I woke up to the smell of bacon — crispy and smoky — and something sweet that made my mouth water, cinnamon melting into warm toast. It wrapped around me like a blanket. For a dizzy second I thought I was still dreaming.
I opened my eyes to sunlight slipping through the blinds. Clay stood at the foot of the bed, barefoot, hair sticking up like he’d been fighting it with a pillow, holding a tray with both hands.
On the tray: two slices of cinnamon toast stacked like golden bricks, a pile of bacon, and my favorite chipped mug. He had that rare smile — the kind that hardly touched his lips but warmed the whole room.
“Happy anniversary,” he said softly, placing the tray on my lap like it was something precious.
I stared at him, at the food, then asked, “You remembered?”
He shrugged like it was nothing, but I felt the air change. It was huge. It was our first year together. For me that one year wasn’t a small thing — it was proof. Proof we’d survived the awkward months, the fights over nothing, the slow careful learning of each other. Proof I wasn’t just a stop on someone else’s road.
Clay wasn’t a grand-gesture kind of man. He’d told me once that his last relationship broke more than his heart. Since then, the word commitment made him quiet. He’d never said, “I love you” — not once. I hadn’t either.
Maybe I was waiting for him to go first. Maybe I was proud, maybe I was afraid. Either way, when he sat on the edge of the bed and watched my face like he was holding his breath, something inside me loosened.
“I made plans,” he said, clearing his throat. “We’re taking a road trip. Just us. Whole weekend. No phones.”
“You planned all this?” I asked, surprise and a warm, silly hope bubbling up.
He nodded. “You’ll love it. I promise.”
With toast still steaming and bacon scent curling in the air, I believed him. Maybe that was the start of everything.
We were on the highway by midmorning, coffee cups warm in their holders, Clay’s favorite playlist humming through the speakers. The sky was wide and blue, like a clean sheet pulled tight. Iowa cornfields rolled by in long green waves. Clay drove with one hand on the wheel and the other tapping the dashboard to an old rock song. Every few miles he glanced over at me with a small smile.
“I’m not telling you where we’re headed,” he said for the third time.
“You’re really sticking to the mystery, huh?” I laughed, leaning back.
“Just wait. You’ll see. Trust me.”
We passed winding rivers, cliffs that looked like book spines, and old barns with paint peeling like sunburnt skin. Clay pointed things out like a kid showing off a new toy. “Look at that barn,” he said. “The way it leans — like it’s thinking about falling but holding on.”
I reached for my phone. “Want a picture?”
“Yeah, yeah. But get the hill behind it, too. That slope — the light is just right.”
I snapped the photo, though the angle felt off in my hands. Then a small field of wildflowers drifted past — purple and yellow patches swaying in the wind.
“That reminds me of my grandma’s garden,” I said. “She had flowers like that near her porch.”
Clay’s face tightened a fraction. Not angry, exactly — just off-balance. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Forget the flowers. Look at the slope. Look at the light.”
I blinked. “Right… okay.”
He turned back to the road and fell quiet. My chest tightened with a small, nagging feeling — like the trip had rules I hadn’t been told about. Still, I reminded myself: he planned this. He showed up. This was his version of love. Maybe it didn’t look like mine, but it was something.
By late afternoon we pulled into a tiny gravel lot near a state park. Tires crunched, trees leaned in at the edges, and the air smelled of pine and damp earth. A soft, steady rush of water whispered from somewhere ahead.
Clay hopped out before I could unbuckle, walking fast, almost impatient. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder. “This is the best part.”
I followed along a shaded trail where sunlight made gold patches on the dirt. Birds chattered and small leaves rustled. Around a bend, the waterfall appeared — not huge, maybe ten feet, but perfect. Water spilled over dark rocks into a shallow pool, mist haloing in the sunlight like breath in a cold room.
Clay stood very still, looking at it like it meant something he hadn’t said.
“I think I’ve been here before,” I said quietly. “When I was little. My parents took us camping. I think this was the place.”
Clay’s warm look evaporated. His eyes went sharp. “You’ve seen it before?” he asked, low.
“Yeah, but—” I started.
He shook his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He started walking back to the car before I could say anything else. His steps were quick and tight.
At the motel that night he dropped our bags and sat on the bed with his back to me. The old room smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and time. I stood, unsure. Had I said something wrong? Was I the one who’d ruined it?
I needed air. I went back to the trail to breathe. That’s when I saw the heart. Carved deep into the bark of an old tree near the woods was a heart with two names inside: Clay + Megan.
My world tilted. Megan. A name he’d promised was in the past. There it was, sharp as a stone in my shoe.
I stood at the window of the motel, arms crossed, staring out at the empty parking lot. The room felt heavy, like dust that hadn’t been moved in years. Clay lay on the bed, hands folded, staring at the ceiling as if it might answer him.
“This wasn’t about me, was it?” I asked, voice small.
He sat up slowly, elbows on his knees. He looked like someone carrying smoke in his chest. “It was supposed to be for us,” he said. “A fresh start.”
“But yeah… I came here once. With her.”
My throat closed. “Do you still love her?” I asked flatly, like I was naming a color.
Clay chewed his lip. He thought, then said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But maybe I miss who I was back then. That version of me felt lighter. Happier.”
Then the truth landed like a hard stone: this trip wasn’t for me. It was for a ghost. For clay’s old life. I felt small and sharp-edged all at once. My hurt was not really at Megan — it was at myself, at how I’d been reduced to a supporting role in my own story.
“I need you here,” I said, the words trembling. “Not back there. Not with her.”
He didn’t look up. The rest of the sentence slipped out before I could stop it: “I love you.”
Clay’s head snapped up. He looked surprised, like I’d thrown him a lifeline he didn’t expect. Tears prickled hot behind my eyes. I grabbed my sweater and walked out the door.
Outside, the air was cool and clean. The sky had softened into a blue that almost looked purple. I hugged my arms to my chest and tried to steady my breath. My chest felt like someone had tied a rope around it and was pulling.
A door slammed behind me, and Clay’s voice cracked the quiet. “Wait!”
He ran across the gravel barefoot, jeans and wrinkled T-shirt, hair a mess, face flushed. He didn’t care who saw. He didn’t stop for shoes. He reached me, grabbed my hand as if by holding on he could keep himself from floating away.
“I was stupid,” he panted. “I thought if I copied the past — if I walked the same path — I could trick myself into moving on. I thought new footsteps would cover the old ones.”
His hand tightened. “But you were right. This isn’t about her. It was never supposed to be. You’re not a replacement. You’re the real thing.”
He swallowed hard. Then, like a drum beating away all my doubts, he said, “I love you, too.”
For a wild second he pulled back and shouted — loud, ridiculous, and full of relief: “I love you!” The sound burst off the motel walls. A window cracked open and someone peered out, rubbing sleep from their eyes. A dog barked. Clay didn’t care. He leaned his forehead to mine and said, softer, “I love you.”
His forehead was warm. Steady. I closed my eyes and let myself feel it — the surprise and the truth and the tiny fierce miracle of it.
We stood in that awkward, ridiculous parking lot, two people who had almost lost each other to a carved heart on a tree. I let my fingers curl around his. I felt the rough skin of his palm, his heartbeat, steady under my thumb.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should’ve told you what I was really doing. I should’ve told you about her. I thought I could fix it on my own.”
I kept my eyes closed for a long breath, then opened them and met his. “You should’ve told me sooner,” I said. “But I came because I want to try. Because I think we can make something real.”
He nodded. “No secrets.”
“No more copying the past to hide from the present,” I added, and he smiled, a small, guilty thing.
We walked back to the car slowly, hands still linked. The playlist in the car picked up in mid-song like nothing in the world could be broken beyond fixing. Clay started the engine and glanced at me.
“I don’t know everything,” he admitted. “I’ll probably stumble. I’ll probably say the wrong thing sometimes. But I want this. I want you.”
I reached over and squeezed his hand. “Then don’t run from it,” I said. “Be here. Be messy. Be you.”
He laughed, a raw, honest sound that chased the last of my fear away. “I can do messy,” he said. “Messy’s part of me.”
On the drive home the sky leaned low and golden. We shared stories about small stupid things — how I burned the first batch of toast I ever made, how he once tried to impress a girl by juggling oranges and ended up chased by a flock of angry geese.
We talked about the waterfall and about the heart carved into the tree. Clay told me about the weekend he’d shared with Megan — not to re-live it but to let it out into the light, and I listened. He told me how he’d wanted to be someone different back then and how coming back made him realize memories don’t erase themselves.
When we pulled into our driveway the house felt the same and also brand new, like a book you thought you knew that opened to a fresh, blank page. Clay turned to me, fingers still threaded through mine, and mouthed, “Thank you.” I leaned over and kissed him, slow and real.
That night we sat on the porch steps with mugs of tea and no phones between us. The world hummed softly. We made no dramatic promises — just small ones: to talk more, to tell the truth, to let the past be a story we could tell each other instead of a secret we kept.
We agreed to bring our own laughter into the quiet spaces, to be brave enough to be honest when the old ghosts slid too close.
Later, before sleep took us, Clay reached for my hand in the dark and said, “I don’t want to be who I was when I was with her. I want to be the man who’s here with you.”
“I want that, too,” I whispered.
He tightened his grip like a promise. “I’ll try every day.”
And for the first time, after all the small and shaky moments that led us here, I believed him. This trip had started as a copy, a stumble into memory, but it ended as something living: messy, imperfect, and ours.
We fell asleep that night not with all questions answered but with a new kind of courage — the quiet confidence that love can be messy, that it can hurt, and that sometimes the only way forward is to hold on, speak up, and keep walking together.