▍ 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...
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Blue Hydranga meaning: Regret. Apology. Emotional depth. A storm-split heart still reaching. Fractured love, quietly blooming blue.
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The silence inside the truck wasn't just thick—it was suffocating. It crawled under my skin, pressed into the hollow behind my ribs, wrapped around my throat until every breath felt stolen.
The rain slammed against the windshield in frantic waves, the wipers dragging back and forth in a losing battle, but nothing—nothing—could clear the storm building inside this cab. It was louder than the thunder rolling overhead. Heavier than the rain carving rivers down the glass. It lived in the set of Colt's shoulders, the way his hands gripped the wheel tight enough to snap bone, the way every muscle in his arms locked down like he was holding something back that didn't want to be contained.
He hadn't looked at me once.
Didn't have to.
The hurt was a living thing between us. Breathing. Bleeding. Bigger than both of us put together.
I turned my face to the window, watched the rain fracture into wild veins of silver, each drop splitting and colliding and vanishing into the dark beyond.
It felt like watching my own heart break apart. Tiny fractures. Cracks you couldn't see until they gave way all at once.
My mind wouldn't stop replaying it—the heat of Rhett's breath on my skin, the weight of his hands, the way he looked at me like he already knew all the pieces I was trying to hide. And Colt...
God, Colt.
It wasn't just anger burning off him like steam. It was grief. That hollow, gnawing kind that eats through muscle and bone until there's nothing left but rage and ruin.
The seat creaked under the smallest shift of my body, the leather sticking damp to my skin where my shirt had soaked clean through. Even that sound felt too loud in the cab, like it didn't belong in the ruin we'd built between us tonight.
I could feel Colt breathing.
Not see it—not really—but feel it.
The way the air moved heavier around him, like every inhale was a battle he hadn't agreed to fight. The way the weight of him filled the truck, filled me, made the space between us ache like a pulled stitch.
He was unraveling. And the awful thing was, he wasn't doing it loud. He was doing it quiet.
The way a man who's lost too much already learns to bleed without making a sound.
Colt's jaw was locked so tight I could see the muscle jumping beneath the shadow of his hat, the light from the dashboard slicing harsh lines across his face, carving him into something too sharp to touch.
I opened my mouth once—closed it again.
There wasn't a word in the world that could fit between us right now without splintering on impact.
