Here’s To New Beginnings

Holland

I never considered myself a smart woman. Not after the string of stupid situations I’d collected like bruises over the last few years. Bad choices stacked on bad choices. One red-flag man after another. I could write a damn manual on how to avoid the wrong men—title it, “How Not to Be Me”—and still, I’d be the first to ignore my own advice.

Robbie had been the worst of them. He did a number on me that left edges still raw. I surprised myself in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible—what I would tolerate, what I would do. For a long time, I was a ghost of myself, apologizing for his temper, making excuses for his absences, excusing the way he stole from me and lied to me like it was some kind of casual misstep. But there’s a point where the ledger tips and you have to put your foot down.

The night I left, I chose me.

It doesn’t make the rest clean. Does it mean I killed a man? I don’t know. It’s easy to argue semantics when you’re still trying to unclench your throat around the memory. Robbie picked his poison. I never put a needle in his arm, I never pushed a syringe into his hand. Maybe there were other things I could have done—other ways to reach him, to drag him back from whatever spiral swallowed him—but you only get so many second chances when the one you’re trying to save keeps biting the hand that feeds it.

That night he was in the car beside me, the smell of cheap tobacco and chemical sweetness clinging to him, eyes darting, hands shaking. He threatened—softly, cruelly—that he would end it if I didn’t do what he wanted. That line blurred every nerve in me. Judgment goes fuzzy when someone you’ve loved turns violent, when they use your guilt and exhaustion against you. When my “no” hardened into a refusal and he went quiet, something in his face changed. He’d been coming down off a high; that’s when the uglier things came out of him—the words like blades, the sudden grasping rage.

I told him flatly: not until you get help. The words were a wedge I meant to keep in place. He didn’t take them well. He started blaming friends, borrowing excuses, conniving. I found the stash in the kitchen drawer one evening—of all places, where I made dinner, where I reached for the butter. He tried to pass it off like it belonged to someone else. When I called him on it, he pulled a knife. In my kitchen. In my house.

That was the last straw.

I had tried to help him—job searches, rides to interviews, pocket change hidden in the glove compartment. I’d coddled him back from the fringes more times than I can count. But a person can only take so much when the other keeps choosing the thing that destroys them over the thing that loves them. I loved the trying, the idea of helping. The man himself? He had slipped away long before the last argument.

So I left. I left him in the car he managed to steal or borrow or be given, passed out or delirious—I couldn’t tell—and I drove until the taillights were a smear behind me. I changed my number, packed a duffel bag, crossed county lines with the kind of determination that’s equal parts fear and relief. I put my past on mute and promised myself I’d start again. New town, new job, new name in the phone.

Safe, though, wasn’t a place you could arrive at on a map.

The first weeks after moving were a fog: sleepless nights, quick glances over my shoulder, nightmares that made my palms sweat. I stayed busy—work is a good anesthetic—and when a new position looked like a five-year plan, I took the shortcut. Smith Automotive’s rental department was a foot in the door: steady pay, benefits if I played my cards right, and enough daylight hours to keep the monsters at bay.

On my first day I ironed my slacks until the fabric was a promise. I told myself I deserved this—deserved to stand straight and not flinch when someone raised their voice. The building smelled faintly of motor oil and old coffee when I pushed through the front door. Cameron was there to meet me: tall, practiced smile, the kind of guy who remembered everyone’s birthdays. He walked me through the systems, sat with me while I set up my login, and showed me the yard—how the rentals sat over here, inventory there, and repairs were tucked behind the shop doors like a secret.

We passed a dark stairwell that sat like a rumor. “What’s upstairs?” I asked, curiosity more stubborn than common sense.

“That’s the owners’ offices. Don’t go up there.” He said it like that was the only necessary warning. There was a flicker of something—anxiety? respect?—in his voice when he mentioned Mr. Smith. “He has a temper,” Cameron added, lower. “And if you value having a job, whatever you do—don’t flirt with him.”

“Why would I flirt with the owner?” I said, because my mouth is a loudspeaker for bad jokes and habit. “He’s probably a crusty old man in a suit.”

Cameron laughed without humor. “Remy Smith’s thirty-five, not seventy. He just… acts like he swallowed a grumpy old man’s soul. Keep your head down, Holland. Learn the ropes. If you need anything after I head back to the other location, call.”

He left with a wave. I dug into paperwork, watched videos and took notes. The rhythm of tasks soothed me—the predictability felt safe. When the shop was slow I filed, when the phones were quiet I balanced logs, and when the lunch crowd trickled in I helped a woman pull a rental contract together with the practiced ease of someone who pretends she’s indifferent but secretly cares.

Late that afternoon, as the sun slanted through the shop windows and painted the concrete gold, the back door slammed open with an aggression that made the whole building flinch. I was standing at the counter, reaching for a sticky pad, when the air punched me in the spine. The force of the door sent me sliding across the linoleum; I landed on my hands and knees with a breathy curse.

“What in the actual—” I started, cursing the balance that had only just begun steadying.

He filled my vision: light red hair cropped close, sleeves rolled to show arms carved with tattoos, crystal blue eyes that seemed to cut the dust in the air. There was a scar traced across the curve of his cheek and up through his eyebrow—thin and pale, as if death had once signed him and left. He moved with a careless strength that made my muscles remember how to hold themselves differently. For a jolt of a second I forgot to breathe.

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded, trying to smack the magnetism down with profanity.

He didn’t answer the way I expected. He reached out, steadying me by the small of my back with fingers warm and confident. His palm pressed there like a remedy—solid, grounding. The touch should have been banal. Instead something bright and wild bloomed along my nerves. Sparks, not electric in the way a taser shocks but electric like summer lightning when you’re standing too close to it. My stomach tightened into a knot of pure, ridiculous recognition.

“I’m Remy Smith,” he said, his voice rough at the edges. “I’m sorry I knocked you over.”

He smiled the kind of small, embarrassed smile that suggested he meant it. And despite myself the spark flared again—sharp and intrusive and entirely unwelcome. I looked for wires, for an explanation: a static buildup, a prank, anything sensible. The world didn’t provide one.

“Did you feel that?” I blurted. My voice sounded small in the lobby. I sounded like someone who’d been living too long with silent sirens.

Remy’s gaze flicked to my hands, to the point where his eyes softened—not because of embarrassment but because something had shifted. “Come to my office,” he said, and the invitation wasn’t so much an ask as a command. “I’ll explain.”

Something in my chest clenched that I’d been trying to loosen for months. Old reflexes rattled—don’t get close, don’t trust, don’t let anyone in. I had left a life complicated enough to fill a bad tabloid’s month. I had reasons to be careful. But the sensation that danced beneath my ribs when his fingers had touched my back was not the kind of thing you file under “ignore and move on.” It was intrusive, intimate, and it rode along my spine like a secret.

I opened my mouth to refuse. I should have. I should have put my hands on my hips, drawn a line, and told him I wasn’t interested in anything except a paycheck and a quiet life. I was about to decline when the world tilted.

Light smeared, the fluorescent bulbs above stretching into streaks that painted the lobby in nauseating bands. The framed calendar on the wall spun like a lazy carousel. My knees buckled and I went somewhere that felt like the inside of a deep well—dark, enormous, and utterly empty.

I fell into nothing.

The first thing that came back was the smell of dust and oil and the metallic tang of adrenaline. I was on my back in the lobby, the linoleum cold through my blouse, the ceiling a white oval above me. Remy—or someone—was kneeling beside me. His fingers were cool against my temple, his voice near and quick.

“You okay? Stay with me, Holland. Look at me.”

The name tasted like a bell. I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud when I registered the way he said it, as if he knew me better than he should. My head felt thick and the world was only just filtering back into a sensible order. I blinked, trying to piece the edges of the moment together.

“You hit your head when the door swung,” he said. Concern threaded the words. “You fainted.”

“No.” My voice was small, but I felt claws of indignation flex. “I didn’t faint.”

“Maybe,” he said, helping me sit. The touch was careful now, respectful. “You were pale. You looked like you’d seen a ghost. That’ll make a person fall, too.”

I wanted to be angry, to stand and brush my knees and scold him for the way his entrance had scattered me. I wanted to be furious at the old me who’d been so soft and pliable she’d let men carve around her edges. Instead my limbs moved like they were trying to test the world—slow, tentative. My body argued with my adrenaline, and for a moment I simply listened to the blood drumming in my ears.

“Do you want water?” Remy asked. His hand hovered, offered, never pushed. He was there and not there in the same breath, simultaneously dominating and easy. I should have been able to catalog him in a sentence, but I couldn’t. There were contradictions—stone and spring, heat and the promise of an unspoken danger.

I took the water. He sat across from me, boots planted flat, the shop’s windows catching on the angles of him. When he leaned forward his tattoos flexed, the ink forming meanings I didn’t know. “You new?” he asked.

“First week.” I kept my voice steady even as the memory of the car and the drawer and the knife crowded the edges of my mind. “Holland.”

He nodded. “Welcome to Smith Automotive.” His eyes flicked toward the stairwell and something unreadable flashed across his expression—an almost imperceptible shadow—before he steadied into something like neutrality. “You’ll do fine. Learn the system. Don’t go upstairs.”

I laughed then—short, brittle—because the stairwell was a refrain now, a secret stitched into the building the way the rent was stitched into the floor. “I was told that already.”

“Good.” He said it with a softness that made me believe he meant it. “If you need anything—anything—find Cameron, or...or ask for me. Not the upstairs. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

He smiled like he’d given me a map and also an ultimatum. The scar on his face tightened the way a muscle tenses before it moves. I felt simultaneously safer and pinned, like an animal in a fancy display case.

That night, in the small apartment I’d painted in colors that felt like hope, sleep came as if it were a favor. But the nightmares were active—Robbie’s voice, the drawer, the feel of a knife. I woke with my throat dry and the taste of copper, and my heart ached with the refusal to be naive.

Still, when dawn came the world was ordinary enough: coffee, the hum of a kettle, the small rituals that patch up a person and let them face the day. I dressed, smoothed my blouse, and rehearsed the smile I’d wear in the lobby. I had a paycheck to earn, a future to build, and a self to find again that wasn’t brittle from fear.

I kept seeing Remy in the edges of everything: in the way he had steadied me when the door did what doors do—swing open—and in the way his hand at my back had felt like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know I had. There was a charge to him I couldn’t name. It sat in the air like a storm on the horizon: distant, inevitable.

When I passed the stairwell on my way out that morning, I glanced up. The banister was swathed in dust. The door at the top was shut. The rumor of upstairs remained just that—an unanswered question. I had survived worse things than curiosity. For now, the most pressing mystery was simpler: who was Remy Smith, and why did the first touch of him feel like a beginning?

I told myself the safe answer: that whatever he was, whatever that spark had been, I’d keep my distance. I had a life to rebuild, and it didn’t have room for more complicated kinds of trouble.

But trouble, like habit, has a way of finding you even when you’re trying not to be found.