Archive of Our Own

When the moon is high, yeah
And the streets are quiet
And the stars are all out
The lights are blinding
Yeah, I'm waiting outside for my shotgun rider

Shane’s television cast a pale blue glow across his living room, the screen cycling through some late-night procedural he'd stopped following twenty minutes ago. His couch creaked beneath him as he shifted, the floor catching the edge of his heel every time he adjusted his weight. His eyes kept drifting to the phone on the cushion beside him, the dark rectangle sitting face-up, its black mirror reflecting the television's flickering light. The time in the corner read 11:47 PM. Not catastrophic, not the kind of hour that meant emergency or catastrophe, but late enough that calling someone meant waking them, meant intruding on whatever quiet they'd carved out for themselves at the end of the day.

Shane dragged his palm across his jaw, the scruff there catching against his calluses. His other hand found the phone, thumb hovering over the glass. He scrolled to her name and his thumb stayed there, suspended above the green call button.

He thought about the last time he'd seen her. The way she'd tilted her head at something Hassani said, that slight angle to the left she always did when she was working through a thought, the curls shifting across her shoulder. The TV droned on, someone was being interrogated, someone else was confessing. Shane pressed the call button.

The line connected with that familiar click, and the ringing started. One ring. The sound was sharp in his quiet apartment, the speaker pressed close to his ear. Two rings. He shifted forward on the couch, elbows finding his knees, the leather groaning beneath him. Three rings and then the line picked up, the audio quality shifting, the ambient hum of a connected call replacing the sterile ring tone.

"Hello?" Bex's voice came through rough, lower than her usual register, the consonants soft around the edges, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who'd been horizontal, eyes closed, breathing slowed, only seconds ago.

Shane straightened. "Hey. Were you sleeping?"

A pause. He heard the rustle of fabric, sheets, maybe a blanket being pushed back. "I'd just dozed off." Her voice was gaining texture as she came awake, the roughness thinning but not gone. "What's going on?"

"I'm sorry." He said it before he could think about whether he meant it. "I shouldn’t have called this late. I can call back tomorrow…"

"Don't." The word cut clean through his retreat. There was a beat, and then her tone shifted, still low but steadier now, more deliberate. "You wouldn't call at this hour if it wasn't important. What do you need?"

Shane exhaled. His free hand found the back of his neck, fingers pressing into the muscle there, working at a knot that had been building for hours. "I need to go for a drive. Clear my head." He paused, and something in his chest tightened before he said the next part. "Could use some company. Your company, specifically."

The silence on the other end lasted maybe two seconds. Three at most. Not long enough for hesitation, long enough for decision.

"Come pick me up." Bex's voice had found its footing now, the sleep still there but layered beneath something alert, something ready. "I'll be downstairs in fifteen minutes."

"Are you sure?" Shane was already standing, the phone wedged between his shoulder and ear as he reached for his keys on the side table. "You can go back to sleep. I don't want to…"

"No." The word was flat, final, delivered without edge but without room for argument either. "I'll see you soon."

The line clicked dead. Shane stood in his living room with the phone against his ear and the dial tone humming through the speaker. The tv was still going, some detective standing over a body now, the blue light washing across the room in slow pulses. He pulled the phone away, looked at the black screen, and shoved it into the pocket of his joggers.

He moved through the apartment grabbing his black hoodie off the back of a chair and pulled it over his head in one motion. He grabbed his tennis shoes by the door, the laces still tied from when he'd kicked them off hours ago, feet sliding in without undoing them. Keys. Phone. Wallet. He was out the door in four minutes.

His truck sat in the parking lot under a sodium lamp that turned everything the color of old brass. Shane unlocked it with the fob, the headlights flashing twice, and climbed in. The cab smelled like the pine air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror and the faint ghost of the Red Vines he'd eaten on the drive home earlier, the empty package still sitting in the cupholder. He turned the engine over, the truck rumbling to life beneath him, the vibration traveling up through the seat and into his spine.

He pulled out of the lot and headed toward Bex's apartment. The drive took ten minutes. He knew the route without thinking, three lefts, a right, straight through the intersection at Maple, past the closed gas station with its flickering canopy light, and into the neighborhood where the brick of her building caught the streetlights and turned them amber. He circled the block once, not because he needed to, but because the extra minute gave him time to unclench his jaw, to loosen the grip he had on the steering wheel, to remind himself that this was just a drive. Just two people in a truck. Nothing he needed to perform for.

At exactly fifteen minutes from the call, he pulled up outside her apartment complex. She was walking down the front steps, ready for him. The gray sweatshirt she wore was soft-looking, the kind that had been washed enough times to lose its stiffness, the collar stretched just enough to show the hollow of her throat. Black leggings disappeared into brown winter boots, and the fuzzy socks peeking out above the boot line were a detail that made something in Shane's chest shift, something small and private that he tucked away before it could settle.

She spotted the truck and stepped off the curb, one hand pulling the sweatshirt's hem down over her hips, the other lifting in a short wave. Shane leaned across the console and pushed the passenger door open. The interior light flooded the cab for a moment, catching her face.

Bex climbed up into the cab in one smooth motion, the kind of practiced hoist that came from riding in high off the ground vehicles daily. She pulled the door shut behind her, and the interior light clicked off, plunging them back into the dim glow of the dashboard.

"Hey," she said. Her voice was different in person, still carrying that sleep-rough undertone, but fuller now, the lower register filling the cab's small space in a way the phone hadn't captured.

"Hey." Shane put the truck in drive. "Thanks for this."

Bex buckled her seatbelt, the click of the metal tongue sharp in the quiet. She settled back against the seat, her head turning toward the window, then back toward him. "You sounded like you needed it."

He glanced at her. "How'd I sound?"

"Like a guy who's been staring at his TV in silence for two hours without hearing it." Her mouth twitched at the corner, not quite a smile, "I know that sound."

There's a great unknowing
It's where we're going
You can feel the heartbeat
Oh, it ain't slowing down
I'm waiting outside for my shotgun rider

Shane pulled away from the curb, the truck's tires humming against the asphalt as they merged onto the empty street. He drove without a destination, the route unfolding in front of him like muscle memory, the truck carrying them past closed storefronts and silent intersections.

Bex didn't ask where they were going. She pulled one knee up onto the seat, her boot leaving a faint mark on the upholstery that Shane wouldn't notice until later, and rested her chin on her knee.

"You want to talk about it?" she asked, her voice low, the question delivered without pressure.

Shane's hands adjusted on the wheel. His thumbs tapped the leather once, twice, a rhythm that didn't match any song. "Not yet."

"Okay." She said it simply, without follow-up, without pushing. She turned her head back toward the window, watching the darkened buildings slide past.

They drove in silence for a while, the kind that didn’t need filling. The truck carried them out of the residential streets and onto the wider roads, the ones that lined the edge of town where the buildings thinned and the spaces between streetlights stretched longer. The engine's low rumble filled the cab, a steady vibration that Shane could feel in the pedals under his feet.

He found himself glancing at her in the moments when the road was straight and empty, his eyes would track right, catching the profile of her face in the dashboard's glow. The slope of her nose, the way her lashes sat against her cheek when she blinked, the subtle movement of her jaw as she worked her bottom lip between her teeth, a thinking habit he'd catalogued months ago and filed in a mental drawer he tried not to open too often.

Bex caught him on the third glance. Her head turned, and those blue eyes, striking even in the dim light, the kind of blue that people wrote songs about and never got right, found his. She didn't say anything. She held his gaze for a beat, two, and then looked back at the road ahead, her chin settling back onto her knee.

Shane's grip on the wheel loosened. His shoulders dropped, the tension in his muscles releasing by degrees, the kind of slow unwinding that happened when the body recognized it was somewhere it didn't need to brace.

Bex shifted beside him, her knee dropping from the seat as she straightened, her boot finding the floor mat. She reached forward and turned the heat up one notch, the vents clicking as the fan adjusted. The warm air pushed through the cab, and she settled deeper into the seat, her shoulder pressing briefly against the center console, close to his arm, but not quite touching.

"Where are we going?" she asked, and there was a lightness to it now, the sleep fully gone from her voice, replaced by something warmer, more present.

Shane looked at the road ahead. The headlights reached into the dark, illuminating a stretch of pavement that curved ahead and disappeared into tree line. He didn't have an answer, he hadn't planned one. The drive was the point, the motion, the direction without destination, the cab of his truck with her in the passenger seat and the road unspooling in front of them like a question he didn't need to answer yet.

"Nowhere," he said. "Nowhere specific."

Bex nodded. She pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands, the gray fabric bunching at her fingertips, and settled back against the seat, "Good."

The truck carried them forward into the dark, the engine steady, the road open, and the silence between them full of something neither one of them was ready to name.

Can we go right now, can we go right now?
Tell me
Remember the lighthouse shooting the lights out?
Come hell or high water it's always gonna end in dreams
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright

Neither of them had spoken in several miles. Shane kept his eyes on the road, though there was little to watch, the occasional reflective mile marker, the distant glow of a farmhouse window set far back from the highway, the pale grass bending along the shoulder. His jaw worked beneath the scruff of his beard, the muscle tightening and releasing in a slow, repetitive clench.

Bex watched him from the corner of her eye. She said nothing. She had learned, years ago, that the space between questions mattered more than the questions themselves.

Shane's throat moved. He swallowed once, twice, and his thumbs went still against the wheel, "Work's been…" He stopped, then started again, "The task force. It's not the same as the pit. The pit was…I knew what I was doing there. I knew the rules. I knew the walls." He exhaled through his nose, a sharp, controlled breath. "Out here, it's all open. Every case is a different city, a different set of faces, and half the time I'm standing in a field somewhere at three in the morning wondering how the hell I got there."

Bex turned her head slightly. She didn't respond, but she knew that feeling of it almost being too much, too often, all too well. Her fingers stayed tucked in her sleeves, her posture unchanged.

"It's not that I can't do the job," Shane continued, his voice low and rough, as if the words had to be dragged across gravel before they could leave his mouth. "I can track. I can find people. That part's…" He lifted one hand off the wheel and let it fall back. "That part's mine. But the pressure of it, the weight of knowing that if I miss something, someone else ends up dead or gone or worse…that part sits on my chest like a cinder block. And I can't put it down. I can't just clock out and leave it at the office, because there is no office. It's just the three of us and whatever trail we’re following, hoping we have a good outcome with whatever's waiting at the end of it."

The truck's engine hummed a low, steady note as the road curved gently to the left. Shane followed it, the truck moving as if it knew the way on its own. A road sign passed on the right, some town, twenty-two miles, but neither of them acknowledged it.

Bex shifted in her seat. She unfolded her leg, planted both boots on the floorboard, and turned to face him more fully. Her head tilted a few degrees to the right, the way it always did when she was processing something carefully, weighing whether to speak or wait. She chose to wait.

Shane glanced at her, just a flicker before his eyes returned to the road. Something in his expression shifted, the tightness around his mouth loosening by a fraction. He adjusted his grip on the wheel.

"There's something else," he said. "Something I haven't…" He pressed his lips together. The truck passed beneath an overpass, and for two seconds the cab went completely dark, the only light the faint glow of the instrument panel. When they emerged, his voice came from a different place, lower and less steady, "Lazarus."

Bex's hands came out of her sleeves. She rested them on her thighs, palms down, fingers spread. She didn't move closer, didn't reach for him, but her attention sharpened in a way he could feel without looking.

"She told me," Shane said. "When she sat me down and told me she's my mother…my biological mother...something shifted in my heart…and I…I didn't know what to do with that. I still don't. She tried to show me compassion before things got even worse…ya know, the whole cooking me dinner, or trying at least…reaching out when she didn’t have to…and I don’t carry any bad feelings over her death…it had to be done…I just…I don’t know…"

The highway stretched on, a set of headlights appeared in the oncoming lane, passing them with a brief wash of white light, and disappeared behind them. Shane tracked it in the rearview mirror until it was gone.
"You grow up your whole life not knowing, right? You build this picture of yourself. Where you come from. Who you are. And then someone walks in and tells you the picture's wrong. That there's a whole other layer underneath it that you never saw. Finding out at fifteen that she was a serial killer, not knowing anything about her until months ago, then losing her all in the same breath when part of me had hoped for a different outcome…" His voice cracked on the last word, just barely, a hairline fracture that he sealed shut immediately by clearing his throat.

Bex's fingers curled slightly against her thighs. She opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked at the road ahead, then back at him. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, stripped of its usual precision.
"You don't have to figure it out tonight."

Shane shook his head. "That's the thing. I'm not trying to figure it out. I'm trying to…I don't know what I'm trying to do." He took one hand off the wheel and dragged it down his face, his palm rough against the stubble. "She was motherly, Bex. After she told me, she was— she'd check on me. She'd do these small things. These quiet, careful things. Like she'd been waiting years to do them and she was afraid I'd pull away if she moved too fast. Things I kept to myself out of fear of judgement."

His hand returned to the wheel. His knuckles whitened.

"And I missed it. I missed so much of it. Because I didn't know what to do with it. I'd stand there while she was being…while she was trying to be my mother, and I'd just freeze. I'd nod and say the right thing and walk away, and then I'd sit in my truck for twenty minutes trying to breathe."

Bex's jaw tightened. She looked down at her hands, then back up at the windshield. The reflection of the dashboard glowed faintly against the glass, superimposed over the dark road ahead. When she spoke, she chose each word carefully, deliberately, knowing that the wrong one could close a door.

"Maybe you didn't miss it," she said. "Maybe you weren't ready for it. There's a difference."

Shane's breathing slowed. He turned the words over in the silence, his eyes fixed on the double yellow line unspooling beneath the truck. The engine's hum filled the gap between them.

"I keep thinking about the things she probably wanted to do," he said. "Before she told me. Before any of this. All those years when she was right there, and I had no idea. She was in the pit. She was…" He let out a breath that fogged the windshield faintly near the vent. "She was right there, and I didn't see her. Not really."

Bex leaned her head back against the seat rest. The pearl at her throat rose and fell with her breathing. She studied the side of his face, the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes moved constantly, scanning the road as if the answer might be standing on the shoulder somewhere.

"Shane," she said. He turned his head just enough to catch her voice from the right angle. "You can't retroactively be someone's son. You can only do it from the moment she told you until..." She stopped, “Until she was gone…”

The words landed in the cab like a stone dropped into still water. Shane's grip on the wheel tensed then eased, one finger at a time, until his hands rested loose against the leather. He nodded once, a small, slow movement that had nothing to do with agreement and everything to do with the weight of something settling into place.

My shotgun rider driving the night away
Hearts on fire, don't care where we go
As long as you're right by my side
My shotgun rider
It's alright

They drove in silence for another mile. The road narrowed slightly, the shoulders pulling in, the trees on either side pressing closer. Bex pulled her sleeves down over her hands again and tucked them against her stomach, her body curling slightly inward in the passenger seat.

"There's more," Shane said. His voice had gone quieter, almost lost beneath the engine's rumble. "Other things I'm…things I'm working through. I'm not ready to talk about them yet."

Bex looked at him. She held his gaze for a moment that lasted longer than it should have, given that he was supposed to be watching the road. Then she nodded, a single dip of her chin, and turned her face toward the passenger window. The dark countryside scrolled past, featureless and vast.

"You'll talk when you're ready," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."

Shane's chest rose with a long, uneven breath. His right hand left the wheel and found the center console, his fingers resting on the edge of it, an inch from where Bex's hand lay curled against her knee.

The highway opened up ahead, the trees falling back to reveal a wide stretch of flatland under a sky dense with stars. The truck's headlights reached farther into the dark, as if the road itself had decided to give them more room. Shane's breathing evened out. His shoulders, which had been climbing toward his ears for the last ten minutes, settled back down.

Bex reached forward and turned the heat down by a single notch. The fan quieted, and the cab filled with a deeper hush, just the tires on asphalt and the engine's low pulse. She settled back into the seat, her head resting against the window, her eyes half-closed.

His fingers stayed where they were on the console, near hers, in that narrow space that meant nothing and everything at once.

Going to the city in a hurricane
And the highway's buzzing, I'm down the left hand lane
Oh, don't you take New York and the Friday lights in vain
Keep your eyes on me

A sign flashed past, white letters catching the high beams for half a second: Valley Overlook — 2 Miles.

Shane glanced at it in the rearview mirror, then shifted his eyes to the road ahead. The truck crested a slow rise, and the landscape opened. The valley below appeared all at once, a vast, dark bowl scattered with the distant pinpricks of farmhouse lights and, above it, a sky so thick with stars it looked like the whole dome had been dragged closer to the earth. No city glow, no haze, just the raw, unfiltered night.

He eased the truck onto the gravel pull-off, the tires crunching to a stop beneath a wooden railing worn silver by weather. Beyond the hood, the valley spread out in every direction, and the sky held still.

Shane sat for a moment, both hands still on the wheel, looking out through the windshield. Then he pulled the key from the ignition, and the dashboard glow died, leaving only starlight.

He opened the door.

The cold hit him immediately, the kind of air that carried the smell of pine sap and dry grass. He stepped down from the cab, his sneakers crunching on gravel, and straightened to his full height. His arms went up over his head, fingers laced, palms turned toward the sky, and he stretched until his shoulders popped a deep, slow release that ran the length of his spine. His hoodie bunched at the collar, then settled as he dropped his arms and rolled his neck.

He walked to the railing and leaned against it, the wood creaking under his weight. The valley lay below him like an overturned bowl of black glass, and above, the stars were so dense they seemed to crowd each other out, white and blue-white and the occasional warm saffron hue, scattered without pattern but not without order, the way scattered things sometimes are.

The passenger door opened behind him.

Bex stepped out, her boots in one hand, and set them on the gravel before pushing her feet into them. She pulled her sweatshirt tighter around herself, tugging the sleeves down over her knuckles, and walked over to where Shane stood. Her breath left her mouth in a thin, visible plume that dissolved within seconds, and she exhaled again, slower this time, watching the vapor curl and vanish. She stopped beside him.

Shane lifted one hand from the railing and pointed toward the northeast, his finger tracing a line above the tree line, "See that…the four bright ones in a row, kind of curving up?" His voice was low, unhurried, the way it got when he wasn't performing anything for anyone. "That's part of Ursa Major. The handle of the Big Dipper."

Bex tilted her head, her eyes following the direction of his finger. She squinted, then nodded slightly. "The one that looks like a question mark lying on its side?"

Shane's mouth pulled to one side. "That's one way to describe it."

"I'm a profiler. Everything looks like a question mark to me."

He huffed a short breath through his nose, not quite a laugh, but close. His hand dropped to the railing again, and he shifted his weight, one boot scuffing the gravel, "My mom, Shannon, showed me that one," he said, “She used to say there are two kinds of people. People who look up and feel small, and people who look up and feel like they're part of something bigger. She said it doesn't matter which one you are, as long as you look."

Bex turned her head to study his profile. The starlight caught the edge of his jaw, the bridge of his nose, the way his eyes moved across the sky like he was reading text written there. She didn't speak. Her fingers, hidden inside the sleeves of the sweatshirt, curled and uncurled against her palms.

"She was a stay at home kind of mom," Shane continued, his gaze still upward. "But when she wasn’t busy running the house, she'd take me outside after dinner, and we'd just…stand there. She'd point at things. Tell me the names. I never remembered half of them." He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, a gesture that pulled his hoodie up slightly at the hem, "But I remembered how it felt. Standing next to someone who wasn't going anywhere."

The wind moved through the scrub behind them, a dry, whispering sound that lasted two seconds and stopped. Bex's breath came out in another visible plume, and this time she watched it rise and disappear before she spoke, "She sounds like she was someone worth knowing."

"She was." Shane said it simply, without qualification, the way someone states a fact about gravity or geography. "She gave so much of herself to everyone without ever asking for anything in return."

Something shifted in Bex's posture. The slight tension in her shoulders, the one she carried like a second skeleton, the one that held her upright through briefings and crime scenes and long nights staring at case files, eased by a fraction. She turned her body toward him, just slightly, so that her shoulder angled in his direction.

Shane pointed again, this time lower and to the south. "That bright one there, the one with the reddish tint? That's Antares. It's a red supergiant. Something like seven hundred times the diameter of the sun." He glanced at her. "I used to fall asleep reading star charts in the field. When you're sitting in a ditch at three in the morning and there's nothing to do but wait, you get familiar with what's overhead."

Bex looked at the star, then at him, then back at the star. Her lips parted, and for a moment it seemed like she might say something analytical, something about spectral classification or apparent magnitude, the kind of detail she'd absorb and catalog and retrieve later during a conversation that had nothing to do with astronomy. But she didn't. She just stood there, her head tilted back, the starlight catching in her eyes and turning them something close to silver.

"I used to do this as a kid," she said after a while. Her voice was quieter than usual, stripped of its usual precision. "Not the constellations. Just…looking up. My dad and I would sit on the porch after he got home from the station, and neither of us would say anything. Just... look."

Shane turned his head toward her. He didn't speak. His eyes moved across her face, the angle of her jaw, the loose curl of blonde hair that had fallen over her collar, the faint red beauty mark above her lip that he catalogued within moments of meeting her that he locked away into a memory he tried not to revisit too often. His throat worked once, and he looked back at the sky.

"That one," he said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges, pointing to a star low on the western horizon, bright and steady, the color of cool cream. "That's the one she showed me first. I don't remember what she called it. I was maybe six. But I remember it was the first time I understood that something could be far away and still…still right there. Still yours to look at."

His hand stayed raised, finger extended, and Bex looked from the star to his hand and back again. The sleeve of his hoodie was pushed up slightly from the gesture, exposing the corded muscle of his forearm, the veins that ran along the inside of his wrist.

She reached out.

Her fingers, cold from the night air, slid across the back of his hand and settled there, not gripping, just resting, her palm against his knuckles, her thumb resting lightly against the ridge of his index finger.

Shane went still. Not the stillness of surprise, not exactly. More like the stillness of someone who's been walking on ice and just heard the first crack. His fingers didn't curl around hers, they stayed where they were, and his breath came in slow and held for a beat too long before it left him in a visible plume that the wind took apart.

Bex didn't look at him. She kept her eyes on the star, her face tilted upward, the breeze pulling a strand of hair across her cheek. Her hand stayed where it was.

Seconds passed then Shane's fingers moved. Slowly, deliberately, they uncurled from the pointing position and turned beneath hers, so that their palms met, his broad, rough-skin, warm from the hoodie lining; hers narrower, cooler, the calluses on her fingertips catching against his. His thumb came to rest against the side of her wrist, where her pulse beat steady and slow.

He exhaled. The sound carried something that wasn't a word.

Bex's mouth curved just slightly, just at one corner, and she shook her head, a barely perceptible motion.

"What?" Shane's voice was barely above the sound of the wind.

"Nothing." She paused. "I just spent forty-five minutes in that truck trying to figure out if I should do that."

A breath left him, short, surprised, almost vocal. His shoulders dropped, and the tension that had been holding his frame together released in a single, visible collapse. His head tipped back, and he looked up at the sky, and the sound that came out of him was quiet and genuine, a low, warm laugh that fogged the air in front of him and dissipated into the night.

Bex's smile broke fully across her face, the kind that showed her teeth and crinkled the skin at the corners of her eyes, and she laughed too, a short, bright sound that seemed too warm for the cold air around them. Her fingers tightened briefly around his, a quick squeeze, and then relaxed again.

"Forty-five minutes," Shane repeated, his voice still carrying the residue of the laugh. "That's a lot of profiling."

"I'm thorough."

"You're something."

They stood there, their hands joined between them at their sides, and the laughter faded into something quieter. The valley spread below them, vast and still, and the stars held their positions in the sky with the patience of things that had been there long before either of them and would be there long after.

Shane's thumb moved once across the inside of Bex's wrist, a slow, absent stroke, the kind of gesture that happens without planning. She didn't pull away. Her breath came out steady and visible, and she leaned until her shoulder pressed against his arm.

The wind picked up for a moment, bending the scrub grass along the hillside, carrying the sharp, clean scent of cold pine and distant rain. Bex shivered once, a quick tremor that ran through her shoulders and disappeared.

Shane noticed. He always noticed.

He looked at her, the way the starlight caught her hair, the way her jaw was set, the way her fingers were still laced through his like they'd always been there, and he turned his body toward the truck, gently tugging her hand.

"Come on," he said. "It's cold."

Bex let herself be led. They walked back to the truck together, their shoes crunching in tandem on the gravel, their hands still linked between them. At the passenger door, she let go, her fingers sliding from his slowly, the contact thinning to fingertips and then nothing, and pulled the door open. She climbed in and settled back against the leather.

Shane walked around to the driver's side. He opened the door, paused for a moment with one hand on the roof of the cab, and looked up once more at the sky then got in, pulling the door shut, and turned the key. The engine caught and the dashboard glowed its faint green. He put the truck in drive and pulled back onto the highway, the gravel giving way to asphalt beneath the tires.

His hand rested on the console between them, palm up, fingers loosely curled.

Bex looked at it then looked at his profile in the green dashboard light, the set of his mouth, the way his eyes moved steadily between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. She put her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, warm and steady.

Shotgun rider driving the night away
Hearts on fire, don't care where we go
As long as you're right by my side
Hold me tighter, it's the world that we're up against
Hearts on fire, never let you go
Always want you by my side
My shotgun rider, hey
Shotgun rider, shotgun rider, red light, green light, go x4
Shotgun rider

Shane's thumb traced an absent arc across Bex's knuckles. A road sign flashed past, green, white and reflective, listing a town name and a distance of fourteen miles. Shane's eyes flicked to it, then back to the road. Another sign followed, gas, food, lodging, next exit. His thumb paused mid-stroke.

"Hey," he said. His voice came out quieter than he intended, shaped by the stillness of the cab. "You hungry?"

Bex turned her head from the passenger window, where dark fields had been blurring past. The question seemed to catch her off guard. Her mouth opened, then closed, and she sat with it for a moment, actually registering, for the first time in what might have been hours, the hollow ache below her ribs.

"Starving, actually," she said, with a small, surprised laugh at herself. "I didn't even notice until you said something."

"There's a place up ahead. Twenty-four-hour diner, if I'm remembering right." He glanced at her. "Worth a stop?"

"Yeah." She nodded, and her fingers tightened briefly around his. "Yeah, let's stop."

He took the exit, the truck slowing onto a ramp that curved through a stand of bare oaks before depositing them onto a frontage road. The diner materialized a quarter mile down, a long, low building with a neon sign buzzing pink and white against the black sky, the words ROSIE'S spelled out in cursive script. A few cars dotted the parking lot, their windshields fogged with the night's chill. Shane pulled into a space near the front and cut the engine, and the silence that replaced the hum felt thicker, more deliberate.

The cold hit again the moment they stepped out. Bex shoved her hands into the pockets of her sweatshirt, her breath leaving a brief ghost in the air before the wind took it. Shane shrugged deeper into his own hoodie and rounded the truck, falling into step beside her as they crossed the lot. He reached for the diner's door and held it open. The warmth from inside rolled over them in a wave that smelled of coffee and bacon grease and something sweet, something like pie.

A waitress with a name tag reading DOLORES looked up from behind the counter, her eyes moving between them with the practiced ease of someone who'd worked the graveyard shift long enough to read a pair of customers in three seconds. She grabbed two laminated menus and gestured toward a booth by the window.

"Sit anywhere, hon."

The booth's vinyl seats were cracked and softened by years of use. Bex slid in first, and Shane took the opposite side, setting the menus between them but not opening his yet. The table was formica, speckled gray and white, with a napkin dispenser, a small caddy of sugar packets and a single-serve bottle of hot sauce. A jukebox in the corner played something low and twangy, just barely audible beneath the clatter of dishes from the kitchen.

Dolores returned with two glasses of water and a coffeepot. "Coffee?"

"Please," Bex said.

"Same," Shane said.

She poured for both of them and set the pot on the counter behind her, tucking the pencil back behind her ear. "You two ready, or you need a minute?"

"Give us a minute," Shane said, and flipped open the menu.

When Dolores returned around ten minutes later, they ordered too much. Bex went first, a patty melt with Swiss, a side of hash browns, and a bowl of tomato soup. Shane ordered a chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, a short stack of pancakes, and a side of sausage links. Dolores raised an eyebrow but wrote it all down without comment, collected the menus, and disappeared toward the kitchen window.

Bex wrapped both hands around her coffee mug, letting the heat seep into her palms. She watched Shane add an unnecessary amount of cream to his coffee, stirring it with the spoon held loosely in his long fingers, and the domesticity of the gesture, the ordinariness of it, here in a nearly empty diner at an hour most people were asleep, settled around them like something familiar.

"You said something, in the truck," she began. She turned her mug a quarter rotation on the formica, the ceramic scraping softly. "Earlier...that there was something else you weren't ready to talk about yet."

Shane's stirring slowed. He set the spoon down and looked at her across the table, his dark blue eyes catching the overhead light. He didn't deflect or redirect. He just sat with it, his jaw working slightly beneath the scruff of his beard.

"I did say that," he said.

"Are you ready now?" She kept her voice even, without pressure, the way she'd learned to phrase things when she needed someone to feel safe enough to crack open. She'd learned it from profiling, but she was using it here for different reasons entirely.

Shane's thumb traced the rim of his mug. He was quiet for a long beat, and she let the silence hold, let the jukebox fill the space between them with its slow, aching melody.

"I think so," he said. "Yeah. I think I'm close."

She nodded. Then she took a breath, held it for a second, and let it out through her nose. "What if I went first?"

His eyes came back to hers. "What do you mean?"

"I mean…I've been holding something back too." She pulled one hand from the mug and pressed it flat against the table, as if steadying herself. "If I share mine first, maybe it'll make yours easier. Take some of the pressure off."

Shane studied her face for a moment. Whatever he saw there, the set of her jaw, the way she held his gaze without wavering, seemed to answer whatever question he was asking himself. He leaned back against the vinyl and gave her a small nod.

"Okay," he said. "Go ahead."

Bex looked down at her hand on the formica. She spread her fingers wider, pressing each fingertip into the cool surface, and when she spoke, her voice came out lower than she'd intended, stripped of its usual steadiness, "I've been doing something for a long time," she said. "Keeping walls up. Between us, I mean. More than the professional thing, the colleague thing…I've been actively keeping anything more than that from happening. On purpose."

She paused. Dolores passed behind the counter carrying a tray of dishes, and the clatter of porcelain gave Bex a moment to find her next words.

"After Oliver…after what he did, what I watched him do…then allowing myself to start to feel something for him again…then losing him again…something broke. Not in a way you can point to on an X-ray. More like a hairline crack in a foundation. You don't see it, but the whole structure shifts. Everything sits a little different after that." She swallowed. "I’ve broken for a long time, Shane. And I didn't know how to let anyone close without feeling like I was handing them the tools to do it again."

Shane was very still across from her. His coffee sat untouched, and his hands had come to rest on either side of his mug, fingers loosely curled, not moving.

"I told myself it wouldn't be fair," she continued. "To you. That it wouldn't be right to bring all of that…the baggage, the damage…and set it down in front of someone and expect them to carry it. So I kept the walls up. I kept things at arm's length. I told myself I was protecting both of us."

She finally looked up at him. The overhead light carved shadows beneath his cheekbones, and his eyes held a stillness that reminded her of the valley they'd just left, wide, open, capable of holding a great deal without complaint.

"But the thing is," she said, and her voice cracked slightly on the word, just enough for him to hear it, "they've come down. The walls. Not all at once…I didn't even notice it happening until recently. But you did that."

His brow shifted. "I didn't…"

"You did." She held up a hand, not to stop him but to steady herself. "Just by being you. By being there. By listening when I needed to talk and not pushing when I didn't. By making me laugh when everything felt like it was falling apart. By checking on me, constantly, Shane, to the point where I started expecting it, started needing it. By having my back on every single case, even when I was wrong, even when I was difficult."

She pulled in a breath that shuddered slightly at the edges. "You pushed me when I needed pushing. You showed up. Every time. And somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to pretend that what I feel about you is just professional. Or just friendship. I stopped being able to pretend the walls were still standing, because they're not. They're gone. And I didn't feel right keeping that from you anymore."

The jukebox clicked over to a new song, something slower, something with a piano. The kitchen rang a bell behind the service window, and Dolores moved to collect a plate, but the sounds seemed to belong to a different room, a different world. The booth had become its own small country, bounded by formica and vinyl and the weight of what Bex had just said.

Shane didn't speak immediately. He looked down at his hands, at the mug between them, and when he looked back up, his eyes were bright, and the muscle in his jaw was working in a way she'd never seen before, not with tension, but with the effort of holding something together.

"You want to know what I've been holding back?" he asked. His voice was rough, lower than usual, the way it got when he was trying to keep it level. "It's the same thing, Bex. It's literally the same thing."

She blinked.

"I made space for you a long time ago," he said. "In here." He pressed his fist lightly against the center of his chest, against the cotton of his hoodie. "Long before you noticed. Long before I even had a name for it. I just…I cleared it out. Made room. And then I waited."

"Waited," she repeated.

"For you to catch up." A breath of a laugh left him, not quite humor, more like release. "Which sounds patient, but I'm telling you, it wasn't. I'm not a patient man. I just knew that if I pushed too hard, I'd lose you. And losing you wasn't an option. So I waited, and I hoped, and I tried to be the kind of person you'd eventually turn around and see."

Bex's throat worked. She pressed her lips together and looked toward the window, where the parking lot lights made halos in the fog on the glass. When she turned back, her eyes were bright, "I see you," she said. "I've been seeing you."

Dolores arrived then with a large round tray, setting down plates with the efficient grace of someone who'd done it ten thousand times. The patty melt was golden and pressed flat, the cheese lapping over the edges of the rye bread. The chicken-fried steak sat beneath a blanket of cream gravy, steam rising. The hash browns were craggy and brown at the edges. The pancakes were thick and pale, waiting for syrup. The tomato soup was the color of old brick, steam flowing steadily from the middle.

Bex ate more than she expected to, pulling pieces of Shane's pancake across the table when he pushed the plate toward her, him finishing the last of her tomato soup with the heel of a piece of toast she'd ordered as an afterthought.

By the time Dolores brought the check, the diner had emptied further. A single trucker sat at the counter nursing coffee, and the jukebox had gone quiet, leaving only the low hum of the refrigerator and the distant clatter of the kitchen being cleaned. Shane left cash on the table, more than the total, enough to make Dolores smile, and held the door open as they stepped back into the cold.

The night had deepened while they were inside, causing the temperature to drop roughly ten degrees more, and their breath came out in thick plumes. Shane's truck sat alone at the far end of the lot, its windshield now fogged. He unlocked it with the key fob, and the headlights flashed once, illuminating the bare oaks at the lot's edge.

Can we go right now?
Can we go downtown?
Tell me
Remember the lighthouse shooting the lights out?
Come hell or high water, it was always gonna end in dreams
Ohhh

The drive to Bex's apartment took them off the highway and onto surface streets, through neighborhoods where porch lights burned and the occasional dog barked from behind a fence. The cab was quiet again, not the tense, loaded silence of earlier, but something settled, something that had found its shape. Shane's hand rested on the console again, and Bex's hand found it without hesitation, her fingers lacing through his as the truck passed beneath streetlights that striped the windshield in gold.

He pulled into the space in front of her building and killed the engine. The dashboard went dark. They sat for a moment in the sudden absence of light and sound, the only illumination coming from the streetlamp outside and the faint glow of a neighbor's window.

"I'll walk you up," Shane said.

They climbed the stairs side by side, their shoes falling into an unconscious rhythm on the worn treads. Bex fished her keys from her sweatshirt pocket and stopped at her door.

She turned the key in the lock but didn't push the door open. She stood with her hand on the knob, her back half-turned to him.

Shane stood close. His hand came up, and his fingers brushed a strand of her hair back from her temple, tucking it behind her ear with a slowness that made her breath catch.

She turned to face him. His hand stayed, his fingertips resting against the curve of her jaw, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone. His blue eyes searched hers, and whatever he was looking for, permission, certainty, the answer to a question he'd been carrying for months, she gave it without speaking. She leaned in, just slightly, and that was enough.

He kissed her. His other hand came up to the side of her neck, his fingers curving against the warmth of her skin, and the kiss was not gentle. It was urgent and searching, the kind of kiss that carries the weight of everything unsaid, everything held back, every moment of wanting that had been packed down and ignored and walled off. Bex's hand found the front of his hoodie and closed around the fabric, pulling him closer, the keys in her other hand clinking against the doorframe as her knuckle brushed it.

The urgency broke like a wave spending itself on a shore, and what followed was slower, softer. His lips moved against hers with a tenderness that undid something she hadn't realized was still knotted inside her. His thumb stroked the line of her jaw, and she let her eyes fall shut and everything fell away until there was nothing but the warmth of his mouth and the steadiness of his hands and the slow, even rhythm of his breathing against her own.

They broke apart by centimeters, his forehead coming to rest against hers, and they stood there, breathing the same air, his hands still framing her face, her fingers still curled in the fabric of his hoodie.

Bex opened her eyes. His face was very close, his eyes still closed. She watched the slow movement of his breathing, the way his lashes lay against his cheeks, and something in her chest expanded until it ached.
She reached past him and pushed her apartment door open. The warm light from inside spilled into the hallway, catching the exposed brick of the far wall, the green velvet of the couch, the soft gleam of the lamp she'd left on that morning in a different lifetime.

"Come inside," she said.

His eyes opened. He looked at her, at the blue of her eyes in the warm light, at the loose curl of blonde hair against her shoulder, at the pearl resting at the hollow of her throat, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a smile that was quiet and certain and entirely his.

He followed her in. The door closed behind them with a soft click, and the lock turned, leaving behind the warmth of the hallway and whatever came next.

Shotgun rider driving the night away
Hearts on fire, don't care where we go
As long you're right by my side
Hold me tighter, it's the world that we're up against
Hearts on fire, never let you go
Always want you by my side
My alibi, my ride or die