Chapter 12 MAYA
MAYA
Outside, the pines are white to their tops. The sky above them has gone a hard, clean blue after days of grey.
I sit at the kitchen table with both hands around my mug, savouring the smell of cooked breakfast. Bacon fat and coffee and the last trace of rosemary from whatever Reid did to the eggs.
And for a long time I’m not bracing for anything. That's new.
Jace is across the table, chair tipped back, watching Owen with the expression I've learned means trouble.
"I've been thinking," he says.
Owen doesn't look up from his tea. "Don't."
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You don't have to."
Reid reaches past me for the salt. He glances at Jace once, then picks up his coffee. Says nothing.
"The portrait has a good likeness," Jace tells me, as though Owen hasn't spoken. "Very serious. Very brooding."
"I wasn't going for brooding," I say. "He has a good face."
Owen's ears go red. He picks up his mug and takes a long, deliberate sip.
Jace grins. "He does have a good face. Owen, Maya thinks you have a good face. Good enough to be framed."
"Jace."
Reid chastises him. Just the name, delivered without volume or inflection, and it lands on the table like a hand coming down flat. The chair legs come down. Jace reaches for his coffee with the expression of someone who has been caught and is deciding whether to be sorry about it.
Owen is looking at the table. The corner of his mouth goes up before he gets it back under control, small and fast. He takes another sip of tea.
I eat my eggs. The bacon is good. The coffee is hot. Outside, the blue sky sits over the white pines and no one needs to fill the silence and I hadn't realized until right now how much I'd missed that.
My phone lights up on the counter.
Mum.
I look at it. The screen times out. I look back at my plate.
"You going to get that?" Jace asks.
"No."
He holds the look a beat longer than necessary. Then he reaches for more toast. "Okay." A single word and I feel a gratitude for it that is embarrassing in its intensity.
We finish breakfast without hurrying. Reid pushes back first, carries his plate to the sink, and says he needs to get to the rescue center.
They move through the clearing-up with the efficiency of men who have shared a kitchen for years.
The choreography so practised neither of them seems to notice they're doing it.
Owen excuses himself to make a call in the office.
And then it's just me and Jace and the remaining wreckage of the table.
"Dish duty," Jace says. He's already stacking.
"I figured you'd find a reason to disappear."
"What gave you that impression."
"Everything about you."
He looks at me over the stack. "That's offensive."
"It's accurate."
He carries the plates to the sink. I bring the mugs. We fall into the rhythm of it without discussing it. He fills the basin. I find a dish towel. For a few minutes there's nothing but water and plates and Jace's commentary on how many dishes four people can generate at a single breakfast.
He has rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
The water is soapy and he works through the stack efficiently and the muscle in his forearm shifts when he scrubs, a slow flexion under tanned skin, and I catch myself mesmerized by the movement.
I look away.
I look back.
He hands me a plate. Our fingers touch.
He hands me another. I dry it. Then my phone lights up on the counter again.
Mum.
Jace glances at it. At me.
"Mothers," he says, with the gravity of a verdict, "are persistent."
"I've noticed."
I look at him. He looks back, patient, not pushing. I sigh and dry my hands on the dish towel.
"I'll be right back."
I go to the porch, not bothering with a jacket or boots.
The cold hits immediately, the wood rough and frozen under my soles. I don't go back for them. Shorter conversation this way.
"Hi, Mum."
"Maya." The relief is immediate and genuine. "I was getting worried. It's been a while since you checked in."
"I know. I've been busy." I look at the pines. The snow on the branches is thick from the storm and the sky above is hard winter blue. "The cabin needed some work."
"I'm glad you're all right." A pause. She chooses her next words the way she always does now, carefully, as though the right packaging changes what's inside. "I still don't understand why you had to go so far. Leaving everything. Your whole life was here."
"I didn't have a choice." I keep my voice flat. "You know that."
"Things were difficult." She minimizes it the way she always has. A small word to contain something that consumed my entire life. "But hiding in the mountains isn't going to fix anything. When the dust settles you should come home. Start over properly. Your father misses you."
Home.
The cold has worked past my ankles into my shins. I think about the word and what it has meant and what it means now, standing on this porch with the mountains behind the trees and the smell of breakfast still in the air.
"The dust won't settle," I say. "Daniel won't let it."
"Maya." The soft sigh that scrapes the inside of my skull every time I hear it. "Maybe if you hadn't—"
"Mum."
She stops.
I breathe through my nose. My feet are numb.
"I know you don't understand," I say. "That's okay. Tell Dad I'll call."
I hang up before she can answer.
I stay where I am.
The cold has moved from discomfort into something that demands a decision I'm not yet ready to make.
The snow on the pines is thick and clean. The sky is the blue of a morning that has decided, after days of refusing, to be generous. No clouds. The light sits flat and bright on the white branches and I stand in it and I breathe and I wait.
After a call like that one, after my mother's soft voice and her careful words and her quiet insistence that I share the blame for what was done to me, there is usually an urge.
Old and reliable. It wants my left forearm.
Wants to leave a mark there, something small and specific and mine.
A pain I chose to replace the one it was imposed on me.
I wait for it.
The urge doesn't come.
I stand on the frozen porch and my feet go numb and the urge stays quiet.
I'm still looking at the treeline when I hear the door open behind me.
Jace. He comes out and stops beside me. He looks where I'm looking, out at the pines and the blue above them. He doesn't speak. Doesn't fill the silence with anything. He just stands there.
"Sorry I left you with the dishes," I say.
"It’s all good." A beat. "Everything okay with your mum?"
I'm still clenching the phone. "Yeah."
He stays where he is, looking at the trees.
Then he turns. The knuckle of his index finger finds my chin, lifting my face toward his. Not rough. Not tentative. Direct.
He looks at me.
"You can tell me," he says. "If something's not right. You know that."
I do know that.
I nod.
His hand stays.
"I know," I say. "But I don't want to talk right now."
His eyes stay on mine.
I look at his mouth.
And I close the distance.
I pull on his flannel shirt, dragging him to me, and press my mouth to his.
It's soft. Careful. My lips against his, a question I'm not ready to hear the answer to.
He goes still.
Not pulling away. Holding himself back, the whole of him going careful, waiting for me to figure out where I'm going.
He pulls back one millimeter. His forehead drops to mine.
"You sure?" The words come out warm against my lips. His forehead against mine, his shirt in my fist, the cold at my back.
I don't answer.
I kiss him again.
He makes a sound low in his throat and his arm comes around my back and pulls me flush against him. I feel the full length of him, warm through the flannel, solid and immediate, hard against my hip.
My breath stops. Heat drops through me like a stone through water, pooling low, and my fingers tighten in the fabric of his shirt because my hands need something to hold on to.
His hand slides into my hair. He presses his tongue to my lips and I open for him. My fists tighten in his shirt. The cold at my back is nothing. He is warm and here and real.
A car horn cuts through the trees from somewhere down the drive.
Jace swears against my mouth.
He pulls back a fraction. His forehead stays on mine. His eyes are darker than usual and we're both still catching up.
"I forgot," he says, low. "Solar panel guy. Checking the array." A pause. "He's never on time."
I look at him.
He takes a step back, but his eyes stay on me, while he reaches down and adjusts himself without apology or embarrassment.
"Hold that thought."
He goes down the porch steps toward the drive, hands in his pockets, unhurried.
I watch him go.
The cold comes back. But my mouth is still warm.