Chapter 6: Booth of Confessions
The jukebox clicked over to another song, the synth beats tinny and distant. Ryli could still taste vanilla and salt—the ghost of milkshake, the sharp tang of sweat on Cadence’s upper lip. Her own heart was a frantic drum against her ribs, so loud she was sure the old cook scraping the grill could hear it.
Cadence’s eyes were wide, the blue gone dark and depthless. Her lips were kiss-swollen, a startling pink against her pale skin. She hadn’t moved her hand from where it still rested, trembling slightly, on top of Ryli’s.
The vinyl booth creaked as Ryli slowly leaned back, putting a few precious inches of Formica table between them. The air, thick with the smell of old grease and their shared breath, felt charged, dangerous. She fumbled for her cigarettes, an automatic gesture, but stopped with the pack halfway out of her jacket. She couldn’t pollute this. Not now.
“So,” Ryli said, and her voice was rougher than she intended. She cleared her throat. “That happened.”
A faint, disbelieving smile touched Cadence’s mouth. “Yeah. It did.”
They stared at each other. The world outside the diner window was a blur of passing headlights and darkness. Inside, everything was hyper-focused: the chip in Cadence’s nail polish, a faint freckle by her eyebrow Ryli hadn’t noticed before, the rapid flutter of her pulse in her throat.
“I should—” Cadence began, just as Ryli said, “We probably—”
They both stopped. A short, tense laugh escaped Cadence. It was a lovely sound, unpracticed and light.
“You first,” Ryli murmured, her thumb tracing a slow, unconscious circle on the back of Cadence’s hand.
“I should be freaking out,” Cadence admitted, her gaze dropping to their joined hands. “This is… a lot. You’re a lot.”
Ryli’s chest constricted. “I know.”
“But I’m not.” Cadence looked up, meeting her eyes with a startling directness. “Freaking out, I mean. I feel… calm. Which is insane, right?”
Ryli remembered her own words from minutes before, spilled across the sticky table like a confession. The noise just stops. She hadn’t known Cadence felt a version of the same silence. The symmetry of it was terrifying.
A waitress ambled over, her rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum. She had a bored expression, utterly uninterested in the charged atmosphere she was barging into. “You two need anything else? We close in twenty.”
“Just the check,” Ryli said, not looking away from Cadence.
“Separate?” the waitress asked, already pulling out her pad.
“Together,” Ryli said, at the same time Cadence said, “One.”
The waitress shrugged and slapped a stained bill on the table before wandering off.
The momentary interruption was a bucket of cold water. Reality seeped back in. The time on the clock. The drive home. The world waiting outside this cracked vinyl bubble.
“Hunt’s probably sent a search party,” Cadence said softly, withdrawing her hand to twist a strand of blonde hair around her finger. The loss of contact felt physical to Ryli. “And Kamora…”
Ryli’s jaw tightened. The memory of Kamora’s devastated face in her taillights was a fresh bruise. “Kamora’s dealing with it.”
“What does that mean?” Cadence’s voice held no accusation, only a gentle, pressing curiosity.
“It means I had a conversation with her. She stated her case. I heard it.” Ryli chose her words carefully, each one a landmine. “It doesn’t change… this.”
Cadence was quiet for a long moment. “She thinks you’ll hurt me.”
“She’s not wrong.” The admission was ash in Ryli’s mouth. “I have a history. It’s not pretty. I’m not good at… this.” She gestured vaguely between them.
“What is ‘this’?” Cadence asked, her head tilting.
“I don’t know!” Ryli’s whisper was sharp with frustration. She raked a hand through her hair. “Talking. Sitting still. Not fucking it up five minutes in. Normal people stuff. It’s not in my skill set.”
“You’re doing okay so far.” Cadence’s smile was small, tentative. “The talking part. The other part… you’re definitely good at that.”
A reluctant, genuine smirk tugged at Ryli’s lips. It felt strange on her face, unfamiliarly soft. “Noted.”
She pulled a crumpled twenty from her pocket, dropped it on the check, and slid out of the booth. She needed to move. Standing up, the diner seemed smaller, shabbier. She held out a hand. Cadence looked at it, then up at her, before placing her own hand in Ryli’s. Her fingers were cool and delicate.
The walk to the door felt like a procession. The bell jingled too loudly as they stepped out into the cool night. The Charger sat alone under a flickering streetlight, a sleek black animal waiting.
Ryli didn’t let go of her hand. They stopped by the passenger door.
“This is where I’m supposed to take you home,” Ryli said, staring at the car’s dark window. “Be a gentleman. Or whatever.”
“Is that what you want to do?” Cadence asked.
Ryli turned to look at her. In the sodium-yellow light, Cadence looked ethereal, her blonde hair a halo, her features soft. But her eyes were clear and unwavering. She wasn’t being passive. She was asking a real question.
“No,” Ryli said, the truth a simple, solid thing. “I don’t want tonight to end. I’m afraid if I take you home, this… dissolves. Turns into something I dreamed up because I’m fucking tired.”
“Where would we go?”
Ryli shrugged, a helpless gesture. “Nowhere. Everywhere. Just drive.”
A car sped past on the main road, its radio blaring. Cadence flinched, just slightly, at the sudden noise. Ryli watched her gather herself, saw the gentle soul brace against the shout of the world. And then she saw her decision.
“Okay,” Cadence said. “Just drive.”
The relief that flooded Ryli was dizzying. She opened the passenger door. Cadence slipped inside, and the familiar scent of her filled the space once more. Ryli circled the car, her boots crunching on gravel, a wild, hopeful terror beating in time with her steps.
She started the engine, but didn’t pull out immediately. She just sat, both hands on the wheel, listening to the deep purr.
“The quiet,” Cadence said, looking straight ahead through the windshield. “It’s not that the noise stops for me, either. It’s that… it gets quieter. Like you turn the volume down on everything else. I can hear myself think.”
Ryli glanced over. Cadence’s profile was calm, but her hands were folded tightly in her lap.
“What are you thinking right now?” Ryli asked.
Cadence turned her head. A slow, real smile spread across her face, touching her eyes. “That I’m very bad at being terrified of you.”
Ryli put the car in gear. She drove away from the diner, from the town, from the known roads. She pointed the car toward the hills, where the night was black and the curves were tight and the only light came from the moon and her own headlights.
They didn’t talk much. Ryli focused on the road, the physics of the turns, the precise pressure on the gas. It was a meditation. Beside her, Cadence rolled down the window a crack, letting in a rush of cold, pine-scented air. She didn’t ask where they were going. She just existed in the passenger seat, a quiet, steady presence.
After thirty minutes, Ryli pulled off onto a wide, gravel overlook. It was a known spot, a place kids came to drink and hook up, but it was empty tonight. Below, the valley was a carpet of scattered lights, distant and insignificant.
She cut the engine. The silence was immense.
“I meant what I said,” Ryli spoke into the dark. “About being bad at this. I’ll get it wrong. I’ll say something stupid. I’ll probably get scared and pick a fight about something idiotic just to feel in control.”
Cadence unbuckled her seatbelt. The click was loud. “I know.”
“You should probably run.”
“Probably.”
Ryli finally looked at her. “So why aren’t you?”
Cadence met her gaze. In the dim light from the dashboard, her eyes were serious. “Because you’re telling me the truth. And because when you kissed me, it didn’t feel like you were trying to break anything. It felt like you were trying to find something.”
The accuracy of it stole Ryli’s breath. She had no defense against this kind of perception. She was built for deflection, for sarcasm, for chaos. Not for being seen so clearly.
She leaned across the center console. Cadence didn’t move away. Ryli stopped an inch from her lips, her question a whisper. “Can I?”
In answer, Cadence closed the distance.
This kiss was different from the first. It wasn’t a desperate collision. It was slower, a deliberate exploration. Ryli cupped Cadence’s cheek, her thumb stroking the arch of her cheekbone. Cadence’s hands came up to rest on Ryli’s shoulders, her touch light as a breeze.
It was terrifying in its sweetness. Ryli felt herself shaking. She, who had faced down cops and gravity without a flinch, was trembling because a gentle girl was kissing her back with careful, devastating tenderness.
She pulled back, resting her forehead against Cadence’s. Her eyes were closed. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Me either,” Cadence whispered. “We can be bad at it together.”
A sound escaped Ryli—half laugh, half sob. It was a foreign noise, one she didn’t recognize as her own.
They stayed like that for a long time, in the dark car overlooking the sleeping world. No plans were made. No promises were given. But an agreement hung in the air, fragile as the mist beginning to form in the valley below.
Ryli would try. Cadence would stay.
And the quiet between them held, a new kind of noise, loud enough to drown out every warning, every prophecy, every echo of the storm. For now.
The quiet lasted three days.
It was a fragile, new kind of time. Ryli found herself doing things that felt alien. She texted back immediately. She showed up sober. She kept her hands to herself in public, though the urge to touch, to anchor herself in Cadence’s calm, was a constant physical itch. They existed in a bubble of late-night drives, shared snacks from gas stations, and conversations that didn’t scrape against her nerves.
She was trying. The effort was a strange, exhausting muscle she’d never used.
It shattered on a Thursday afternoon in the sunbaked parking lot behind the abandoned cinema. Ryli had just pulled in, spotting Cadence’s little hatchback. A flicker of that unfamiliar warmth bloomed in her chest. Then she saw him.
Jake from her history class was leaning against the driver’s side door of Cadence’s car. He was laughing at something, his body angled toward hers in a way that looked easy, familiar. Cadence was smiling, that soft, genuine smile, and she held a thick textbook out to him.
Ryli’s vision sharpened, the world narrowing to that single point. The engine of the Charger growled as she parked two rows over, the sound unnecessarily aggressive. She killed the ignition and watched.
Jake took the book. His hand brushed Cadence’s. He said something else, his smile widening. Cadence nodded, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
The warm feeling in Ryli’s chest flash-froze, then cracked apart. Something corrosive and familiar flooded in. It wasn’t rational. Jake was a nobody, a pleasant guy who quoted classic rock lyrics. But he represented a world Cadence inhabited—a normal, gentle, unbroken world where people borrowed textbooks and didn’t threaten to wreck themselves as collateral.
A world where Ryli was the unstable element, the temporary fascination.
She got out of the car. The door slammed, the report like a gunshot in the flat space. Two heads swiveled toward her.
Cadence’s smile softened into something brighter, something meant for her. “Hey. You’re early.”
Ryli didn’t return the smile. She walked over, her boots scuffing on the hot asphalt. Her gaze pinned Jake. “What’s up?”
The pleasantness on Jake’s face faltered under her stare. “Oh, hey Ryli. Just returning my psych book. Cadence was my study partner last semester.” He hefted the textbook like evidence.
“Campus is that way,” Ryli said, her voice flat.
A beat of silence. Cadence’s happy expression dissolved into confusion. Jake glanced between them, his sociable mask slipping into unease. “Right. Yeah. I was just leaving. Thanks again, Cadence.” He offered a weak wave and started walking toward his own car, the speed of his retreat obvious.
The moment his car door shut, Cadence turned to her. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Ryli leaned back against the hatchback, crossing her arms. The metal was searing through her t-shirt but she welcomed the burn.
“That. You were…” Cadence searched for the word, her brows knitted. “You were really rude. For no reason.”
“He was in your space.” It sounded childish even as she said it. She couldn’t stop.
“He was returning a book! We were talking for two minutes.” Cadence’s voice was still quiet, but a thread of steel Ryli had only heard once before was in it. “Why are you acting like this?”
“Acting like what?” Ryli pushed off the car, taking a step closer. The need for a fight, a loud, clarifying explosion, was a drumbeat in her temples. Kamora’s voice whispered in her memory: You’ll pick a fight. You’ll cheat to make it simple. “Like I don’t want some guy all over you?”
“All over me?” Cadence’s laugh was short, disbelieving. “He wasn’t on me. He’s a friend. He’s got a girlfriend, for god’s sake.”
The information should have deflated it. It didn’t. It just made her jealousy look stupider, which fed the anger. “It didn’t look like just friends.”
“So what?” Cadence’s gentle face hardened. The transformation was startling. “What are you saying? I can’t talk to people now?”
“I’m saying I know guys like him. They see someone sweet and they think ‘easy target.’” The words were ugly, chosen to wound. She saw them land, saw Cadence flinch.
“Easy target,” Cadence repeated, her voice hollow. She shook her head slowly, as if clearing water from her ears. “Is that what you think I am? Is that what this is? You see something sweet and think ‘easy target’ until you get bored?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s exactly what you meant.” The steel was fully formed now. Cadence took a step forward, her blue eyes blazing. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to show up and be… different, and make me feel like maybe I’m not insane for letting you in, and then turn into this… this possessive jerk because you saw me smile at someone else. You don’t own me.”
“I never said I did!”
“You’re acting like it!” Cadence’s voice rose, finally breaking from its usual whisper. It echoed off the cinema walls. “You’re looking for a reason to blow this up. Kamora told me you would. I didn’t want to believe her.”
The mention of Kamora was gasoline. “Oh, you two have little chats about me? Plotting my inevitable fuck-up?”
“We don’t have to plot it, Ryli! You’re executing it all by yourself, right on schedule!” Cadence was breathing hard, a flush high on her cheeks. “Is this the part where you get scared of the quiet? So you have to make it loud again?”
It was a direct, brutal echo of her own fears spoken aloud. The accuracy was a sucker punch. Ryli had nothing. No clever retort, no deflection. Just the hot, shameful truth writhing in her gut.
Her silence was confirmation.
Cadence’s anger seemed to dissolve into something worse: disappointment. She looked at Ryli like she was a complicated equation that had just resolved into a very simple, very sad answer.
“I’m not one of your stunts,” Cadence said, her voice dropping back to a near-whisper. It carried more weight than any shout. “I’m not something for you to conquer and walk away from. And I’m not someone you get to cage because you’re afraid of what happens when I’m out in the world.”
She turned and yanked open her car door.
The finality of the motion sparked a panic in Ryli that overrode the jealousy, the anger, the need to fight. “Cadence, wait.”
Cadence paused, one foot in the car. She didn’t look back.
“I’m…” The apology caught in Ryli’s throat, rusty and disused. “I saw him and I just… I’m not good at this.”
“I know,” Cadence said softly, still facing the interior of her car. “But ‘not good at this’ isn’t a free pass to be cruel. My heart isn’t a practice range for you to figure your shit out on.”
She got in. The door closed with a soft, definitive click. The engine started, a polite, modest sound that was somehow more condemning than a scream.
Ryli stood frozen in the empty space as the hatchback pulled away. The sun beat down on her, but she felt cold. The corrosive feeling was gone, leaving only a hollow, aching clarity. Cadence had seen the storm rising in her and hadn’t cowered. She’d named it. And then she’d driven away.
Kamora was right. She’d picked a fight. She’d said something cruel to make it simple.
And instead of breaking, Cadence had just… reflected it all back to her, perfectly intact, and shown her exactly what she was.
Ryli got back into the Charger. The inside was an oven. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles ached. She had nowhere to go. The idea of the party scene, of her friends, of any of her old distractions, made her skin crawl.
She started the car and drove, not toward the hills or the river, but aimlessly through the grid of suburbs. The quiet in the car was back. But it wasn’t the silence she’d found with Cadence. It was the old silence, the one that had lived inside her forever. It was just noise turned way, way down, leaving nothing but a high-pitched hum of her own failure.
She had tried, and her first real test had been a performance of her own worst prophecy. The mechanics, as Kamora called them, were in motion. And for the first time, watching the gentle, unbroken girl drive away from her fury, Ryli understood the cost not as an abstract concept, but as a specific, sharp pain located right behind her sternum.
It felt like a start, too. The worst kind.
The hollow feeling fossilized into something solid over the next forty-eight hours. Ryli didn’t call. She didn’t text. The Charger sat dormant under a layer of spring pollen, a dead thing in the driveway. She ignored the pounding bass from Giselle’s Thursday night pre-game, the texts piling up with question marks and concerned gifs. The noise of her own life felt like an assault.
She spent Friday night on the roof of her garage, smoking stolen cigarettes from a pack she found in her mom’s junk drawer. They were menthols. They tasted like cleaning products and regret. Below, the neighborhood was a diorama of normalcy—mown lawns, glowing windows, a family eating dinner visible through a screen door.
She imagined Cadence in one of those rooms. Reading. Drawing. Existing without the frantic, grinding soundtrack that played behind Ryli’s eyes. The thought was a precise ache.
Her phone buzzed on the shingles beside her. Not Cadence. Hunt.
Hunt: heard u were a bitch to jake. what’s your damage?
Ryli stared at the words. The validation of her fuck-up, delivered via proxy. She didn’t reply. A minute later, another text.
Hunt: cade won’t talk about it. which means u hurt her. we’re done.
The finality of it was clean, almost welcome. Another bridge ignited, another connection severed. She expected to feel relief. She felt nothing. Just the vast, hollow quiet.
She must have fallen asleep up there, because she woke stiff and cold in the predawn gray, dew soaking through her jeans. Her body ached. She climbed down, moving like an old woman, and slipped inside the silent house.
Saturday passed in a blur of static. She scrolled through her phone, stopping on the picture of the candle flame. It felt like evidence from a different life, a crime she couldn’t quite remember committing. She deleted it. Then immediately went to her recently deleted folder and restored it. The back-and-forth was pathetic. She threw her phone across her bedroom. It hit the wall with a satisfying crack.
By Sunday afternoon, the silence in her skull had become a scream. She needed motion. She needed gasoline and rubber. She dug the keys from the pocket of her dirty jeans and went to the car.
She didn’t drive to the quarry or the river roads. She pointed the car toward the part of town with chain stores and neatly trimmed hedges, driving on autopilot until she found herself idling outside a familiar little house with a faded butterfly wind chime on the porch. Cadence’s hatchback was gone. The driveway was empty.
The defeat was profound. She’d come for… what? A glimpse? A chance to park silently outside like some lovesick ghost? She swore, a vicious, gritty sound in the car, and slammed her palm against the steering wheel. The horn blared, sharp and stupid in the quiet street. A curtain twitched in the house next door.
God, she was an idiot. She shoved the car into drive and peeled away, the tires chirping in protest.
She ended up at the bland, corporate coffee shop on the east side, a place her crew never went. It was all neutral tones and the gentle hiss of espresso machines. She bought a black coffee she didn’t want and took a seat in a deep armchair in the corner, melting into the anonymity.
She was staring into the bitter liquid, tracing the path of a crack in the ceramic mug, when the door chime sounded. She glanced up from under the fall of her hair.
And froze.
Cadence walked in with Annie and Auddy. She was wearing a soft-looking cream sweater, her blonde hair in a messy bun, a few strands escaping to frame her face. She was smiling at something Annie said, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. There were faint shadows beneath them.
Ryli’s body went rigid. She shrank back into the chair, pulling the hood of her jacket up. A pathetic, cowardly move. She couldn’t look away.
They ordered. They moved to a cluster of plush chairs by the window, sunlight streaming in and haloing Cadence’s hair. She looked ethereal and tired. Auddy was talking animatedly, hands waving. Cadence nodded, sipping her drink, her gaze drifting to the window.
Then the door chimed again.
Liam strode in. He was a guy from the community college, a friend of a friend who occasionally orbited their larger party scene. He was all easy confidence and artfully faded jeans. He spotted the girls immediately and veered toward them, a wide smile on his face.
“Hey! Fancy meeting you rebels here,” he said, his voice carrying across the quiet shop.
Annie laughed. Auddy waved him over. Cadence offered a small, polite smile.
Ryli’s grip on her mug tightened. Her coffee sloshed, burning her thumb. She didn’t feel it.
Liam pulled over a chair, settling right next to Cadence. Too close. His knee brushed against the leg of her chair. He launched into some story about a failed physics exam, his body angled toward her, his attention focused. He touched her arm to emphasize a point. A casual, friendly gesture.
Cadence didn’t flinch. She listened, that same faint smile on her lips. She said something quiet back. Liam laughed, loud and appreciative.
A white-hot wire snapped behind Ryli’s ribs. It was a perfect mirror of the Jake scene, reversed. Here was the gentle girl, surrounded by the easy, normal world she belonged in. Here was a guy, tactile and interested, in her space. And Cadence wasn’t freezing him out. She was being… polite. Nice.
The jealousy was instantaneous, a chemical flood that turned her coffee to acid in her stomach. But beneath it, a more confusing sensation writhed. This wasn’t the possessive, angry burn she’d felt in the parking lot. This was colder. Deeper.
She wasn’t jealous of Liam touching Cadence.
She was jealous of Cadence’s capacity to allow it. Of her ability to sit there, gently engaged, untouched by the storm raging inside Ryli just fifteen feet away. She was jealous of the normalcy Cadence could slide back into so easily, the world where a guy’s casual touch wasn’t a potential declaration of war. She was jealous of the simple, unbroken person Cadence was, a person who could have this mundane coffee shop moment without feeling like the walls were closing in.
Liam said something else, leaning in. Cadence nodded, then her gaze—distant, thoughtful—swept across the shop. It passed over the armchair in the corner, over the figure slouched in the hoodie.
It stopped.
It snapped back.
Her eyes locked with Ryli’s from across the room.
Every ounce of color drained from Cadence’s face. The polite smile vanished. Her body went still, as if someone had hit a pause button. The gentle, composed mask she’d been wearing shattered, revealing something raw and startled underneath.
Liam, noticing her distraction, followed her gaze. He saw Ryli. His expression shifted to one of cautious recognition, then to awkwardness. He said something to Cadence, a question.
Cadence didn’t hear him. She was just staring, her blue eyes wide, one hand slowly coming up to press against the base of her throat. The sunlight caught the fine gold chain she always wore, making it glint.
Ryli saw it then, the confusion that mirrored her own. The jarring disconnect of seeing the other person suddenly materialize in the wrong context. The unspoken history hanging between them in the smell of roasted beans and steamed milk.
And in Cadence’s eyes, Ryli saw something else, something that cut through the cold jealousy and left her breathless.
It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t fear.
It was a flicker of pure, unguarded hurt. And beneath that, a question.
Then Cadence looked away. She turned back to Liam and Annie, her movements stiff. She said something short. She stood up, collecting her bag. Her movements were hurried, uncoordinated. She didn’t look back at Ryli.
“You okay?” Annie asked, her voice tinged with concern.
“Yeah. I just… I forgot I have to… my mom needs me,” Cadence mumbled, the lie clumsy on her tongue. “I’ll text you.”
She practically fled, pushing out the door into the afternoon light, leaving her half-finished drink on the table.
Liam and Annie exchanged a look, then both turned to stare at Ryli. Auddy’s expression was pure, icy condemnation.
Ryli didn’t move. She watched through the window as Cadence hurried to her hatchback, fumbling with her keys. The jealousy was gone, replaced by a sinking, cold understanding.
She had wanted Cadence to be angry in the parking lot. Anger was a language she spoke. Anger was fire, and she knew how to navigate a blaze.
This was different. This was Cadence, caught in a normal moment, visibly shaken just by the sight of her. Not angry. Rattled. Thrown.
It was more confusing than any shouted accusation. It meant Ryli had become a disruption in her quiet world, a ghost that could haunt a sunny coffee shop. It meant she mattered in a way that caused pain, not drama. Actual pain.
Ryli set her untouched, cold coffee down. She stood, ignoring the stares from the table by the window, and walked out. The door chime sounded cheerful, absurd.
She stood on the sidewalk, the sun warm on her upturned face. Cadence’s car was already gone, vanished into the stream of Sunday traffic. The normal world hummed around her—cars, couples with shopping bags, the distant laugh of a child.
She had come here seeking motion, an escape from the quiet. She had found a deeper, more profound silence. The silence of being seen as a problem that couldn’t be solved, only avoided. The silence of knowing she had, without saying a word, made a gentle girl forget how to be gentle for a moment.
She got in the Charger. This time, she didn’t drive aimlessly. She knew exactly where she was going. She drove toward the quarry, toward the cliff’s edge, toward the one language she had always been fluent in. The noise of the engine was a roar, but it couldn’t touch the new, desperate quiet inside her. It was the quiet of a losing bet, the mechanical click of a prophecy fulfilling itself. She pressed the accelerator, watching the needle climb, the world blurring into streaks of color and light.