“I never saw you coming.” // caleb in either dream verse or the married one
They’re standing in the backyard of a house neither of them remembers buying. The grass is overgrown and the white porch swing creaks slightly in the wind. It’s dusk, that bleeding hour when the sky can’t decide what it wants to be—amber, violet, something in between.
Hayley’s barefoot, a flannel wrapped loosely over a fitted tank, the hem of sleep shorts brushing her thighs like an afterthought. Her hair’s still damp from a shower she doesn’t remember taking. The faint smell of wildflowers clings to her skin, strange and familiar all at once.
Caleb’s presence is unsettling in its ease—he stands like he belongs here, like she does too. But this universe is wrong. She knows it. And yet...
“Yeah... well, neither did I.” Her voice is soft, but the words scrape out—she’s trying not to feel them too deeply.
She doesn’t know his history. Doesn’t know the scars under that calm. But something in his eyes carries the same exhaustion she sees in her own. Same weight of survival. It makes her chest ache.
“I didn’t plan for you either. I didn’t ask for this.”
She crosses her arms, trying to summon distance, but her fingers brush the edge of a ring she doesn’t remember putting on. Hayley wants to run. Wants to question everything. But maybe—just maybe—it’s okay not to understand right now.
“But here you are. And here I am. So what the hell do we do with that?” There’s no bite in her tone now. Just wariness, laced with the kind of hope she’s terrified to name.
@choserage Meme from Here: Accepting
