Runaway

Runaway

“We left with nothing. But it felt like everything.”

We left before sunrise.

No bags. No driver. No goodbye.

Just a full tank of gas and the clothes on our backs.

I didn’t even grab a coat.

I told myself I didn’t need one — that the cold wouldn’t touch me as long as I stayed beside him.

It was a lie.

The coastal town was four hours south — a place my mother used to take me when I was little. Quiet, unremarkable, warm even in winter. The kind of town where strangers were left alone, where no one asked your name, where the sea swallowed every secret you let it.

We booked a room at a nameless inn. Cash only. No questions.

The receptionist handed us one key and didn’t blink when Silas called me “Isla.”

I played along. Smiled softly. “And he’s Eli.”

We didn’t talk about what we were running from.

Or who might already be chasing us.

We just existed. In a room that smelled like old salt and fresh linen.

I stood by the window while Silas stripped the bed of its scratchy floral sheets and replaced them with the clean ones he found folded in the closet.

“Have you done this before?” I asked.

“Once.”

“With who?”

His pause lasted too long.

“No one that matters.”

I didn’t press. I didn’t have to.

There was something about this place — about the way the ocean whispered just outside our window — that made everything heavier and softer all at once.

I peeled off my shoes, sat on the bed cross-legged, and stared at him while he opened the window.

The breeze rolled in. Sea and silence.

He looked at me like I was a painting he couldn’t touch. Like he’d ruin it if he got too close.

“Come here,” I whispered.

He hesitated — just a second — then walked over, slow and deliberate. He stopped right in front of me. I looked up.

“I don’t know who I am when I’m not trying to survive,” I said.

He knelt down in front of me.

“You’re still her,” he murmured. “Just buried under the fire.”

I cupped his jaw, thumb brushing the new scar beneath his cheekbone.

“And who are you?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

He just kissed my palm.

Like he didn’t need a name.

Like he was only ever mine.

We walked to town that night — hand in hand, like something out of another life.

We ate grilled fish from a paper plate, sat by the pier, and didn’t speak until the stars started to show.

“I don’t think I know how to be normal,” I said quietly.

“Good.”

“Why?”

“Because normal people don’t survive this long.”

I smiled. Just a little. Just enough to hurt.

He reached over and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

He nodded.

“Do you ever… wish it had been you instead of her?”

He didn’t flinch.

But I saw something in his eyes crack open.

“No,” he said. “Because then you’d be dead too.”

I looked away. The waves crashed. The pier groaned under our feet.

“I loved her,” I whispered. “I don’t think she’d forgive me for this.”

“For what?”

“For still breathing.”

Silas leaned in slowly — just enough that his forehead pressed against mine.

“I think she’d be proud,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of the way you still fight.”

We slept in the same bed that night.

Clothes on. Lights off. Breath slow.

He didn’t touch me — not until I reached for him first.

Not until I curled into his chest and whispered, “Don’t disappear again.”

“I won’t,” he murmured.

But he didn’t say I promise.

Because men like him don’t promise.

They show up. They burn. They bleed.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky…

They stay.

——

We pretended.

And maybe that was enough — for a time.

Every morning, I woke before the sun touched the window. I watched him sleep beside me, chest rising and falling in a rhythm I’d memorized years ago but never dared hold this close. Silas looked younger in sleep. Less haunted. Almost human.

I told myself that pretending was survival. That holding his hand in the town’s Sunday market, buying oranges and bread like we weren’t fugitives stitched in blood, was just another lie we had to wear like a second skin.

But I liked the lie.

I liked the way his hand curled around mine — firm, grounding — like he wasn’t planning to let go. I liked the way the old woman who sold fresh herbs called him your husband, and the way he didn’t correct her. Just glanced at me and smiled under the brim of his cap, a small, secret kind of smile that no one else ever got to see.

Sometimes, we cooked together in the tiny kitchen. The stove sputtered. The knives were dull. But I swear, nothing ever tasted better than garlic and oil on stale bread when it was made beside him. We’d end up dancing — slowly, with bare feet on cool tiles, the radio humming some old love song we didn’t know the words to.

I leaned into him like I belonged there.

He let me.

And for a few days, the ghosts quieted.

We slept tangled. Spoke softly. Moved like the world outside the walls didn’t exist.
I caught him staring more often than not. Over coffee. While I brushed my hair. When I was reading, pretending not to notice.

He always looked away before I could ask what he saw.

But I knew.

Because I saw it too.

That ache we never named. That maybe, if we’d been anyone else, this could’ve been our life. The grocery lists. The seaside mornings. The quiet touch of two people who’d bled too much to believe they deserved peace — but chose each other anyway.

One night, I caught him humming under his breath while folding laundry.

“You sing now?” I teased.

He looked up. “Only when you’re near.”

God. That did something to me.

I didn’t tell him, but I pressed the shirt he handed me to my chest when he turned around. Just held it there. Because it smelled like him, and that felt like safety. Something I hadn’t had in three years.

But I also knew it couldn’t last.

Nothing unkillable ever stays still.

And he knew it too — even when he kissed me in the kitchen like the world had finally stopped turning.

Even when he whispered, “I should’ve done this the first time you said my name.”

Even when I kissed him back like I didn’t care what morning would take from us.

Because part of us — the wounded, terrified, desperate part — still believed in the idea of normal.

Still believed that if we held tight enough…

Maybe the world would let us stay.

But the knock on the door two nights later proved otherwise.

And in that moment — when his eyes snapped to the handle and his body shifted like muscle memory — I remembered what it felt like to be hunted.

And we weren’t pretending anymore.

We were just running out of time.