It starts with the smell.

Not a memory. Not a dream. Not a feeling. A scent.

Warm copper. Black soil. Skin turned strange.

You were born with it.

Just like them.

He’s known for a while now. Maybe he always did. Maybe he saw it in your eyes the first time you got quiet around roadkill. Or the day you cried because you didn’t understand why the sight of humans made you so hungry. You’re not so good at hiding anyway — not when the hunger starts curling at the edges of your teeth like it’s been waiting there since before you were born. Maybe it has.

You were only a baby when she died. Maren.

Your mother.

He doesn’t talk about that night much. Sometimes not at all. Other times you hear it in pieces — in the way his voice goes tight when he says her name, or when his hands stop mid-motion like he’s trying to remember something without breaking.

You live on the road. Mostly. Sometimes you stay in towns long enough to make it seem like you could belong. Lee works odd jobs. Picks up shifts where no one asks for a last name. You go to school when you can. Or pretend to. Some places you have a real bed. Other times it’s a mattress in the back of the truck or a motel that smells like mildew and old TV static.

You don’t mind. Not really. As long as he’s there when you wake up.

Lee’s not soft. Not anymore. There’s a kind of hardness to him now — like everything about the world since her death carved something sharp out of the gentle boy he once was. But when it comes to you, he’s different. You’ve seen it in the way he ties your shoes too tight so they won’t fall off. The way he still carries your photo in his wallet even though it’s been crumpled and worn down to almost nothing.

The way he watches you eat.

Not dinner. The other kind.

Lee sits on the truckbed like he’s made of ghosts — jacket with the frayed shoulder, shirt unbuttoned at the throat. His eyes are red, not from crying but from remembering. Her book is cradled in his lap.

He looks at you.

Long and soft.

Like he’s seeing someone else through you. Like he’s terrified you’ll turn out like her. Or worse, like him.

“You feel it again?” he asks, voice low, raspy with all the things he’ll never say out loud.

You nod. You always do.

He doesn’t scold. Doesn’t flinch. Just sighs. Stares down at his callused hands like maybe they hold an answer somewhere in the dirt and blood they’ve touched.

“You were just a baby,” he murmurs, mostly to himself. “Didn’t think it’d hit this early.”

He doesn’t touch you — not because he doesn’t want to, but because he’s scared he won’t be enough to keep you here. Scared that if he holds you the wrong way, he’ll lose what little he has left of her.

You don’t say anything. Just sit beside him. Let your shoulder brush his.

He smells like smoke and sweat and something older than either of you. Something wrong and familiar. Your stomach twists — not from fear, but need.

He notices.

You see it in the way his jaw clenches. The way he sets the book down like it’s suddenly too fragile for this kind of night.

“There’s things I could tell you,” he says. “Things I saw. Things she taught me. But I don’t want that for you.”

You want to ask what she was like. You’ve heard fragments — the way she bit her lip when she was nervous, the way she’d hum under her breath while washing dishes, the way she never wanted to hurt anyone, not really.

But all that’s left is you. And him.

And the hunger.

The one neither of you asked for. The one you’re both trying to outlove, outrun, outlive.

“Can’t change what you are,” he says, gently. “But you can choose who you’re gonna be with it.”

Then he does touch you — fingers rough but warm, brushing your hair back behind your ear like she used to do.

He lets you lean into him. Lets you fall asleep with your head on his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath your cheek. He smells like all the roads he’s walked. Like loss. Like loyalty. Like the quiet kind of love that keeps showing up, even when it doesn’t know how.