We coasted up Mulholland Drive, Etta James on the radio and windows down to the let the night sounds in. We passed old Hollywood mansions and rows of palm trees. Climbed up the canyon until we reached a startlingly beautiful viewpoint. All of Los Angeles sprawled naked and glimmering in front of us, still radiating energy even though it was past two in the morning.

Josie parked but left the music on, then slid out and onto the hood of the car. I joined her, pressing my head against hers.

“Something else, huh?” Josie asked, and there was a nervous edge to her voice.

“It’s gorgeous,” I replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s not Big Sur.”

“That’s okay,” I said, turning to capture her gaze. “It has its own beauty. Thank you for taking me here. For this whole day.”

Josie smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.

“I came here the night before my wedding. With Lucia,” Josie said. “It was my bachelorette party.”

Gabe turned his head towards me. “That’s interesting. I would have thought you would want something a little wilder than this.”

Josie grimaced, shrugging her shoulders.

“Did you suspect something was off that night?” I asked softly.

She shook her head. “I didn’t have a clue. We were spending the night apart anyway, so at that point, I hadn’t spoken to him since that morning. I thought everything was perfect. But—” she hesitated, biting her lip. “Lucia said something. Told me that if I didn’t want to go through with the wedding, she and I could run away. No questions, no judgment. Just get in the car and drive. And briefly… so briefly, I considered it.”

“Do you wish you had done it?”

“I don’t know,” she said on a long exhale. “But I’ll never doubt my instincts again. They’d been so quiet the entire time I’d known Clarke. Even with the dozens of red flags that would pop up, sometimes daily, any hesitancy I felt I squashed. Immediately,” I said. “But that night I was really unhappy. I had this surface-level happiness, and if you asked me, I would have told you I was so excited for my wedding. Couldn’t wait to marry my soulmate. But that night… that night I was so fucking anxious. And nervous and freaked out, and in that moment, the thought of not marrying Clarke felt so right. The most right feeling I’d had in a long time. And I… ignored it. Just like that. Because when someone has spent months gaslighting you, the first thing they destroy is your inner compass.”

I cupped her cheek, swiping my thumb along her skin. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. About what happened. What he did.”

“It’s all in the past now,” Josie said. “Truly. He’s not in my thoughts anymore.”

“And his voice?” I asked.

She smiled. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m back in control. And I wanted to bring you here for a reason. To build new memories over the old ones. To… listen again. To my instincts.”

“What are they saying, Josie?” I asked because this whole day had been one long moment of my heart screaming she’s the one.

Josie looked over the view for a moment like she was gathering something. “I don’t have a solution. Yet. To how we’d make a… a relationship work.”

I swallowed roughly, heart slamming in my chest.

“But I know two things. I want to be in a relationship with you. A real one. And I don’t want to do long distance. I want to be with you. Every day.”

I pulled Josie in for the softest, sweetest kiss of my entire life, and when I pulled back, I caught a wayward tear sliding down her cheek.

“Actually, I know three things,” she said, laughing into the L.A. sky. “The third is I’m so incredibly in love with you, it’s ridiculous.”

Time stilled in a way that was ancient and beautiful. Because I was filled with the rightness of this moment and the winding path we’d taken here. Our week of passion. Our miserable separation. The delicate and deliberate way we’d found ourselves sitting on the hood of a car on Mulholland Drive.

“Oh, Josie,” I said, cupping her face in my hands. “Can you say that one more time?”

“I love you, you big sexy Viking,” she said, biting her lip and grinning. I placed her hand on my chest, right over my spinning heart.

“I love you. Probably since the moment you called me hirsute.”

She laughed again, wrapping her body around mine. There was no tension in her body, only a loose lightness. I could feel what this moment meant to her, so different from two years ago. The way our lives were opening together, like a night-blooming flower.

“You know, my parents almost moved away from Big Sur, right after they graduated from college,” I finally said, brushing her hair from her shoulders.

“The high school sweethearts?” she asked.

“The very same. The whole town was swept up in their relationship. But when they first got together, though, they were in love with this idea of moving to Argentina.”

“Argentina? Why?” Josie’s brow furrowed.

“I have no idea. You know, both sides of my family are local to Big Sur, stretching back at least five generations. My dad’s family were homesteaders. You remember how The Bar used to be an old school, back in the day? My great-great-grandfather probably went to school there.”

“There’s a kind of poetry to working and living in the same room where your past relatives sat in small desks and learned,” Josie said. “Now, people puke on the floor and sloppily make out with each other.”

I laughed. “Smart-ass. The Bar is a beautiful, classy place, and the patrons never drink themselves to excess.”

“That’s a bald-faced lie, and you know it.”

I laughed into the stars, tugging on a strand of her hair.

“Also, maybe your parents just wanted to do something different,” she said seriously.

“I think that’s exactly it,” I agreed. “Two newlyweds in love with each other and the world around them. Maybe feeling trapped and claustrophobic by all that small-town intensity. The Big Sur Channel. The gossip. The fact that there is absolutely nothing to do. The fact that neither of them had ever stepped foot out of California.”

“Did they ever end up going?”

“No,” I said. “But they did take a pretty epic road trip in their car all across the country. Slept in the backseat and saw almost every state. It was their honeymoon.” I smiled at the memory, recalling the aged photos pinned haphazardly to the walls of my childhood home: my parents at the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park and pointing at alligators in Florida.

“Then what happened?”

“They made a choice. Saw the entire country and loved it. But realized there was nothing like their home town. Nothing like Big Sur. And they made an active decision to move back and commit themselves to that community. Not just because it had always been done. Which, when I was younger, I didn’t understand.”

“And now?” Josie asked.

“I’m starting to understand more. This,” I said, waving to the glittering skyline, “is like nothing I’ve ever done before. Nothing I’ve ever seen before. I understand their desire to take the entirety of the world in.”

Josie’s eyes were filled with honesty. “I felt the same way on that drive in Big Sur. The grandiosity of the landscape. Even the fear of the rockslide—it all touched something inside of me that L.A. doesn’t. Or hasn’t in a while. I thought the same thing: what else in this world haven’t I seen?”

An idea was forming in my mind, something new and exciting and just the right amount of scary.

“Josie,” I said. “What if we did something completely different?”

“Like what?” she laughed.

It was an irresponsible idea. Not even a little bit well thought out. Josie was probably going to toss me over this cliff, then drive away as fast as she could.

“How much vacation time do you have?”

She bit her lip. “I control my schedule. I mean, I’m booked straight through for the next month. I can always cancel, find a colleague to take my clients, but—”

“But what?”

“They won’t be happy with me,” she grinned. “Although there are much worse things.”

I was nodding, mentally doing some calculations. “I think I can get Paige and Max to run The Bar for a bit. And my parents, too.”

Slowly, Josie’s head tipped to the side. “What’s on your mind, hirsute hunk?”

“Remember when we had an accidental coffee date at the Bakery in Big Sur? I told you I’d take you to my favorite waterfalls?”

“I do,” she said. “And you never did. We didn’t go to any private beaches either. And I had plans for that, if you know what I mean.”

Her fingers danced up my thigh, and I kissed her right beneath her ear. She shivered.

“I know a waterfall. It’s famous. In fact, it’s one of the largest in the whole world.” A deep breath, and I kept going. “Let me take you there.”

“In Big Sur?” she asked, brow furrowed. “How did I not know this?”

I shook my head with a rumble of laughter. “Not Big Sur. In Argentina.”

Josie watched me for a minute as recognition flashed across her features. Her eyes narrowed, and then the smile she gave me burned brighter than the city below. She took out her phone, fingers flying across the screen. A minute later she flipped it over, showing me plane tickets: two leaving from LAX to Buenos Aires. Placed her palm against my cheek.

“What else in this world haven’t we seen, Gabriel?”

And that was how, not three hours later, Josie and I ended up squeezed into seats on an airplane. Breathless. Exhilarated. Together.