Chapter 17 Maya
MAYA
Two days.
Two whole days of nothing. No text, no call, no showing up at the station with his hands in his pockets and some excuse about needing fresh air. Just silence. The same kind of silence he’d perfected ten years ago, apparently, because the man had not lost his touch.
I shoved the filing cabinet drawer shut hard enough to rattle the frame. Cooper glanced up from his desk, eyebrows raised, and I gave him a smile that could have scared the birds from the trees.
“Stuck drawer,” I said.
“Sure.” He looked back down at his paperwork very quickly.
Yeah, okay, the silence was bad, but worse than that, was I’d seen it coming.
The second he’d pulled back from that kiss, the second his face had shuttered and his hands had dropped away from me like I’d burned him, I’d known.
I’d known exactly what was going to happen because it had happened before.
I’d stood there in the parking lot watching his taillights disappear and let it happen anyway.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and apparently, I just stood in gravel like an idiot.
I yanked open the next drawer and started reorganizing files I’d already organized that morning. Alphabetical. No, chronological. No, alphabetical. It didn’t matter. My hands needed something to do that wasn’t punching a wall or throwing my coffee mug at the whiteboard.
Movement through the window broke my spiral. A truck pulling into the lot. Dark green Tacoma, brand new by the look of it. Not one of ours, and not a vehicle I recognized.
A premonition washed over me as I watched it swing into a spot near the entrance. The engine cut. The driver’s door opened.
Nate.
The man who’d detonated a grenade inside me and then ghosted me for forty-eight hours.
Every muscle in my body went rigid, then something hot and sharp blazed through me, burning away the last shred of patience I’d been clinging to.
I was out the door before he’d made it three steps from his truck.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
He stopped dead, his eyes locked onto mine across the lot. The exact moment my fury registered was written across his face. The set of my jaw. The energy rolling off me in waves. Whatever he’d been expecting when he pulled in here, it wasn’t this.
Fucking excellent.
“Maya...”
“Two days.” I closed the distance between us. “You kissed me on that trail and then you vanished for two days. No call. No text. Nothing.”
His jaw tightened. “I know.”
“You know.” My laugh came out sharp and brittle. “That’s great, Nate. Really helpful. Thank you for that.”
“Can we go somewhere and talk about this?”
“We’re talking about it right now. Right here.” I was close enough that the tension in his shoulders and the shadows under his eyes were impossible to miss. They told me he hadn’t been sleeping any better than I had. Part of me was glad. The rest of me was too angry to care.
“You kissed me like...” I shook my head, the words tangling up with the memory of it.
“You kissed me like that, and then you said sorry, and then you walked away. And I’ve been sitting in that station for two days, filing the same goddamn folders over and over, waiting for you to show up and explain yourself. ”
His throat moved. “You’re right.”
“I’m not finished.”
His mouth snapped shut.
“You know what the worst part is? It’s not even the kiss.
It’s that you did this to me before.” My voice cracked and I hated it.
Hated that he could still do this to me after all these years.
“The towel, Nate. My bedroom. I was eighteen, and you saw me naked and you couldn’t even look at me after that. ”
He flinched.
“You just shut me out. Overnight. Like a switch flipped and suddenly I didn’t exist. You wouldn’t talk to me, you wouldn’t be in the same room as me, you couldn’t even look at me.
Then you left. You just left.” My throat was getting tighter, which was infuriating, because I needed it to work.
I needed my voice to be steady and sharp and it was betraying me.
“And I had to grieve you, do you understand that? You were one of the most important people in my life and I lost you, and I didn’t even get a say in it.
I didn’t get a goodbye. I didn’t get an explanation. I got fuck all.”
The parking lot was quiet. Just the wind in the trees and the distant sound of a car on the highway and my own ragged breathing.
“Ten years.” I held up both hands, fingers splayed, like showing him the number might help him grasp the weight of it. “Ten years of nothing. And then you come back and you call me Slayer and you look at me like... like...”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t put words to the way he’d been looking at me for weeks. Because naming it would make it real, and if it was real, and he took it away again, I wouldn’t survive it a second time.
“And then you kiss me on a mountain and you run. Again. The exact same thing, all over again.”
Because the universe apparently hated me, my eyes started burning.
No. Absolutely not. I was not going to cry in front of Nate O’Hare in a parking lot on a Thursday morning. I was not that woman. I set my jaw and blinked hard, willing the sting away through sheer force of stubbornness.
It didn’t work.
The first tear spilled over before I could stop it, sliding hot down my cheek, and I swiped at it with the back of my hand so hard it almost hurt.
“Great.” My voice came out thick and furious. “This is just great.”
More tears. Traitors, every single one of them. Pouring out of me like they’d been waiting for their moment and had collectively decided right now, in front of the one person I wanted to look strong for, was the perfect time to stage a mutiny.
“You don’t get to keep doing this.” I jabbed a finger at his chest, blinking through the blur. “You don’t get to show up in my life and make me feel things and then disappear because you can’t handle it. That’s not fair. It wasn’t fair when I was eighteen and it’s not fair now.”
My breath hitched on something dangerously close to a sob, and I clenched my teeth against it so hard my jaw ached.
“And I am so angry at you for making me cry right now. I want you to know that. This is your fault.”
He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t tried to interrupt or defend himself. He’d just stood there, taking every word, his jaw clenched so tight it looked like it might shatter.
Then something snapped.
“You’re right.” His voice was low and rough, like it had been dragged over gravel. “About all of it. You’re right.”
I opened my mouth, but he kept going.
“That day, with the towel. I saw you and something hit me that I wasn’t ready for. You were Dan’s little sister. That’s all you’d ever been. And then you weren’t, just like that, and it scared the shit out of me because I didn’t know what to do with what I was feeling.”
His hand gripped the back of his neck, hard, his eyes dropping to the ground between us.
“I was twenty-two. And I was...” He paused, his throat working. “I was pretty fucked up, Maya. In ways that had nothing to do with you. And I handled it the worst way possible, because shutting down was the only thing I knew how to do.”
His gaze came back to mine, and what I saw there nearly knocked the wind out of me. Open. Unguarded. Holding nothing back.
“I’m sorry. For then, and for now. For all ten of those years. You didn’t deserve any of it. I know that sorry doesn’t fix a single one of them, but I need you to hear it. I am so sorry.”
The parking lot went quiet again. A bird sang somewhere in the tree line, oblivious and cheerful and completely inappropriate for the moment.
All that fury, churning and building for two days, and suddenly it had nowhere left to go.
A sob finally escaped me. And then Nate stepped forward and pulled me against him.
I stiffened instantly. Every instinct I had screamed at me to shove him back, to keep my walls up and protect whatever was left of my pride. My hands came up, palms landing flat and hard against the solid wall of his chest.
But his arms wrapped around me, tight and sure, one hand coming up to cradle the back of my head like I was something precious.
The fight drained out of me all at once.
I just didn’t have the energy to be strong anymore.
I crumbled, my body completely overruling my brain, and the hands that were meant to push him away grabbed fistfuls of his shirt instead. I held on.
His heartbeat thudded against my cheek, fast and hard, and his chest expanded with a long, unsteady breath that vibrated all the way through me. I squeezed my eyes shut against a fresh wave of tears.
He held on like he was trying to absorb every terrible thing he’d put me through. Like if he held me tight enough, long enough, he could undo ten years of silence through sheer force of will.
He couldn’t. But God, he was trying.
Eventually, I loosened my grip, took a shaky breath, and stepped back. His hands lingered on my arms before falling away, like letting go was something he had to force himself to do.
“Maya.” His voice was quiet. Careful. “I can’t stay in Esperance.”
I sighed. “I know.”
“And starting something with you when I know I’m leaving... It wouldn’t be fair. No matter how much I want it.”
I didn’t trust myself to respond. If I opened my mouth, I was either going to scream or kiss him, and neither of those was going to help.
He brushed a tear from my cheek with his thumb and pressed his lips to my forehead, warm and lingering.
I pulled away first, taking a half step back to put some necessary distance between us.
“I guess you should get inside, before Brody comes out to drag you in.”
“Yeah.” He held my gaze for a beat. “We’re good?”
“We’re grand.” I stepped to the side, gesturing to the station. “I’ll see you later.”
His only reply was a nod before he moved by me and into the station.
I stood in the parking lot, waiting until the door closed behind him before I let out a long, shaking breath.
He wanted me. He’d said so. And he thought he was going to walk away from that because it “wouldn’t be fair.”
What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?