Chapter 39 Maya
MAYA
The bed was warm. The spot beside me had already gone cold.
My hand found the empty sheet before my eyes opened, fingers spreading across cotton that had lost Nate’s heat. He’d been here. He’d stayed. That counted for something.
I rolled over and reached for my phone on the nightstand. Seven-fifty-three. No missed calls. No messages from Nate. Where had he gone?
I sat up slowly, pressing my back against the headboard, and stared at my phone. My thumb hovered over his name in my messages. The last text between us was from three days ago, something about picking up dinner. The ordinariness of it felt like it belonged to a different lifetime.
Should I text him? Just a quick check-in, something light. something carrying none of the weight of yesterday.
But the memory of him on my doorstep kept surfacing, that hollowed-out look. I couldn’t shake the feeling that reaching out too soon might press on something still raw.
I put the phone down. Picked it up again. Put it down.
Space. He needed space. That was the one thing I actually knew how to give him, even when every part of me wanted to do the opposite.
I pushed the covers back and climbed out of bed, heading straight for the kitchen.
Coffee first. Worrying second. Or, you know, coffee and worrying at the same time. Multi-tasking.
The coffee machine had barely warmed up when my phone pinged from the bedroom.
I was back down the hallway before the sound had finished.
Dad. Nate’s here. Having coffee.
Thank. Fuck.
I read it twice. The relief hit me so hard my knees almost buckled.
I stayed upright long enough to go back to the kitchen. Dropped some bread in the toaster because I needed to do something with my hands.
Then I gazed out the window, my mind turning over and over. I was so lost to my spiralling thoughts that I almost jumped out of my skin when the toast popped.
He was at my parents’ house. That was good. That was a place where coffee appeared and nobody asked questions you weren’t ready to answer.
But where did that leave me?
My mind whirred as I smeared jelly on my toast.
Should I drive over there? Show up with a smile and act like yesterday hadn’t rearranged something fundamental inside both of us? Or stay here, give him room, wait for him to come to me the way he had last night?
I took a bite of toast. It tasted like cardboard and uncertainty.
Waiting won. Barely.
I gave up on eating after three bites and took a long shower instead. I stood under the hot water for an eternity, hoping the water would wash away the worry.
It didn’t.
I was towelling off my hair in the hallway when the rumble of a truck engine sounded in the driveway.
By the time I got to the door, Nate was halfway up the path. He stopped short. His gaze tracked from my wet hair dripping onto my shoulders, down to the towel and my bare legs, and something flickered across his face. A memory, maybe. A ten-year-old one.
“Careful. Last time you saw me in a towel, you didn’t speak to me for a decade.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Just barely, but it was there. “Last time I saw you in a towel, I wasn’t allowed to do this.”
He closed the distance between us, cupped my face with both hands, and kissed me. Slow and soft and deliberate, his thumbs brushing along my jaw. The warmth of his lips against mine dissolved every hour of worry I’d been carrying since I woke up to an empty bed.
When he pulled back, his eyes were tired, but the haunting emptiness of last night had eased into something quieter.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“You okay?”
He took a breath. Let it out. “Getting there.”
“I’m glad.” I stepped back to let him in and he followed me inside, the door clicking shut behind him.
He turned to face me in the hallway, hands in his pockets. Something in his expression made my stomach tighten.
“I need to leave.”
The ground dropped out from under me.
My fingers tightened on the knot of my towel. Everything I’d been holding at arm’s length for weeks rushed in and hit me all at once. I stood there in my hallway and absorbed it, because what else was there to do?
I’d always known this was coming. And honestly, I couldn’t even blame him for it.
“Okay.” My voice came out small and flat and I hated the sound of it.
“It’s just, you know, with everything happening, I need some space. I need to shake the dirt of North Carolina from my boots.”
“Of course, I get it. Your dad is…”
“Yeah, he is. Anyway, I wanted to know if you have a passport.”
I blinked at him. Moments passed while clouds of confusion swirled around my head. “A passport?”
“Yes, Maya. A passport.”
“Oh uh, yeah, I do actually. I booked a trip to Thailand a few years back. Paid the deposit and everything. But then I chickened out and canceled it. Got to keep the passport though. Of course, because why would they cancel my passport?” The really big question here was why the fuck was I rambling so much?
I dragged in air. “Anyway, yes, I have a passport.”
Amusement danced in his blue eyes. “Great. Because I’d really like it if you came with me.”
I gaped at him. The words arrived in my brain and just sat there, refusing to connect to anything useful.
“You want me to come with you,” I repeated slowly.
“Yeah.”
“Come with you. As in, leave the country. With you.”
“That’s generally what a passport is for.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Where?”
He shrugged. The casualness of it was so absurd, given that my entire nervous system had flatlined thirty seconds ago, that a laugh almost escaped me.
“Haven’t decided yet. Somewhere far enough away that none of this can reach us for a while.” His gaze held mine, and the lightness in his voice gave way to something darker. “I think we could both use that right now.”
We. Both. Not just him running. Both of us, together, somewhere else entirely.
My passport sat in the top drawer of my bedside table. Pristine. Unstamped. A monument to every safe choice I’d ever made and the one brave one I’d talked myself out of.
“When?” I asked.
“Today.”
“Today?” Why the fuck did my voice have to squeak like that?
“Yeah, why not?” He leaned against the wall, his expression dangerously close to amused.
“I already texted Brody. He said he can give you a week. Two if I’m extra nice to him, which I’m choosing not to think too hard about.
He also said you’ve got more leave banked than anyone on his roster and if you don’t start using it he’s going to make it an HR issue. ”
“He said all that in a text?”
“He said a lot more than that in a text. Most of it isn’t repeatable.”
My head was spinning, trying to catch up with a conversation that had gone from I need to leave to pack your bags in under two minutes.
“Today,” I said again, because apparently my vocabulary had been reduced to a single word.
“Unless you’re too chicken shit, of course.”
Something clicked into place. A gear shifting, a lock turning. The quiet snap of a decision being made before the rest of me had caught up. I lifted my chin and straightened my spine.
“Yes.”
His eyebrows rose. “Yeah?”
“Yes. I’m in. Let’s go.”
The smile that broke across his face was the first real one I’d seen since before the party. It cracked through the tiredness and the tension and lit him up from the inside. Holy hell, the somersaults my heart did in that moment left me breathless.
He reached for me, pulling me against him, and kissed me. This one was different from the porch. Deeper. Hotter. His fingers pressed into the bare skin above my towel. My back met the wall, and for about five very promising seconds, packing was the last thing on either of our minds.
Just when I started thinking this was heading for the bedroom, he lowered the heat, kissing me gently before pulling back just enough to rest his forehead on mine. Then he dragged in a deep breath and straightened, trailing his thumb along my jaw before stepping back.
“I need to go see Kelly. I owe her an apology.”
I hesitated. The words sat on my tongue for a moment, uncertain. Because this was his family and his history. I didn’t want to push my way into a space that wasn’t mine. But the memory of my hands on Thornton’s chest, the shove, the chaos that followed, burned fresh in my mind.
“Do you think I could come?” I asked quietly. “I owe her one too.”
A heavy beat of silence passed before he reached up, running his knuckles over my cheek. “Yes, you can.”
He brushed his lips across mine, featherlight, barely there.
“How about I wait here while you go pack? We can stop at Kelly’s on the way to the airport.”
On the way to the airport. Like people just decided over morning coffee to leave the country with someone and were wheels-up by lunch.
“Okay,” I said.
And I went to pack.