You’re parked off a long-forgotten road somewhere in Nebraska. The engine’s off. The night’s still.

It’s been hours since either of you spoke.

The car smells like cheap gas station coffee, dry blood under your fingernails, and the kind of sweat that clings to skin when you’ve run too far and still don’t feel safe. Your knees are pulled up to your chest in the passenger seat. Lee’s in the driver’s side, staring out the windshield like he’s waiting for something to come out of the dark and finally finish the job.

You don’t ask if he’s okay. You don’t ask if you’re okay, either.

His knuckles are scraped. There’s dried blood on the collar of his denim jacket. You both know it wasn’t supposed to go that way tonight. But things rarely go the way they’re supposed to when you live like this — always in motion, always on the edge of some invisible line.

Still, you feel it in your chest — the way his fingers twitch slightly on the steering wheel. Not nervous. Not scared. Just stretched thin.

“I didn’t want you to see that,” he finally says. His voice sounds hoarse, like he hasn’t used it in days.

You don’t respond right away. The silence is heavy, but not cruel.

“Too late,” you say softly, after a while. “I see you.”

Lee turns his head slowly to look at you. There’s something flickering in his eyes — not quite sorrow, not quite regret. Just the deep, aching tiredness of someone who’s always had to carry more than he was meant to.

You reach for his hand — dirt-streaked, rough-edged, still warm. He lets you take it.

“Does it scare you?” he asks. “Who I am?”

You think about it. About the way he held you after that man lunged. About the way his hands shook afterward, not from rage — but from remorse. About how he keeps old cassette tapes in the glove compartment like they’re tiny memories he can’t bear to let go of.

“No,” you whisper. “But it hurts.”

He exhales slowly, leaning his head back against the seat, closing his eyes like your words are both a balm and a knife.

Outside, the world keeps breathing.

Inside, the two of you stay like that — fingers locked, bodies still, eyes closed — trying to remember what it feels like to just be.

And eventually, in the kind of voice you barely catch over the wind, he says:

“I’ll try to be better. If we ever make it to morning.”