The rain has eased enough to let a crack of sun through the ragged seam of cloud. Earlier, they were black and menacing—now torn, like the wounds breaking open inside. The stretch of road is still black with rain, painted speckled red with scattered leaves. Leaves and twigs and broken branches strewn like the thoughts in my head.

Nothing stops until I reach the stretch that curves down into the valley, where the birches and maples huddle against each other, burning reds and yellows.

I dread the car sitting in the rest area.

Our rest area.
Our spot.

A gust of wind brushes water from the overhanging branches as I stop and idle, then turn the car off. I sigh, waiting for the intruder to do something—anything. Like fuck off.

Your favorite resolution to everything.

Fuck off.

Sometimes delivered with a smile, in a smoky bar when someone other than me tried to pick you up.

Fuck off, still smiling. Still delightful.

But also cruel, when needed. A snarl for when the world asked and you objected. Which is probably why you never could keep steady work.

They called you wild. I dared dream you mine. I saw between the crazy. I saw you in your calm.

And right here, you told me, staring out at the lake.

“I feel like I can breathe.” As if you’d found it for the first time. Calm.

I could see you again like this if only the intruder would hurry up and leave. But they, too, are waiting for the skies to crack fully open and bleed red sunset over the lake. A man and a woman, silhouettes against the fading light, stealing kisses that once belonged to us.

“Stop here,” you gasped one night as I was taking you home. Or almost home, stopping short of the forest, cloaking my presence from your mother’s searching eyes at the kitchen window. We’d driven past the same stop a thousand times, but that night, somehow, it was important for you to pause everything.

So I stopped, exactly here, and you leaned back, breathing alcohol and whatever else you were on into the night, then sighed, and for the first time since what felt like forever, let me see you calm. Calm and beautiful.

The past few years, your restlessness had grown into something impatient, something ragged, something I almost didn’t recognize. And your eyes had turned a shaded memory of blue, as if you were hiding somewhere inside yourself. You rarely laughed anymore.

“This is nice,” you whispered, and I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Couldn’t follow your eyes across the moonlit lake or catch whatever peace you found in the water. I did notice how your arms stopped clawing at each other, though.

We sat like that for what felt like forever. For long enough that it still sits inside me while I wait for them to do their thing and get the fuck out. Fuck off.

When you finally turned toward me, when your face broke into a smile, you looked almost sober. It startled me—how beauty returned from the blur.

“Let’s fuck,” you said. Factual. Not even an invitation, just something to do.

“I didn’t shoot up tonight.”

You brushed your hair out of your eyes, but didn’t quite meet mine. “And that’s not why. I promise.”

And who was I to object?

I’d known you for five years by then, having graduated from high school together three years earlier. Rumor had it you’d fucked half the class of 2015, the kind of rumor that just sticks to a girl with your looks and fire.

Three guys, you later told me. And a girl. Just enough to give you that reputation. A name.

And still—still—you always called me when it was time to go home.

The nights you didn’t call were the hurtful ones, because they meant you didn’t come back, but burned. And burned someplace else. The nights when you didn’t say fuck off to a stranger, but let your blood run wild, and the score just felt too tempting.

I never slept much those nights.

I had never dared tell you I loved you, and you had never cared to let me know.

But when you phoned—

It was always the same. Same breath. Same pause. Same exact word.

Please?

The radio never changes the songs. Same playlist, same chords, the same words, looping through the speakers. Over the years, they became yours. And through you—mine. Not because we’d stopped here before, but because I always drove you home. Or nowhere in particular, while you passed out or sobered up, or both. Or when I took you to my place because you never sobered. And I watched over you until you woke, told me to fuck off, and left.

Somehow, that was enough. As if hearing those same songs brought you closer to the place you’d been chasing all along.

And when we did pause in our spot, it was as if you decided.

And the closer you came to sobriety, the more beautiful you became.

The sunset is almost gone, drowned in the lake or behind the ever-stretching forest that lies beyond it. The evergreen of greens, the oranges, the yellows, the reds—all turning the same black against the red sky.

The intruder rocks mockingly against your memory, a handprint against fogged-up glass. I can’t unsee it or turn my eyes. They don’t care about my presence; they only care about the night unfolding.

“Let’s fuck,” you said.

You didn’t wait for an answer, didn’t expect one. You just smiled as you pulled your sweater over your head.

“Why?” you asked then. “Why haven’t you fucked me before? You’ve had plenty of opportunity.”

I don’t know whether what escaped you was a sigh or something else.

“Not even then? Half-naked and useless on your couch?”

I wanted to answer, but I couldn’t—not while my eyes traced the bruises blooming like shadows along your arms. Old ones. New ones. Fading fingerprints and fresh blood beneath the skin. I saw the needle points, the ghost of scabs picked too many times, and the half-healed welt near your elbow you always scratched when you were restless.

You wore a black tank top.

To look is free. To touch is to burn.

“You’re gorgeous,” I whispered. Because.

You stopped then. Just for a moment. Your smile faded slightly.

“Fuck off,” you said.

But you didn’t stop. You unbuttoned your jeans, pulled free of them as if the night only belonged to two bodies separated by everything life held, yet connected through the dissonance of who we were, and once had been.

But your eyes—your eyes didn’t find mine again until you straddled me.

“Please don’t ruin this by saying something,” you whispered, pulling your top over your head and kissing me.

There’s a scar on your left breast that you never tried to explain. It stretches from your collarbone halfway down the curve that swells into perfection.

Perfection. As if you’d stolen a fantasy from inside my head.

Your right breast matched that perfection—almost imperfect without the scar.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, and I still wonder why.

Your lips on mine, as your hands fought a battle with my zipper—a battle I was determined to lose—burned hot and tasted of desperation. Desperation for something else.

But I never spoke. Never uttered a word.

Your hips. Anchor points for my hands, still searching for meaning. You ground yourself against my now-throbbing cock, chasing a high not yet found, holding me in a kiss that no longer felt like mine. Urging me to cum before anything even began.

You broke free, apologized again, and I was afraid you’d coil back and tell me to take you home.

“Sarah…” I whispered.

“Hush,” you begged, stretching to reach your purse.

It felt as if something inside you gave way with that stretch. As if the only thing that could fill the gap was silence. Silence and patience. And something that looked like—

“Here,” you whispered, handing me the small, foil-covered packet. “It’s not for me…”

You whispered it into the backseat, never meeting my eyes.

“…but for you.”

And in that moment, something settled behind your silence—something closer to shame than surrender. A quiet that asked for nothing in return. A quiet that braced for being left.

My gaze tries to shift away from the oversized Toyota pickup in our spot. Black. I wish for tinted windows. The handprints are on the back window of the cab now, not the side. But I’m frozen, making their present my memory.

I catch them — their sensation — as I watch the prints slide down, leaving streaks of want, hunger, and release. The silhouette of the car holds steady against the last shimmer of light clinging to the horizon.

There are no streetlights on our stretch, no artificial glow to carve the dark. And now, the dark threatens to swallow everything — them, your memory, my longing.

“Leave,” I whisper.

Fuck off, you answer, and I stay still, watching the dark take them, their shapes dissolving with the fading light.

And finally, they give in. The truck startles our night with a roar, headlights and light bar tearing through the dark with vulgar intrusion, slicing fractures through my already bleeding heart. I watch them carve through the valley, shadows and light cutting across the forest that still holds your house — until finally, they’re gone.

All gone.

“…but for you,” you said.

I fumbled with the wrapper, the same way I fumbled with you. To me, you were untouched beneath your scars, beneath the bruises that I only ever thought touched your skin.

And once I’d fumbled through, once you saw I was about to speak, you kissed me again, sinking down against me.

You only flicked your panties to the side, guiding me in the same motion like you knew how—and when you sank down and took me, the world stilled.

Not just me, my breath caught against your skin, but you—my precious you—who met my eyes again, both in question and confirmation.

Is this okay?
This feels okay.

I wanted to tell you. To speak. To let you know it was anything but okay. That my world had stilled around you. That the night consumed me in a way that still aches inside me. That I never saw you broken or lost.

Only perfectly you.

And it was as if something stilled in you, too. You stopped chasing, and your body stopped taking, and became one with mine. Slower, yes, but deeper, like maybe you needed this more than I?

And then you dared kiss me differently. Softer, somehow. As if my hands on your breasts meant something to you. Whether it was because they were mine, or because of the way I touched you—I still don’t know.

“You can’t save me,” you cried, thighs clenching, breath failing. “Why didn’t we fuck before? Oh shit—fffuck—you’re going to make me cum.”

And that night, that felt like salvation.

When your head fell back, when you ground yourself into me, when I kissed your breasts in the pale moonlight—
for once, you stopped pretending.

And when you found peace, found breath and comfort, you grinned. At first, before your upper lip curled, and something else filled your eyes.

“You didn’t cum with me.”

Then you fucked me—no search for meaning, no thought of intimacy or belonging. You fucked me.

Rode me hard and furious, sledgehammering your cunt onto me as if it was I who needed intervention.

And when I broke, you didn’t halt; you brought yourself over the edge so hard it still echoes in my blood.

When everything stilled, you slid back into your seat. You didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare. You dressed.

“Take me home,” you said, but I didn’t want to start the car. I just stared. At you, the water, the night.

“Take me home,” you repeated.

What if this were our only night? How—

I started the car and found the stretch of road. I still wish silence hadn’t been our only companion. Through the hairpin bend and across the narrow bridge gapping the stream and lake. Through the thicket of your forest, before stalling safe from your mother’s window.

I watched you exit, but couldn’t stay quiet any longer.

“Sarah,” I said.

You looked up the road, toward the gravel path leading to your house, then bent down to meet my eyes.

“Yea?”

It sounded like a sigh.

“What was this?”

You pulled at your sweater, scratched the inside of your elbows as if searching for answers there. You shrugged, then looked up the road again.

“Fuck off,” you told me, then shut the door and made for the path hidden in the bushes.

But something did change that night. You started calling me instead of scoring, and not with a please, but something more desperate. As if you felt haunted, or threatened. Or both. You reached for me when the noise got too loud. Fucked me like I was your fix, and I let you. Again and again, because I didn’t know how to stop you. Didn’t want to.

You never called me yours; your scratches were always fresh, but your bruises faded. We’d sit on the bench—now tucked away for the winter—that overlooks the lake, and I asked you if you wanted a beer.

“I want to get drunk,” you answered then. “I want to shoot up, get high enough to still the noise. I want to claw my own skin off and become new! I want to stop!”

A final scream: “I want it to stop!”

I think your eyes swelled.

“But—”

Then your gaze shifted toward the lake. Your eyes awaiting the sunset. Longing for it.

“But what, Sarah?”

You didn’t answer. Not right away. You just sat there, breathing. Stunning. Calm.

“Make love to me?” your voice cracked in a whisper.

I remember the sound of my throat closing, trying to swallow what I only remember as a swell.

“Make love to you?”

I had never seen you cry until that evening. I had seen you laugh. I had seen you scream at the world. I had seen you burn, high and wasted—those nights I never took you home but let you sleep on my couch, wishing you’d stop, knowing you wouldn’t.

But you did, that summer of ours.

“Yes. Don’t lust me. Don’t fuck me. Don’t—”

“No condom?” I asked.

I hadn’t meant to frighten you, to make you coil, but you looked like you meant to ask me to take you home.

I regretted asking, but not my intention.

“Sarah,” I said, and you relaxed enough to wait for the rest. “Not here. If we do this, we go back to my place, okay? And you stay the night?”

And still, as we walked to my car, you grabbed my hand.

“You need to protect yourself,” you whispered, and for once, I couldn’t tell if you meant from the world or from you.

We let the radio find the songs, and we let the songs be dialogue. But this time, you sought my hand while we let the road take us back to my small house on the other side of the lake.

I stopped and let the car die as I gazed back over the water, searching for the light flickering on the other side, through the trees.

“I could always see your house, you know?”

“I was rarely there,” you whispered.

“But your light was on when you were.”

I wanted to kiss you when you looked at me, but I still wasn’t sure you’d let me—so I let go of your hand and told you to wait. And you waited. Waited patiently for me to come around the car and open your door. Waited patiently for my hand, and in return, you offered me a whispered thank you.

You wanted to catch the last of the sun casting light across the lake, until all that was left was the flicker of light between the trees.

“Is that really my house?” you asked.

“Yes,” I whispered. “And your light’s off tonight.”

Your smile as you turned—that’s how I remember you. Not pretending, not snarling, not even sure of what to do next.

“Is this when you make love to me?” you asked, reaching for my hand.

“Now and forever,” I said, leading you inside.

You had never been shy of your body, but that night you blushed at the side of my bed. Even more so when I took your hands in mine and told you to turn, so I could brush your hair from your neck and breathe a kiss into the curve.

When I reached for the hem of your sweater, you took my hands and held them in yours, as if hesitation’s breath was still catching up with you.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “Tell me to stop. Anytime.”

“No,” you said. “Just…don’t say you love me.”

Your hands clenched a little tighter, and I think you stopped breathing.

“Everyone who did…”
“Gone.”

I kissed again, the same spot.

“I love you, Sarah.”

I didn’t mean to make you cry, but I did mean for you to let go of my hands. I think you expected me to vanish, so I made sure to be gentle, ensuring you felt safe — even as your pale back rested against my chest. Even as I traced your spine, uncovering yet another scar you’d kept hidden. Even as my fingers found the clasp of your bra.

“You okay?” I whispered, pressing another kiss into that same soft spot, your head tilting slightly to the side now.

Your hair had once been blonde, but this summer you’d chosen strawberries and peach for your palette, and that night, you smelled of a different shampoo.

“No,” you answered. “But…don’t stop.”

When I undid the clasp, you exhaled. Not just breath, but years of pent-up anxiety. Self-loathing, maybe. A weight lifted that allowed you to feel, if only for a moment, as beautiful as I’d always seen you. And still your instinct was to cover yourself, arms reflexing to hide your beauty — but you stilled yourself.

“Six weeks,” you whispered, so fragile only the night caught it. The night, and me.

“I’m proud of you.”

I think my pride stalled you; you never noticed my hands grazing your ever-flat stomach, or finding the first button of your pants.

“Proud?” you begged. “For being sober?”

“No. Not that. For letting me love you at last.”

The button gave way, and you curled your hand behind my neck, as if wanting to pull me closer to your skin. So I kissed you again. The same spot.

I wanted that to be the silence that carried us. But when the next button gave, another breath escaped you, an echo, almost, of a whimper you might have carried once. Something soft, finally passing between your lips.

The third made you press against me, no longer caring to hide my throbbing arousal for you.

With the fourth, your jeans gave in, as if your bones were too fragile to hold them. As if the weight you’d gained those last few weeks had never been meant to be enough.

I let you settle into your skin. Pressed another kiss into you. Let you decide whether to step out of your jeans, or just stay there like that. You lifted your leg, slowly, then put it down again.

“I’m thirty pounds light,” you said. “I only realized after… you know. You can count my ribs.”

My hands, which had been resting where your thighs curved toward each other — catching the pulse you hadn’t yet noticed — drifted slowly upward along your sides, feeling the slow rise of ribs beneath my fingers.

“I never noticed,” I said, cupping your breasts.

I think that’s when you decided. To step out of the jeans. To turn around, leaving my hands with no other purpose than to hold you against me.

“Kiss me,” you asked.

“I will,” I answered. “But don’t kiss me back. Not yet.”

Your eyes had never seemed so blue.

Your lips had found their youth again since that first time — no longer cracked and harsh, but full and tender. I pressed a kiss to your upper lip, and your reflex was to meet me.

“Hush,” I whispered. “Not yet.”

“I have to do something,” you giggled.

“No,” I said. “You just need to stay perfect.”

When I kissed you again, you let me. You let your arms fall to your sides and let me hold you like you deserved. And when I stopped, you didn’t open your eyes. Instead, your hands fumbled, as if my zipper had grown foreign to you in the past hour.

“No,” I told you, fighting my own need for your hands.

“No?” you asked, eyes opened blue again. “I’m practically naked and you’re—”

“Do you want me to get you naked?”

Your breath hitched, and you looked at me like I’d spoken something foreign.

“What?”

I sat on my bed then and pulled you closer, my lips landing on the swell beneath your belly button. You always wore thongs, but this one was red. My fingers asked permission, tracing the line where it sat on your hips, planting small kisses where my thumbs drew the fabric down.

When my lips traced the line below your stomach, you couldn’t just accept me anymore. Your hands found the back of my head, and I’m not sure whether you pulled or pushed.

“Fuck…”

It escaped you more like breath than speech.

And now, it escapes me like a prayer for this night to end. I start the car, only now registering how cold it has gotten. How impossibly dark. How the rain had started, and the wind had woken again. How impossibly late I’m running. I don’t want to, yet I don’t want not to, so I put the car in drive and head toward the hairpin. The bridge. The edge of your forest.

And still, I refuse to not stop short of your gravel driveway. To stop where we always stopped. To let the radio do the talking.

“Lie on the bed,” I told you, but you didn’t know how to. “Try to be comfortable.”

As I undressed, I watched you twirl, twist, trying to feel natural within yourself. When I lay beside you, your instinct was to reach for me, to grab my cock—aching with want and your touch, to return to how we had been up until that night—but I told you wait.

“I can’t even touch you?” you asked.

I didn’t answer then. I just looked at you until you fell back against the covers, strawberry spilled across a pillow that had secretly ached for you since I moved in right after high school. From my bedroom window, there’s a lake and a flickering light between the trees. I’d driven by the small cottage many times over the years, but once we graduated, I knew this was where I was supposed to live. To stay connected when everyone drifted their separate ways.

“No,” I finally told you, tracing your ribs with my finger. “You’ve gained weight, Sarah. You feel softer against me than you did earlier this summer.”

Your instinct was to reach for me again, your eyes swelling, pleading, “Yea?”

But you resisted the urge and let my fingers find you just as you were. Your collarbone still stood sharp beneath my fingers, your neck slender, offered without fear. The line of your jaw—sharper now, a little crueler than it had been in high school. But your smile? Just the same. As if the past few years had refused to let it forget its shape. Your lips opened softly against my thumb, and I decided to kiss you again, because you whimpered so softly.

And in that kiss, you let me trace down again, until I found the swell of your breast, your nipple poking sharp and stubbornly against my palm. And since I touched it, I had to kiss it. I think you made it a rule.

And your body pressed against my lips, your breath shifting—from hesitant to warm, from shallow to deep. But I had already touched the other one, the one with the scar, and it, too, begged for my lips.

I traced the scar with the elbow of my thumb and caught you between wanting to recoil and wanting to confess.

“Only if you’re ready,” I assured.

Your hand found the back of my head again, as if making sure I’d not leave. And against my lips, I felt your long, deep breath.

“I was gone the summer after high school. You remember, right?”

I remembered, but assured you through my kiss, through the stubborn swell of you.

“It was a bad summer. Fun was replaced by ugliness, and ugliness took root. You know what an abscess is?”

You didn’t wait for an answer, just made sure my touches didn’t stop, that my lips stayed loving.

“I nearly died that night, under a bridge somewhere in the city. I should have. They discovered the abscess when they inserted the catheter for detox.”

I traced your ribs again, downward this time, until I found the sharp bone at your hip.

“An abscess is the body rejecting what you’ve done to it. Then it rejected the care too—as if I didn’t deserve it.”

You hesitated. I felt it in how your breath fought against the tears.

“Everything in me is infected.”

And then you stalled. Maybe because I’d stopped kissing, maybe because my eyes were searching for yours. Maybe because my fingers were circling that pointed bone at your hip.

“Not factual. Medicine. But…zombified. Something I don’t want to infect you with.”

“You came back,” I whispered, allowing my thumb to seek the swell caught where your thighs met. The softness made no sense and felt impossible against your words.

“Your lips forgot to follow,” you whispered. “But don’t kiss me there.”

And still, your thighs gave way to my touch. When my lips followed, you refused the urge to deny me. My fingers found you—intoxicatingly warm, trembling beneath my hand—and when my thumb brushed your nub, I think I touched your core, but wasn’t certain until I kissed the soft fold where your thigh met your hip, and you shivered like the memory was older than both of us. Or perhaps just new.

“You can’t—” you said, but when my lips closed around your swelling desire, you let your body remember it was yours again.

And that recognition consumed me. The way your legs curled around my neck, the way you sought my tongue, the way your nails dug into my back — you were letting go of your ghosts.

“Fuck,” you whimpered. “I’m already cumming.”

And I let you.

I had expected you to do what you always did: take over. Fuck me. My face, my tongue. Take what always seemed to drive you.

But not this time. You just let your body open, let the sensation fill you, then flow through you before releasing — not all at once, but in slow spasms, then only slight tremors.

Your legs loosened their grip and fell to the sheets, your nails begged forgiveness for the streaks on my back, and your breath returned to beauty.

I lay beside you, watching you return.

“I need you inside me,” you whispered.

“No condom?” I asked again.

You coiled a little.

“Not yet,” you said, regret clouding your eyes.

“Then we wait.”

You turned toward me. “Really?”

“Really.”

Really happened sooner than I’d dared hope for. This was late July. The rest of the season was ours, and you gained almost twenty pounds. We swam in the lake. We laughed in the grass.

We made love.

September softened you further. I found you reading in the chair by the window. You wanted to cuddle and watch The Lake House. You discussed university and began applying for jobs, even though your reputation still never landed you an interview. When I found you scratching your elbow, you giggled, mosquito. You laughed a lot.

Your stroke hit in October. The doctors tried to explain it—to your mother, to me—how the years of abuse had left a scar, somewhere deep inside. Something so vicious, so cruel, I sometimes wonder if I should’ve let you crash and burn out instead.

I was the one who found you on our—our—bathroom floor. Gone but not gone.

Three years ago today. I still have to gather strength for the final stretch up your driveway.

Your mother greets me at the door and only shrugs at my usual question: How is she?

She wears different scars than you, Sarah. Scars formed at 2 am, clutching a cup of cold tea, staring into the dark of a tree line, hoping you’ll stumble through the pathway. Scars formed from preparing meals no one ate—or worse, meals your body rejected at your worst.

Then she hugs me, but today, she doesn’t cry.

“Non-responsive,” Dr. Abrahamsen said. Words like low cognition. Limited awareness. But awareness.

The first year, I saw no recognition behind your eyes. Just the endless repetition of white hospital walls, white hospital sheets. The tubes, the wires, the endless hum of the machines hooked up to you. But now, I think the safety of your own room, your mother’s care, and the repetition of my voice have made you aware. The last words that escaped your lips were the ones you left me with that morning when I left for work, an echo of mine.

I love you.

Today, I imagine a smile forcing its way onto your lips, and as I kiss your forehead, I feel the same longing I’ve carried for a thousand and ninety-five days. Last year was a leap year — a thousand and ninety-six.

I turn the radio on, it’s fixed to our channel. The same chords, the same words. The same songs. I make sure your light is on for when I leave, so I don’t have to. So I can watch you from my bedroom window.

When I take your hand, I instinctively search for a pulse, a squeeze — anything to tell me you’re still here. I’ve done it so many times,  tricked myself into feeling something.

Despite the feeding tube, I don’t need to trace your ribs to count them, but I still do. Even the scar. Especially the scar. As if mapping your pain with my fingertips can take it from you. As if memorizing the outline of what’s left can keep you from fading. As if touching a memory we shared breathes life into your eyes again. As if—

Anything, Sarah.

My October isn’t a festive celebration. I live my own Halloween story, with no høsttakkefest to cherish. All I have are the leaves and the rain, the wind hammering drops against your window. And still, it’s nothing compared to the storm raging inside me.

“I’m still here, Sarah,” I whisper through my tears. “And I love you.”

I stall.

Because against that storm, I swear. I swear you squeezed.

I swear I hear it.

The two most beautiful words I’ve ever heard.

Fuck off.