The sun filters in slow.

It creeps over the dashboard, glints off the cracked windshield, spills into the hollows of your collarbones. It touches Lee’s hair first — soft bronze catching on the curls at his temple — and for a second, he doesn’t move. Just breathes. One hand still loosely threaded through yours.

You blink slowly awake, back aching from the passenger seat. There’s a stiffness in your neck where you’d leaned against the door all night. And then — a weight. Solid and warm and there.

Lee’s jacket is draped over you.

You don’t remember when he did that. Sometime in the middle of the night, maybe — after he fell asleep with his hand in yours and the kind of tired in his bones that no sleep ever fully cures.

He stirs next to you. Eyes still shut, head turned in your direction.

“Hey,” you murmur. Your voice is rough, like it forgot how to be used.

He grumbles something incoherent — a sound that might be “morning” or “don’t go” — before cracking one eye open. He blinks, slow and reluctant.

“You always look at me like that when I wake up?” he asks, voice rasping, amused despite the sleep still thick in him.

You shrug, pulling the jacket tighter. “Only when you’re drooling.”

“I wasn’t drooling.”

“You were definitely drooling.”

He lets out a small breath of a laugh and shifts toward you. The early light makes him look softer, less guarded. He stretches, muscles rolling under his shirt as he exhales — like maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t feel like a monster this morning.

There’s a pause. You both let it linger.

“Dreamt we were back in Minnesota,” he says, eyes half-lidded now, fixed on the way your fingers toy with the zipper of his jacket. “You had a sunburn. I was making pancakes.”

You glance at him, surprised. “You don’t even know how to make pancakes.”

“Yeah, well,” he shrugs, lips curving, “dream-Lee’s got a lot more going on.”

You smile, despite everything. Despite how cold your feet still are, despite the ghosts still trailing the two of you. Despite the reality that you’re parked in a beat-up car on the edge of nowhere.

Right now, he’s next to you. Tired and human and trying.

You rest your head against his shoulder, letting your eyes drift closed again, just for a minute. And before the quiet settles too deeply, you hear him say:

“I could learn, y’know. For you.”

And you believe him.