She walked out of a compound deep in the woods with a bag on her back and a head full of rules that had never once felt like love. She didn’t know it was a cult. She just knew she had to leave. Eli wasn’t supposed to be anything. He was just the guy who found her frozen in a parking lot staring at automatic doors and made the arguably reckless decision to help. (Read description.)
Before I write this I want to say something genuinely — the way you described Y/N’s inner world, the book girl who surrounded herself with love stories because she wasn’t getting it at home, the one who flinches when she makes a mistake, who cries at father-daughter songs — that’s not just a character. That’s someone real. And she deserves a story that holds her carefully. “Someone Who Stays” a story about being found
He came home from war in one piece. Technically. The part of him that knew how to want things, look forward to anything, feel present in his own life that went quiet somewhere overseas and never quite came back. Then a girl walked into a gas station at 2am in the rain and ran directly into him, and for the first time in a long time something in him went still in a way that wasn’t empty. He’s not sure he wants to. But he keeps showing up wherever she is anyway and slowly, without either of them planning it, she becomes the reason he remembers that still being here might actually be something worth working with.
He doesn’t say I love you the way most people do — loudly, on occasions, when it feels required. Marco Ricci says it in the coffee that’s always stocked and the keys that are always on the rack and his shoes on either side of hers every single morning like that’s just where shoes go.
The sky was too bright for a day like that. YN stood at the casket she refused to look at directly, in a black dress that felt too tight, in a world that had the audacity to be warm and sunny and completely, unforgivingly normal.