Chapter 42 Nate
NATE
Keflavík International Airport at five in the morning was fluorescent lights, empty corridors, and the faint, ever-present smell of coffee.
Maya hadn’t stopped moving since we’d touched down. She’d bounced off the plane, through passport control and snagged her bag before I even spotted mine. Now she stood in the rental line with two coffees and a smile that had no business existing on three hours of plane sleep.
“I’m in Iceland,” she said, for the fourth time since we’d landed.
“You are.”
“I’m in actual Iceland. Like, the country.”
“That is how countries work, yes.”
She bumped her hip against mine. “Don’t act like you’re not excited!”
I smiled. “You’ve got me there.”
“You’re gonna need this, then.” She pressed a steaming paper cup against my chest until I took it.
I took a grateful gulp. The stuff was strong enough to strip paint, which was exactly what I needed.
While we waited, she leaned into my arm and scrolled through her phone, tilting the screen toward me every few seconds. Waterfalls. Black sand beaches. A volcanic crater that looked like it belonged on Mars.
“And this one is a canyon where they filmed Game of Thrones. We have to go. Non-negotiable.”
“I’ve never seen Game of Thrones.”
She looked up at me like I’d just told her I didn’t believe in gravity. “We’ll deal with that later. The canyon is still happening.”
The rental agent called next before I could tell her my thoughts on dragons. I stepped up to the counter and handled the paperwork. A few signatures later, I grabbed the keys and we headed for the exit.
The automatic doors parted and a rush of cold, clean air hit us that tasted like nothing I’d ever breathed before. Sharp. Mineral. Almost sweet.
Maya stopped dead on the pavement, her face tipped up, her eyes closed, breathing it in.
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, wow.”
I loaded the bags, got us into the SUV, and pulled out onto a two-lane road cutting through the early morning mist. Hands at ten and two, eyes on the road, brain running through the route.
We were only a few miles out of Reykjavik when the sky started to change. What had been flat, pre-dawn gray when we’d left the airport was leaking along the horizon, pale gold bleeding upward through layers of cloud. The light caught the landscape in slow, creeping increments.
Lava fields. Miles of them, rolling out on both sides of the road in frozen black waves, cracked and jagged and ancient, covered in patches of moss so green it looked fake.
No trees. No fences. No buildings. Just rock and sky and the road cutting through it all like someone had drawn a line across the surface of another planet and said drive.
“Nate.” Maya’s voice was so quiet I had to lean over to hear her. “Pull over.”
I found a gravel shoulder and stopped the car. She jumped out as I killed the engine, walking to the edge of the road, and she just stood there. Arms at her sides, face turned toward the horizon where the gold was spreading, the wind pulling at her hair and the collar of her new puffer jacket.
The land stretched away from her in every direction, vast and untouched and impossibly still. She was small against it. Small and bright and completely, utterly transfixed.
I got out and leaned against the hood, coffee in hand, my attention locked on her.
She turned back to me after a while, her eyes shining, her cheeks pink from the cold. “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
The sunrise sure was something. But I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She tilted her head. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m drinking my coffee.”
“You’re staring and drinking your coffee.” She walked back toward me, her boots crunching on the gravel, and stopped between my knees. Her cold fingers curled into the front of my jacket. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Thank you for bringing me here.”
I tucked a strand of wind-blown hair behind her ear. “Thank you for coming.”
She kissed me. Quick and cold-lipped and tasting like coffee, and then she pulled back with a grin and smacked my chest. “Right. Let’s go. We’ve got a whole country to see and you’re just sitting here.”
“I was told to pull over.”
“That was three minutes ago. Keep up.”
We hopped in and hit the road.
The GPS handled the route and Maya handled the music, scanning through stations of Icelandic pop until she found one she liked. Something deep and resonant drifted through the speakers, and to my surprise, it was in English.
“I like this. Who is it?”
It took less than thirty seconds for her to google it. “KALEO, apparently. This one is Save Yourself.”
“It’s good.”
“Yeah, it is.”
Another mile down the road and Maya was grabbing my arm. “Nate. Nate, look! Horses.”
Sure enough, a herd of small, stocky horses stood in a field just off the road. One of them looked directly at the car as we passed, blissfully unbothered.
“Pull over.”
“Again?”
“That was for a sunrise. This is for horses. Totally different category.”
I pulled over, and we stepped out into the chill. The horses tracked Maya’s approach with mild curiosity, one of them ambling closer to investigate.
“Oh my god, look at his little face.” She held her hand out over the fence and the horse nudged it with a velvet nose. “Did you know Icelandic horses have a gait that no other breed in the world can do? It’s called a tolt. I saw a documentary about it.”
“Of course you did.”
“They’re also not allowed to leave the country. And if they do leave, they can never come back. It’s to keep the bloodline pure.” She scratched behind the horse’s ear and it leaned into her hand. “Honestly, I don’t blame them, because would you look at this face?”
“Uh huh.”
“Come on! Look at this face and tell me it’s the cutest damn thing you’ve ever seen!”
The horse blinked at me. I had to admit, it had a pretty good face. “It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“There we go.”
Maya gave the horse one last scratch and a solemn promise to return, then jogged back to the SUV with her hands shoved deep in her pockets and her shoulders hunched against the wind as she slid into the passenger seat.
“It is freezing,” she announced, yanking the door shut. “Like, properly freezing. I love it.”
Back on the road, she pulled out her phone and started researching, scrolling through articles and travel blogs with the focus of someone building a mission brief.
To keep her fueled, I reached into the bag of airport supplies, unwrapped a granola bar, and handed it to her.
She took it without looking up, bit off half, and pointed at the windshield.
“See that mountain? The flat one with the stripe of snow? I think that’s Esja. According to this website, you can hike it.”
“Already planning hikes?”
“It’s called being proactive.” She polished off the granola bar and brushed crumbs off her jacket. “Also, I think there’s a waterfall somewhere off this road. Can we stop if we see a sign?”
“We can stop wherever you want.”
She slipped her boots off and settled back in her seat, putting her feet up on the dash.
Her hand landed on my thigh, warm through the denim, her thumb tracing an absent pattern while she gazed out the window.
The music played. The road ribboned ahead of us.
The sun painted everything in soft golden light.
And somewhere in the middle of it, an unexpected shift settled over me.
My shoulders were loose. My jaw was unclenched.
The low-grade hum of alertness that had been my baseline for as long as I could remember, that constant background frequency of watching, assessing, bracing, had finally gone quiet.
I couldn’t pinpoint when it had stopped.
It had faded somewhere between the airport and the horses.
All I knew was that I just felt good. Simple as that. No weight behind it, no qualifier attached. Just a man driving through a strange, beautiful country with someone he wanted to be with. For the first time in a long time, that was enough.
Maya traced another slow circle against my leg. I covered her hand with mine and drove.