Lee wasn’t supposed to be in town that long. He never was. Just passing through. A body in the trunk, half a tank left. One shoulder burned red from the sun that cut across Kansas, Nebraska, some state you forget the name of when you’re tired and starving. He wasn’t even that hungry for food. But the diner caught his eye.

A crooked neon sign. A window smeared with flies. It didn’t promise much, and that’s why he trusted it.

You worked there.

Blue gingham apron. Lip balm smudged. You were wiping down a booth when he came in. Hair half up. Skin glowing in that tragic, fluorescent kind of way. The air conditioning was busted. The place smelled like coffee and grease and something faintly metallic. Like blood under fingernails.

Lee had barely sat down before he knew. You knew too.

You didn’t flinch when your eyes met his. Didn’t look away. You just tilted your head, pen hovering above your pad. “Coffee?”

He said yes. He said it softly.

Something about you already felt like a memory.

You moved with a quiet kind of grace, like someone who had learned how to be invisible in a loud world. Someone who knew what it meant to starve without dying. He watched the tendon in your neck shift as you poured the coffee. He watched your hands. They were clean. Too clean.

The bell over the door rang again. Two truckers. Loud, too loud. You flinched. He saw it. The twitch behind your eyes. Like you were hearing something no one else could.

It took three days for you to speak more than ten words to each other.

By day five, you slipped him an extra biscuit with his eggs and smiled like it was nothing.

By day seven, he followed you out back after your shift. He didn’t say anything, just stood there in the humidity, palms sweating, heart clawing at his ribs. You leaned against the brick wall and lit a cigarette with shaking hands.

“I smelled it on you.”

He nodded.

“Me too. I try not to. But sometimes… I just can’t.”

“Yeah. Same.”

You flicked the ash off the cigarette and looked up at the moon like it had wronged you personally. “Sometimes I think I was born just to be hungry.”

And Lee, for the first time in weeks, didn’t feel so alone.

You didn’t kiss. Not that night. But he didn’t leave.

Not the next day. Or the one after.

There was no romance like this in books. No promises. Just shared cigarettes, stolen glances, and that awful, aching bond between monsters trying to be more than what they are.

He started coming earlier. You started sitting in his booth after close. You both pretended not to hear the missing person reports on the radio.

And at night, when the world stilled, when the streetlights hummed and you curled into the crook of his arm in the back of that rust-bitten truck, he told you things he’d never said aloud. You listened like you had nowhere else to be.

Because maybe you didn’t.

Because maybe love, for people like you, always came bone-deep. Quiet. Like hunger. Like mercy.

And maybe, for once, he wouldn’t have to keep running.

Not alone, at least.