green, the sky a pale clear blue above it all, and the whole thing looked so much like a painting that you stood there for a while just letting it be what it was, not trying to do anything with it.

Only when you turned to look at him did you notice he'd already been looking at you.

"We came so far," you said.

He nodded. Looked back out at the canyon. "There's no going back." He said it quietly, and you weren't entirely sure whether it was meant for you or for himself.

"I wouldn't want to go back," you said, and the ease of it surprised you — how naturally it came out, and how true it felt once it was in the air.

"Me neither." His voice was calm, genuine, no performance in it. He was quiet for a moment, and then: "I want to make it physical."

You looked at him, half smiling, uncertain. "What do you mean?"

"Do you trust me?"

You nodded before you'd even finished deciding to. "I do."

"Give me your knife."

You still didn't fully understand, but you didn't question it. You reached down and pulled the knife from your boot and handed it to him. He opened his palm and looked at you, and you opened yours too — and somewhere in that exchange, in the seriousness of his face and the way he held your gaze, you understood what was happening. A cold shiver moved through you, not of fear exactly, but of weight. The specific feeling of something that matters.

"No regrets?" he asked. A smile was beginning at the corner of his mouth.

"No regrets," you said back.

You watched him draw the blade across his open palm — a clean line, dark red surfacing immediately, welling at the edges of the cut. "Your hand." He asked and you offered your open palm. He did the same to you, the sting of it sharp and startling, deeper than you expected, and you exhaled slowly through it as he kept going until your wound matched his.

When his hand covered yours the warmth of it was different from any warmth you'd felt before — your blood and his meeting at the joint of your palms, the ache of it still present but secondary now to the pressure of his hand holding yours. You squeezed back. He leaned down and you rose up to meet him and you kissed with a smile still on your lips that you couldn't quite lose, and he didn't say anything, and neither did you, and it felt like the biggest thing you'd ever agreed to. More than leaving Collinsville, more than the road, more than any of it.

When he pulled back from the kiss he turned you both toward the railing, your joined hands extended out over the edge. You looked down — the canyon dropping away below you, the thin thread of river catching the light so far down it looked like something drawn rather than real. And you watched as your blood ran together down your wrist, down your fingers, and fell — one drop, then another — all that distance down into the water below.

"We'll be living in all the oceans now, honey," he said.

You looked up at him. He was still watching the river, something unhurried in his expression. You felt the ache in your palm and the warmth of his hand around yours and the wind coming up through the canyon, and your heart was so full you didn't know what to do with it.

It felt like being part of his life.

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𓆰♱𓆪 ⛪︎

Half a mile south of the railroad trestle, on the straight stretch between nowhere and Winslow, you found yourself standing in the parking lot of a sideroad motel. A neon sign flickered above you, throwing pale light across the pavement. Your mind was still spinning from the nightmare; this time you couldn't reach for Hollis, couldn't press yourself against him to make it stop, because in the dream it was him. He'd gone through a double door and you'd heard gunshots and he never came back out.

You'd woken up with your phone already in your hand. A childish, desperate wish to call home had flooded you, and before you could bring any sense to it you'd dialed your mother's number and slipped out into the night.

It was so late you didn't think she'd pick up. One ring, two, three and then: "Hello?"

You opened your mouth. You squeezed the phone in your hand. Your voice never came.

"Y/n? Is that you?"

The worry in her voice was immediate and specific, the kind only a mother carries, and you had to cover your mouth so the sound of you sobbing wouldn't travel through the speaker.

"Baby, where are you? We've been so worried, we... "

You hung up.

And then you really cried — properly crumbled, right there in the parking lot, bracing yourself against the wall of the motel and pressing the back of your hand to your mouth so you wouldn't be loud enough to wake anyone. The cold night air came in around you, the breeze picking up, the temperature dropping in that particular desert way that felt personal. Your nose went red, your cheeks ached with it. You stood there until the worst of it passed and then you tried to put yourself back together — wiped your face, steadied your breathing, told yourself it was just a nightmare, just a phone call, just the middle of the night.

By the time you slipped back into the room you thought you'd managed it. Careful with the door, light on your feet, everything slow and quiet.

But Hollis was awake.

He was leaning against the window with a cigar between his fingers, the dim orange glow of it the only light in the room besides the neon bleeding through the curtains. His expression was tired in a way that went beyond the hour.

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything first. So he did.

"Who were you calling?"

"Nobody," you said, not looking at him. You took off your coat slowly, your blood loud in your ears, something like shame moving through you.

He took a drag, exhaled slowly. "So now you're hiding things from me." It wasn't quite a question. There was a faint, dry humor in it that didn't reach his eyes. "Should I be worried?"

You stood there for a moment looking at him — the hollows of his cheeks as he smoked, his long fingers around the cigar, the dark circles under his eyes, the half-empty glass of bourbon on the nightstand. He was tired. You were tired. The room smelled like alcohol and like the particular dragging feeling of too many nights in too many rooms like this one.

"I called home," you said. Low. Ashamed of it.

A full minute passed before he said anything. "Home. You mean... "

"My mom. I don't know why, I just... " Your voice was still unsteady, the knot in your throat threatening to come back.

He took a final drag and stubbed the cigar out on the window ledge, tossed it outside. "I thought you wanted to leave all that behind."

"I did. I do." You looked at your hands. "Things have just been so... "

"So?"

"Weird." You looked up at him.

"You've certainly been weird," he said, and it landed immediately — the offhand quality of it, the way it reduced something real to a behavioral observation. It stung more than it should have. “I've been doing my best to make you feel comfortable. To keep you safe.”

"Have you?" The words came out before you could stop them.

His brows pulled together. "Have I not?"

You took a breath. "We barely talk."

"What?" The offense in his voice was immediate. "We talk."

"About real things. Not the road, or an itinerary. About ourselves. About you, about me." You were keeping your voice low and even, trying to. "I feel like I overshare and you just... take."

"What does that even mean?" 

Again. You just had to start over. Your fingers were twitching, you intertwined one hand with the other. “Do you ever think about how it's going to be? After this. When we actually get somewhere." 

"You mean California." He said it flatly.

"Yes."

"Sometimes." He shrugged.

You sighed. Defeated. Again, he gave nothing away. You let your gaze drop. You turned and walked to the bed and sat on the edge of it and took off your shoes without looking at him. 

"What is it?" His voice came from behind you, quieter now.

"I'm tired," you said.

"No you're not." His weight settled on the mattress beside you. His hand found your arm, his fingers warm against your skin, and you looked at him despite yourself. "You've been doing this a lot lately. Spacing out. Keeping things back." 

The irony of it.

"I just feel like it's useless," you said. "Whatever I say. It won't matter." 

"Of course it'll matter." He tried a small smile. You didn't follow him and it died at the corner of his mouth. 

The more you looked at him, the more you felt the familiar division of it. On one side, you had the nights he'd held you so tight you forgot to be afraid. His hand finding yours without being asked. His laugh, his soft words, even the way he simply said your name. And then the other side of it, the times you'd tried to reach him and found a closed door, the secrets you knew he was keeping, the morning you'd brought up your concerns over the robberies and watched him smile like you were being endearing rather than serious. 

You took a breath. "I just feel like sometimes I don't know what I actually am to you. Like you don't trust me enough to let me in." You paused. "Sometimes I feel like I'm just… convenient."

A silence opened up. His brows lifted slightly, something between surprise and the beginning of offense moving across his face. "Convenient."

"I don't mean like... "

He cut you off, his voice dropping into that low register. "Say exactly what you mean."

You could have stopped there. You could have softened it, walked it back, found a safer word. But he was looking at you with that stillness that could go either way, and something in you was tired of finding safer words. "Sometimes I feel like I’m only good for one thing. To keep you company but that’s it. Some sort of fuck toy.”

The room went very quiet.

He looked at you for a long moment. Then he did something that was almost worse than anger — he laughed. Short, humorless, dry, the sound of someone who's been handed something they didn't expect and doesn't know where to put it. "Right," he said. "Is that it?"

"That's not... "

"No, I get it." He stood up and it made something twist in your chest. "You're unhappy. You've been unhappy. And apparently I'm the reason." He brushed his hair back, frustrated.

"I didn't say that," you said, and your voice came out smaller than you wanted. "I'm trying to talk to you. That's the whole point, I'm trying to... "

"And what do you want me to say?" He looked at you then, and there was something genuinely tired in it, not cruel, which was almost harder to take. "What answer am I supposed to give you that fixes this?"

"I don't need you to fix anything. I just need you to… " you stopped. Felt the thing you actually meant sitting right there, the real thing underneath all of it. "I need you to listen to me. Not just… want me."

He stood there a moment, staring at the wall. You waited for him to turn around, to come back to bed, to say something that would undo the last five minutes. Instead he reached for his jacket, picked up the keys, and with his back still to you: "I'm going out."

You barely got "Don't... " out before the door closed.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

The silence he left behind had a shape to it. It sat in the room like a third person, filling up the corners, pressing against the walls.

You didn't move for a while. Just sat on the edge of the bed with your hands in your lap and let the quiet settle over you. The AC hummed, and beneath it all you could hear the echo of his voice, that offended tone, the way his expression had shuttered closed. Then, because you needed something to do with yourself, you reached for your bag and started going through it — reorganizing what was already organized, checking products you already knew were empty. It gave your hands something to do. It didn't give your mind anything.

You checked the window. His car was still in the lot. You turned the TV on and sat in front of it and watched nothing. Some late-night show with a host whose mouth kept moving, whose audience kept laughing at things you couldn't hear as anything but noise. You turned it off. The silence came back.

You went to the window again. Still there. The car, solid and still under the parking lot light. You pressed your forehead to the glass and watched it for a while.

The spiral started slowly and then all at once. First you blamed yourself — you'd pushed too hard, said it wrong, should have found a better word than the one you chose. Then you blamed him — he'd walked out, avoided the matter, and that was on him, not you. Then your parents, somehow, because they'd taught you that wanting things was dangerous and you'd gone and proved them right. Then yourself again, because where else did it always end up.

And then, somewhere past the second hour, you found yourself at the window again. Something in your chest came apart slowly with the thought of him just leaving. Not coming back, like in your dream. Disappearing from your life as easily and suddenly as he'd entered it. The thought planted itself and grew fast, and what grew out of it was this: if he left, what would you have left of yourself? On all those nights you'd stayed awake considering leaving him, it had never once occurred to you that he might do the same. That he might already be thinking it. 

Somewhere between Oklahoma and Utah and all the nowhere in between, he had become the whole architecture of your days, and you hadn't noticed it happening until right now, standing at a motel window at two in the morning in the dark, watching his car in the lot as if it was the only string of hope that he’d come back. 

You sat down on the floor with your back against the bed and you prayed, which felt stupid and desperate and true all at once. You prayed the way you hadn't since you were a child, not the rote verse-recitation of Sunday mornings but something raw and shapeless, more like begging than prayer. Please bring him back. Please let him come back. And then, somewhere in the middle of it, you became aware of what you were doing — you were on the floor of a motel room, asking God to bring back the man you'd run away with, the man who robbed gas stations and carried a gun and had walked out two hours ago because you'd told him the truth about how you felt. You thought about what the preacher would say. You thought about your mother's face. But underneath the absurdity of it all, beneath the desperation, you also thought: I would do it again. Every single part of it. I would do it all again.

Sleep was finally beginning to pull at you, your body giving up on the vigil your mind refused to abandon, when you heard the door.

Hollis came in quietly, moving with the careful deliberateness of someone trying not to be obvious about how unsteady they were. You sat up from the floor and got to your feet before he'd fully made it through the door. He passed through the glow of the bedside lamp and you saw it — and before a single word formed in your mind your body reacted first, something dropping in your chest, something that was equal parts relief and a new, different kind of dread. The bruise sat high on his cheekbone, the skin around it already swollen and darkening at the edges.

He was right there and still seemed somewhere else entirely, eyes on the ceiling as he dropped onto the bed, oblivious or pretending to be.

"What happened to your face?" Your voice came out smaller than you wanted.

"Nothing."

"Hollis." He groaned.

"Some guy at the bar thought I was looking at his girl." He almost smirked, then winced at the movement. "Not that it was worth looking at.”

You rolled your eyes at him.

"So you got into a fight." You exhaled. "Were you carrying?"

"The fuck?" He turned to look at you. "You think I'd shoot someone over a bar fight?"

"I don't know. You're drunk."

"I'm fine."

"You've been drinking a lot lately." You kept your voice careful, low. "More than usual."

"I'm fine," he said again, back to the ceiling.

"And the other thing." You kept going, quieter. He went still in a way that told you he knew exactly what you meant. "I saw you. A few nights ago, at the gas station. I was going to say something and then I… I didn't. But I saw."

"It's nothing." His jaw tightened. Not angry exactly. More like a door shutting, smooth and final. "It takes the edge off. That's all."

"But..."

"I'm fine, y/n." His eyes found yours — not soft, not reassuring the way they usually were. A line drawn clearly in the space between you. A subject closed. "Go to sleep."

"What? I can't just... " Your brows pulled together and everything you'd been holding for the past three hours rushed up at once. "You were gone for hours, and you come back looking like that, and you just want me to go to sleep?"

"Yes."

The dryness of it stung somewhere deep. Your breath caught. "I was scared," you said, and hated how small your voice was. "I didn't know if you were coming back."

Something moved across his face. That sharp, closed-off expression faltered — just for a second, just barely. He opened his mouth and closed it again. You felt the tears coming and couldn't keep fighting them, so you just turned away, rolled onto your side, pulled your knees up, and squeezed your eyes shut.

His weight shifted on the bed. For a long while he said nothing, and you thought he might just let sleep take him, leave the whole thing unfinished until morning. But then his voice reached you, low and careful.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"You left," you said, barely above a whisper.

Silence stretched. A long minute of it, just his breathing in the dark. "I needed air."

You could feel two things simultaneously — the warmth and the withholding. Him trying to reach you and holding back at the same time, both happening in the same quiet sentence. 

You turned to face him. He was close enough that you could see every detail of the bruise, the precise edges of the swelling. You reached up and touched it carefully, just the fingertips, and something in your chest ached with it — this specific ache of tenderness for someone who frustrates you, which you were starting to understand was just what caring about a person felt like when they were this difficult to reach. 

His eyes found yours in the dark, steady and unguarded in a way they rarely were, and something in you went still. Like a shared secret between the two of you just by looking at each other.

"I'm afraid," he said, so quietly you almost missed it. 

It caught you completely off guard. He never seemed afraid, or concerned, or conflicted by anything. “Of what?”

“That you wanna leave me,” He closed his eyes briefly, and that small gesture told you more than the words did — how much it had cost him to say it. "When you called your mom. When you said what you said." 

"I didn't mean it like that," you said quickly. "I really didn't.”

“I know what you meant,” his eyes opened again. “I hear you. I do.”

You nodded. You needed to believe him. Whatever this night had been — the nightmare, the parking lot, the phone call, the argument, the waiting — it had made one thing clear that you hadn't known how to say before tonight: you couldn't do this without him. You didn't want to.

Sometime deep in the night, when sleep had almost taken you, you felt his hand find yours. His palm settling over yours, his fingers fitting between yours with a naturalness that felt like it had always been there. He drew a slow, shapeless pattern on the back of your hand, and it was enough. It pulled you under.

It wasn’t a resolution, nothing was solved but he was right there, like you prayed.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

The argument dissolved into the next morning as a thin line of tension between you. Hollis pretended nothing had happened, woke up to the same routine as always — packing the bags, loading the car, checking out of the motel, taking the road. The only difference was the way he moved around you, careful and measured, like you were some kind of wounded animal that might run or bite back if he came too close too fast.

On the road, the landscape did something you hadn't expected. Down the heart of Arizona the terrain had been shifting for days — the green thinning out, the soil going pale orange, the horizon filling with flat-topped rock formations that had no equivalent back in Oklahoma. But this morning, watching it move past the window with your chin resting on your hand, it landed differently. You understood, in a way that was physical rather than intellectual, how far you actually were. Not just from Collinsville. The canyons sat in the distance, enormous and indifferent, and you looked at them and felt something release in your chest. Something that had been held for a long time.

Hollis drove. The radio played low. You didn't say anything and neither did he, and it was the good kind of quiet.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

The town was larger than the usual stops — still small, but it had an actual main street with actual stores, people moving along the sidewalks without any particular urgency.

"We have a few hours," Hollis said, cutting the engine.

Something in his tone gave it away. This was intentional. Time — actual time, in an actual place, with nowhere to be for a few hours. You understood what he was offering without him having to say it, and you didn't make anything of it, just got out of the car.

You walked side by side down the main street, your eyes moving over the shop windows. At one you slowed without meaning to. A light blue dress on a mannequin, simple and pretty, the kind of thing you'd have saved up for back home and probably never bought. You were still looking at it when you registered that Hollis had already stepped inside. You followed.

"Pick whatever you want," you looked up to him for a moment wondering if he meant it, he didn't look back; just walked around and you knew it was his way to say he meant it.

You started carefully — the dress, then a soft blouse on the rack beside it that you held up and liked immediately. Then a pair of shorts that actually fit right, fitted rather than the loose practical things you'd been making do with. And then, on a circular rack near the back, a short skirt — rounded, full, the kind that moved when you turned. You held it against yourself and looked in the small mirror propped against the wall and felt something you hadn't felt in a while, something girlish and uncomplicated. You put it in the basket without deliberating. 

When you found yourself at the lingerie section you glanced back. Hollis was far enough away. You took your time here, more than anywhere else — not rushing, not grabbing the first things you touched. You chose carefully, things that made you feel like something different than your usual self. Something lacy, something soft, something in a color you liked. You wanted to look nice for him. The thought made your cheeks warm.

At the hair products display you spent too long reading labels, deliberating, until a hand reached past you and placed two bottles in your basket without ceremony. You looked up.

"How did you know?" you asked, half smiling.

"You've been complaining about your hair for a week." He was already moving away. "Still looks nice though."

You turned before he could see you smile.

At the perfume counter you found one you actually liked — sweet without being heavy, something that reminded you of wildflowers opening in early spring back home, back when spring meant something good. You turned the bottle over and checked the price and put it back.

Hollis stepped closer. He took your wrist gently — the one where you'd sprayed it — and brought the inside of your wrist to his nose. He held it there for a moment and you felt the touch of his fingers in such a careful way, the specific tenderness of a person handling something they don't want to damage. After last night, after everything, it landed somewhere deep.

"Did you like it?"

You nodded.

"Then take it."

"It's too expensive."

"Take it."

You took it. And you didn't argue, and he didn't make anything of it, and that small unremarkable exchange felt like something being quietly tended to between you. Not fixed. Just tended.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

He paid for everything and carried the bags and you walked down to a diner a few blocks along the main street. You sat across from each other at a window table, the afternoon light coming in sideways, and the silence between you was the comfortable kind — not empty, just unhurried. Hollis wasn't tense anymore. Just present.

The waitress was blonde with a lip piercing and a smile that reached her eyes without any effort. She took your orders and you couldn't help smiling back at her, the ease of it catching you slightly off guard.

When she came back later she leaned in a little, friendly and genuinely enthusiastic. She suddenly pointed to your bags. "Are those from the store on the corner?"

"I think so, yeah," you said.

"I've been meaning to get over there for weeks. They're so good." She glanced at Hollis briefly, unbothered, then back to you. "You two just passing through?"

"Just for today," you said, since Hollis wasn't going to.

"Then you have to go to the hot spring before you leave." She said it directly to you, like she'd already clocked who'd appreciate it. "Twenty minutes out, past the edge of town, most people don't even know it's there. Best thing in a hundred miles, I promise."

"We'd love to," you said, and meant it.

She talked about it with the enthusiasm of someone sharing something genuinely precious, and then, because she wanted you to actually find it, she pulled out her order pad and drew directions on a napkin — a small map with a bent tree and a large rock and an X, the handwriting looping and confident. It made you laugh. You folded it carefully and put it in your pocket.

When she was gone the feeling settled over you slowly. How long it had been since you'd had a conversation like that — easy, unguarded, with someone who had no reason to be anything other than what she was. You hadn't had many friends back home. But you'd had this — the casual warmth of ordinary contact, a stranger who smiled at you like you were just a person in a diner — and you hadn't known how much you missed it until just now. You sat with that for a moment, not sadly exactly, just feeling it.

You looked at Hollis. He was watching you with that quiet attention he sometimes had, not quite a smile, and you wondered briefly how long he'd been looking.

"Can we go?"

"Go where?" He'd barely been listening.

"The hot spring." You couldn't keep all the excitement out of your voice.

He considered it in the unhurried way he considered things. Then: "Sure, honey."

Honey. Something filled your chest that didn't have a clean name. You looked out the window and let it stay there.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

On the walk back to the car you glanced across the street and slowed without meaning to.

A white wooden church, modest, a verse on the sign out front in the font churches always used. People were coming out into the afternoon light — families mostly, dressed carefully, children pulling at their parents' hands. A woman stopped on the steps to fix her daughter's collar, the girl squirming and the mother patient and the whole small scene so familiar it made something tighten briefly behind your sternum. A family you recognized the shape of, even if it had never felt like yours. The distance between that life and the one you were living settled over you for just a moment — not as loss, not as longing, but as fact. Clear and specific and surprisingly bearable.

You thought, briefly, of the motel room floor. Of begging. Of I would do it all again.

When you came back to yourself Hollis had stopped a few steps ahead. He said nothing. He just turned and held out his hand.

You quickened your steps and took it. He laced his fingers through yours and held on all the way back to the car, warm and steady, and you held back just as firmly, and neither of you said a word about any of it.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

On the drive out you tried reading him the napkin directions and kept losing the thread of the girl's handwriting, which made him laugh — properly, from somewhere unguarded — and then made you laugh at yourself, and for a stretch of desert road you were both laughing at nothing much and it felt like the first fully clean moment you'd had in days.

"Okay," he said, still smiling, "the big bent tree next to the large rock. I've got it."

And there it was, exactly as described. The bent tree. The absurdly large rock. And beside them, a chain-link fence with a no trespassing sign rusted at the corners from years of sun and indifference.

You stopped. Hollis kept walking.

"Hey." You fell into step beside him, watching him scan the fence for the loose section. "Won't we get in trouble?"

He looked back at you with an expression of such patient, almost gentle reasonableness that you felt the answer coming before he said it. "My angel, we've done considerably worse shit than jumping a fence."

Which was entirely true. The foolishness of the worry landed on you and you smiled despite yourself — that was what he did, made you feel like the caution was the strange choice, dissolved your hesitation with that particular easy humor, and you loved it and resented it in equal measure and he knew both things.

He lifted the fence. You ducked under. He followed, and you walked the short trail through low scrub until the spring opened up in front of you.

It was smaller than you'd imagined and more beautiful — a natural pool set in smooth worn rock, the water still and steaming faintly in the dry afternoon air, surrounded by sparse desert vegetation gone gold at the edges. The silence out here was different from road silence — fuller, somehow, the absence of engine noise replaced by something older. A bird somewhere. The faint sound of water moving against rock. You stood and took it in.

You were still taking it in when Hollis stepped past you and started undressing. You watched him without quite meaning to — his shirt coming off, the afternoon light doing what it always did to him, the lean definition of his shoulders and arms, that particular physical ease he had in his body that you'd never stopped finding slightly astonishing. He was so effortlessly, almost unreasonably beautiful.

You became aware you were staring when he caught you. Said nothing. Just the faint curve of a smile before he turned toward the water.

"Come on," he said.

You undressed to your underwear and followed. He looked at your body before he looked at your face — the way he always did, unhurried and unashamed, like he was taking stock of something he was glad to have — and you felt it everywhere.

The water closed around you and you made a sound that surprised you — involuntary, something genuinely released, a breath you'd been holding since the motel room two nights ago finally let go. Warm and pressured in a strange, good way, the kind of warm that goes all the way through.

"It feels so nice," you said, walking until it reached your chest. "And weird."

Hollis laughed, moving further out until the water was at his shoulders. You stopped where you were — past that point and it would cover your head entirely — and he registered it without being asked, reaching back and taking your hand, drawing you toward him slowly, one arm keeping you afloat while your hands found his shoulders on instinct. His other hand found your thigh under the water, guiding your legs around his waist until you were anchored against him and the water was taking your weight and his arms were doing the rest.

"I got you," he said, looking at you from so close you could see yourself in his eyes. "And yeah, it sure does feel nice."

His forehead came to rest against yours.

The silence out here was so complete. Just the water and the bird somewhere and his breathing close to your face.

His thumb moved against your skin in those slow shapeless patterns, the ones he drew without seeming to notice, and you felt your body settle into him the way it had learned to.

"Thank you," you whispered.

"Don't thank me." The thumb kept moving. "Things will be better. I promise you."

"Hollis, you don't have to... "

"I want to." His hand moved to your face, careful and deliberate. "I don't know where the hell I'd be if you hadn't come all this way with me. I mean it." A pause — not searching for words exactly, more like deciding how many to give. "I know I'm hard to deal with, but I need you with me. And I need you happy.”

You stayed still. Just received it. Let it land in the full weight of what it was — the most he'd given you voluntarily, the closest thing to an opening he'd offered since Utah, maybe since the beginning. You felt it move through you and didn't rush past it.

Then you kissed him. More urgency than you intended, something close to desperate underneath it, almost a plea. He felt it. He pulled you in with both arms and kissed you back with the same weight, and the water held you both, and maybe the three words your heart had been saying found their way through anyway — through his hands and your mouth and the way you held on — without either of you having to say them out loud.

Maybe he heard them anyway.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

"I need a shower," you announced as you stepped into the motel room. Hours of road behind you and you could still feel the water from the hot spring on your skin, in your hair, that mineral warmth that had seeped into everything.

You were already heading toward the bathroom when you felt his arms come around you from behind. "We have a problem," he said, his voice low above your ear, "because I also need a shower."

The sound of it sent a shiver down your spine, your lower belly turning over in that way it always did. "You want to go first?" You knew exactly what he meant. You played dumb anyway.

"Nah." His mouth curved against your neck. "I think we fit just fine in that bathroom."

He walked you there with his arms still around you and you laughed at how completely unashamed he was about it. He undressed you both unhurriedly, taking his time, and as he did he kissed your body — your shoulder, the curve of your neck — and you heard it, low and almost to himself: you're gorgeous.

You would have told him to shut up, except he pulled you into his arms and carried you into the shower before you could.

The hot water came down over both of you. His lips found your neck, your shoulder, moving slow and deliberate. He turned you in his arms, your back to him, and kept going — kissing down your spine, your lower back, until he reached your ass and grabbed you without restraint, both hands, groping and squeezing and kissing your skin. It felt so natural that your body answered before you decided to — you curved back into him, and he lowered his face, and when you felt his tongue it undid you completely.

You pressed both hands flat to the tiles. He parted you and dragged his tongue all the way through, circling your clit, sucking lightly in a way that turned you into a mess of small helpless sounds. The water ran hot down your back and you couldn't think past what his mouth was doing to you.

"Holli," you begged, trying to look back at him, getting nowhere. Your hips wavered, some instinct to escape the overwhelming sensation, and he responded by gripping you harder with one hand and bringing the other down across your ass — heavy, deliberate, the sting of it blooming through you. You cried out his name.

"Fuck, I need you so bad."

He pulled away and gave you less than a minute to catch your breath before he turned you in his arms. His hands gripped your waist, large and certain, and he leaned down to kiss you. He tasted like you, and that alone made you whimper against his mouth. Your hand traveled from his stomach downward, loving the way his muscles tensed under your fingertips the closer you got, and when you wrapped your hand around his cock his breath caught between your lips. You stroked him slowly and pulled back just far enough to look at his face — those hazel eyes on you, gleaming, like you were the only thing he needed.

No words. He gripped your thigh and lifted it to his waist, lowering himself to fit between your legs. That feeling — the anticipation of being stretched open by him, filled completely in that aching, overwhelming way — always got you weak before it even started. You grabbed his shoulders as he began to move. Slow, deliberate thrusts, like he was memorizing the feel of you. When you tried to hide your face against his chest he caught you by the jaw and held you there, made you look at him. He didn't kiss you. Didn't say anything. Just watched you come apart because of him — your whimpers, your moans, landing against his mouth as he breathed them in and gave his own back.

It was too much. The eye contact, the slow pace he held for longer than was fair, the way his hands moved over your body like he owned it and knew it and wanted it all at the same time. The specific torture of being taken slowly when every part of you was demanding more.

When he finally shifted and let himself go faster it felt like release — like something that had been pulled taut finally giving way. Your nails dragged across his arms as he drove into you harder, deeper. He kissed you then, urgent and sloppy and completely without restraint, and beneath his mouth your body broke apart in waves of spasms that left you shaking and loud — entirely his.

You clenched around him, holding him tight inside you as he kept going, relentless, until he lost himself too — his rhythm faltering, his grip going almost painful. He pulled out and as he moved to finish himself you got there first, wrapping both hands around him, and he pulled you in with one arm, caging you against him as you worked him fast and firm. His fingers pressed into your skin hard enough to mark. You didn't mind. You felt him spill across your fingers with a low, wrecked sound above your ear.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀♱ ⠀

A few days later, further west, you were nearly asleep in the passenger seat when Hollis pulled the car over on a bridge and cut the engine.

You came awake slowly, squeezing your eyes against the light, and then the view registered.

A bridge between two canyons. Below, impossibly far below, a thin thread of river catching the light. The landscape was orange and rust and faded green, the sky a pale clear blue above it all, and the whole thing looked so much like a painting that you stood there for a while just letting it be what it was, not trying to do anything with it.

Only when you turned to look at him did you notice he'd already been looking at you.

"We came so far," you said.

He nodded. Looked back out at the canyon. "There's no going back." He said it quietly, and you weren't entirely sure whether it was meant for you or for himself.

"I wouldn't want to go back," you said, and the ease of it surprised you — how naturally it came out, and how true it felt once it was in the air.

"Me neither." His voice was calm, genuine, no performance in it. He was quiet for a moment, and then: "I want to make it physical."

You looked at him, half smiling, uncertain. "What do you mean?"

"Do you trust me?"

You nodded before you'd even finished deciding to. "I do."

"Give me your knife."

You still didn't fully understand, but you didn't question it. You reached down and pulled the knife from your boot and handed it to him. He opened his palm and looked at you, and you opened yours too — and somewhere in that exchange, in the seriousness of his face and the way he held your gaze, you understood what was happening. A cold shiver moved through you, not of fear exactly, but of weight. The specific feeling of something that matters.

"No regrets?" he asked. A smile was beginning at the corner of his mouth.

"No regrets," you said back.

You watched him draw the blade across his open palm — a clean line, dark red surfacing immediately, welling at the edges of the cut. "Your hand." He asked and you offered your open palm. He did the same to you, the sting of it sharp and startling, deeper than you expected, and you exhaled slowly through it as he kept going until your wound matched his.

When his hand covered yours the warmth of it was different from any warmth you'd felt before — your blood and his meeting at the joint of your palms, the ache of it still present but secondary now to the pressure of his hand holding yours. You squeezed back. He leaned down and you rose up to meet him and you kissed with a smile still on your lips that you couldn't quite lose, and he didn't say anything, and neither did you, and it felt like the biggest thing you'd ever agreed to. More than leaving Collinsville, more than the road, more than any of it.

When he pulled back from the kiss he turned you both toward the railing, your joined hands extended out over the edge. You looked down — the canyon dropping away below you, the thin thread of river catching the light so far down it looked like something drawn rather than real. And you watched as your blood ran together down your wrist, down your fingers, and fell — one drop, then another — all that distance down into the water below.

"We'll be living in all the oceans now, honey," he said.

You looked up at him. He was still watching the river, something unhurried in his expression. You felt the ache in your palm and the warmth of his hand around yours and the wind coming up through the canyon, and your heart was so full you didn't know what to do with it.

It felt like being part of his life.