My heart hammered against my ribs, wild and frantic, a trapped thing looking for a way out. The air between us had thickened to something almost visible, shimmering with everything we weren't saying, everything we couldn't. I could feel it pressing against my skin, filling my lungs with something sharp and stinging, harder to breathe by the second.
He wouldn't look at me. Wouldn't so much as flinch.
And God help me, I couldn't take it—the waiting, the burning weight of his silence, the way he stood there like he was made of stone and shame and things I'd never be able to name.
The words tore free before I could stop them, raw and broken at the edges.
"Damn it, Colt, say something," I snapped, my voice breaking apart on the last word, a sharp, splintered thing I couldn't call back.
It echoed through the room, bounced off the old wood and the low ceilings and came back to me sounding smaller, hollower. A ghost of itself.
The fire crackled, spitting a shower of sparks up the stone hearth. Outside, the storm grumbled low and restless, rattling the windowpanes like an impatient hand. And inside—inside it was only us. Only the terrible, endless ache of two people who didn't know how to reach for each other anymore.
"You think it didn't gut me?" I whispered fiercely, the words trembling in the space between us. "You think it didn't feel like drowning, standing there watching you look at her like that? Like she was the only thing in the goddamn world?"
I could hear my own breathing now, too fast, too shallow, matching the hard, stuttering pace of my heart. It felt like I was unraveling thread by thread, and he was just standing there—watching it happen.
At last, he moved.
Slowly, like every inch of him was carrying a war he hadn't chosen. His boots scraped against the old floorboards. His fists twitched once at his sides before he finally, finally turned.
And when he did, it knocked the breath clean out of me.
His face was a map of the night's wreckage—split lip, swelling cheekbone, a smear of blood still drying along his jaw. But it wasn't the bruises that broke me.
It was his eyes.
They weren't angry. They weren't cold.
They were wrecked.
Wrecked in a way I hadn't seen since the night he was thrown by the bull, broken and bleeding. Wrecked in a way that made me want to cross the room and gather him into my arms even as my own heart lay in pieces at my feet.
I hated the way I knew him so well.
How I knew every quiet crack he tried to hide, every splinter he thought no one could see.
The slight hitch in his breathing—too sharp, too shallow—the way his chest stuttered like even air was a battle he wasn't sure he could win tonight.
The bruises hadn't even finished blooming across his skin, and still he stood there like he could bear it all if he just locked his jaw tight enough, willed the world to forget he was made of flesh and blood like the rest of us.
It was killing me.
Watching him.
The house felt too small for it—his grief, my anger, the storm rattling the windows, clawing at the walls. I could feel the weight of it pressing down, heavy and thick, until it hurt just to stand there and breathe.
"Say it," I whispered, my voice sharp and shaking, but louder than the silence swallowing us whole. "Whatever's sitting on your chest, Colt Langmore—just say it. I'm right here. Don't stand there acting like you're the only one who's been hurt tonight."
YOU ARE READING
Firefly Nights
Non-Fiction▍ AN ORIGINAL ╱ western romance There's a kind of wild you can't outrun. Lemon Odell knows this better than anyone-the kind that lives under your skin, that shapes the way you move, the way you fight, the way you break. Born into a bloodline stitch...
