ʟɪɢʜᴛ ꜱᴘᴇᴇᴅ | 𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣 𝙟𝙖𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙧

6. 𝙉𝙀𝙒 𝙍𝙊𝙈𝘼𝙉𝘾𝙀

006, 𝙉𝙀𝙒 𝙍𝙊𝙈𝘼𝙉𝘾𝙀

.⋆𐙚 🍒

TRUST WAS NOT SOMETHING THAT CAME EASY TO ME.

It wasn't a conscious decision. It wasn't something I had chosen to withhold. It was built into my bones, stitched between the cracks of every conversation, every choice, every goodbye that had taught me people only stayed until it was convenient not to.

Trust, for me, was a currency. And I'd learned young that most people spent it without ever intending to pay it back.

Maybe that was why the weight in my chest felt so foreign now, sitting here in the passenger seat of a car with a boy I barely knew, watching the city lights disappear behind us in the rearview mirror.

Maybe that was why my hands had been clenched into fists against my thighs for the last ten minutes without me realizing it.

Because no matter how badly I wanted to lie to myself, no matter how much I tried to shove the feeling down into the deepest, dustiest corners of my mind— some small, reckless part of me was already trusting him.

Not with my heart. Not with my secrets.

But with something almost worse.

With my fear.

With my willingness to get in his car, drive into the dark, and let the road swallow me whole.

The realization made my throat tighten, my pulse hammering louder behind my ears. This wasn't just stupid. It was dangerous. And not in the way everyone else assumed.

It wasn't the tattoos or the reckless driving or the way he said things that made your stomach drop before your brain could catch up.

It was the way he made it easy.

The way sitting next to him didn't feel terrifying until I thought about it too hard. The way I wasn't forcing myself to stay in the seat—I was forcing myself not to lean closer.

I pressed my forehead lightly against the window, the glass cool against my burning skin. Outside, the trees blurred into smears of black and silver under the half-moon. We were deep into the outskirts now, far past the places I recognized, where the road felt endless and the night pressed closer against the windows.

My hands loosened slightly in my lap. Not because I was less scared. Because some part of me already knew it didn't matter.

I'd made my choice the second I answered his text.

Maybe even before that.

Maybe the night he touched me in that basement, when his thumb brushed against my lip and everything inside me—every careful, logical, self-protective instinct—cracked under the weight of him.

Maybe that very first time our eyes met.

And even now, hours later, miles away from where it started, I still hadn't stitched myself back together.

The turnoff came without warning.

One second we were flying down the endless black ribbon of highway, the next he was flicking the wheel sharply to the right, tires humming as we veered off onto a narrow, cracked side road swallowed by trees.

My stomach lurched.

The air inside the car shifted, growing heavier, colder, like the night itself had crept in through the seams of the windows.

The road was barely a road at all—just crumbling asphalt overgrown at the edges with weeds, lit only by the car's headlights slicing through the dark. No signs. No streetlights. No life.