​Skye

I’m good at taking up space. I stay loud, keep moving. Working at a veterinary clinic keeps me busy enough to avoid stillness. Stillness is dangerous, and the quiet lets things catch up to me.

Then a favor for my brother pulls me into the Mojave with his fellow mechanic and my good friend Darren, a quiet former Army medic who sees straight through my nerves.

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We’re supposed to pick up custom-requested paint from a desert artist and head home. Instead, we stumble onto a sketchy shipment falsely tied to Phoenix Cycles, no cell signal, and a situation that spirals fast.

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No matter what the desert throws at us, Darren doesn’t try to fix me or tell me I’m wrong. He just stays, solid and steady. Falling for him means stopping long enough to believe I'm not actually broken, and that realization might be the scariest thing of all.
 

Darren

I’ve spent my life holding broken things together. My love life. My professional life. Bodies. Motorcycles. Other people’s pain. I trust what’s solid, what can be carried, what can be endured without complaint.

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Skye has been my good friend for a while now. Too nervous, too brazenly honest, too easy to care about if I let myself think about him too long. I’ve always told myself it was safer to keep a little distance between us. That's when a routine trip into the Mojave goes wrong.

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The desert strips everything down to survival, and suddenly the things I’ve been avoiding matter less than the man standing beside me.