Chapter 53 Maya
MAYA
Icouldn’t stop my spiraling thoughts, so I’d called an emergency meeting. Of course, my girls had dropped everything and here we were, at Riverside Park, on the edge of town.
Nate had kissed me this morning before he left. Slow, soft, holding me like he couldn’t bear to let me go. And then he’d grabbed his keys and walked out the door with barely a word. Again.
The river caught the autumn sun in long, lazy streaks. I sat on the grass with my knees pulled up to my chest, barely able to breathe around the pain.
“I can’t bury my head in the sand anymore. He’s leaving.”
Hannah shredded a blade of grass between her fingers. “What are you gonna do? You can’t just let him go. Can you?”
I picked up a stone from the bank and turned it over, its smooth weight heavy in my hand.
“I don’t know if I have a choice, Han. He’s made his plans, whatever they are, without talking to me about it.
” I pulled my arm back and let the stone fly, the way Nate had taught me when I was a kid.
It skimmed the surface three times before dropping beneath with a flat, unsatisfying splash.
“So it seems pretty clear he doesn’t intend to invite me along. ”
“Would you go if he did?” Poppy asked quietly.
I didn’t even need to think about it. “Yes. I’d go anywhere he asked me to go.” Tears burned my eyes. “But he hasn’t asked me, has he?”
Cassidy sat up straighter, her eyes fierce. “Okay. Enough. You need to tell him this.”
“Tell him what, exactly?”
“What you just told us. Right now. Go.”
“You’re serious?”
Cassidy leaned forward. Her stare pinned me to the spot. “Yes. Because if he’s fixing on leaving town and doesn’t tell you, you’ll never get over it. You know that.”
She was right. She was so fucking right it hurt.
Poppy reached over and squeezed my hand. “You deserve an answer, Maya. Whatever it is.”
“Okay.” I swiped at my cheeks with the back of my hand. “I’m going.”
“We’ll be right here if it turns to shit,” Hannah said. The way she said it, steady and certain, almost broke me all over again.
I hugged each of them, fast and tight, and then I turned and walked out of the park before I could change my mind.
I walked fast. Head down, arms folded tight across my chest, rehearsing words that fell apart the second I strung them together.
Nate, I need to know what’s going on. Too calm. I wasn’t calm.
Nate, please don’t leave me. Too desperate. Even if it was true.
Nate, I love you. Too much. Too late. Too terrifying.
My parents’ street was only a few blocks from the park so I covered the distance in minutes.
My boots hit the pavement in a hard, angry rhythm, my pulse climbing with every step.
I didn’t know what I was going to say when I got there.
I just knew I couldn’t sit on that riverbank for one more second and let this happen to me without a fight.
I was halfway up the street when I raised my head.
Nate was coming out of my parents’ front door. With his suitcases.
I stopped dead on the sidewalk and stared. He crossed the porch, carried them down the steps, and tossed them into the bed of his truck. Then he reached into his back pocket for his phone.
My entire body went very still. And then it went very, very hot.
He was doing it. He was actually doing it. Packing his bags and leaving town without a word, the same way he had ten years ago. Except this time he wasn’t just walking away from a girl in a towel.
This time he was walking away from someone who’d held him through nightmares. Someone who’d sat in his lap in a restaurant in Iceland. Someone who’d jumped off a fucking cliff because he made her believe she could.
The pain in my chest caught fire and became something I could use.
Rage. White-hot and righteous and so much easier to carry than a broken heart.
I stalked the rest of the way down the street, fists clenched, muttering every filthy word I knew under my breath. Nate looked up from his phone. The flare of surprise in his eyes when he caught sight of me storming down the driveway only made me angrier.
I crossed the last ten feet between us in a blind blur. He opened his mouth, probably to say my name or offer some perfectly calm, perfectly rational excuse, but I refused to give him the chance.
I put both hands on his chest and shoved with everything I had.
He stumbled back two steps. Two. That was all I could manage against six foot three of solid muscle. It made me want to screeeeeam.
“You bastard!” My voice cracked. “You fucking asshole!”
“Maya! What’s happened?”
“What’s happened?” I shoved him again, but this time he held his ground. “How dare you ask me that!”
I hit his chest. Open-palmed, wild, no technique, no control. Every day of bracing for this moment and I still wasn’t ready for it.
“Maya, seriously.” His hands came up, but he didn’t grab me. “What the fuck is going on?”
All that came out were sounds, raw and ugly. Fury and grief so tangled I couldn’t tell them apart.
Then his hands closed around my wrists. Firm. Gentle. Immovable. He turned us both. My back hit the side of the truck, his body blocking the street. He held me there while I fought to breathe.
“Tell me what’s wrong.” Low and steady. “Right now.”
The rage collapsed. Just like that, all at once. Like someone had pulled a plug. What was underneath it was so much worse.
I dropped my forehead to his chest and sagged against him. “I don’t want you to go.”
The words came out broken and muffled.
“What?”
I forced my head up. His face was inches from mine, his brow creased, his eyes searching. “I don’t want you to go. There. I said it.”
He went still. The crease between his brows smoothed out and his eyes moved over my face. I watched the exact moment he understood what I was saying. What I thought was happening.
“Maya.” His grip loosened, his thumbs brushing across my pulse points. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Don’t.” My voice splintered. “Don’t lie to me. I saw the suitcases.”
“I’m moving out of your parents’ house. That’s it. That’s all.”
I stared at him, my chest heaving, tears still hot on my cheeks. The words didn’t make sense. They were in the wrong order. The wrong language. They couldn’t possibly mean what they sounded like. My brain refused to process the information. It felt like a trick. A trap.
“I’m not leaving,” he said again, quieter this time. Steady as stone. “I’m not leaving Esperance and I’m not leaving you.”
The rage and fear vanished. The emotion that rushed in to fill the empty space was so overwhelming my body didn’t know what to do with it. My hands and knees shook. The tears I’d been running on shifted from fury to something raw and ungoverned, spilling over faster than I could blink.
“I thought—” My breath hitched so hard it hurt. “The phone calls, and the library, and you kept disappearing, and I thought—”
“I realize that now.” His voice was rough. He released me, his hands coming up to cup my face. “I get what it looked like to you. And I’m so sorry.”
A sob broke out of me. Ugly and loud and completely beyond my control.
He caught me before my knees gave out, pulling me against his chest. I grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and held on, my legs totally useless, his arms the only thing keeping me upright.
I cried with enough force that my ribs ached with it. Weeks of bracing. Weeks of watching him go distant and talking myself out of asking why. Telling myself I could handle whatever came. Building walls I knew wouldn’t hold. All of it poured out of me in great, heaving waves I couldn’t stop.
His hand moved through my hair, his lips pressed to my temple. He didn’t say a word. He just stood there, holding me together until my hammering heart gradually synced with the steady thud of his.
The sobs thinned to shudders. The shudders thinned to long, ragged breaths. My grip loosened by degrees, my fingers cramped from how hard I’d been holding on.
“I’m getting snot on your shirt,” I mumbled.
His laugh was low and unsteady. “I’ve got other shirts.”
“This is a good one, though.”
“It’s seen worse.”
I pulled back just enough to look up at him.
My face was a wreck and my eyes were swollen, but his expression made my breath catch.
He was looking at me the way he had under the northern lights.
The same way he did at the top of the zip line.
As though I was the most important thing he’d ever seen and he couldn’t believe I was real.
His thumb traced a line through my tears. “You okay?”
“No.” I let out a wet, shaky laugh. “I’m a disaster. I just attacked you in a driveway.”
“You shoved me. Twice. My ego will recover.”
“I also called you a bastard.”
“Also survivable.”
Wrapping my arms around his waist, I pressed my face into his chest and breathed him in. He was here. He was staying. The two facts sat side by side in my head, bright and simple and refusing to sink in.
“You’re really not leaving,” I said.
“I’m really not leaving.”
“You swear.”
“I swear.”
His arms tightened around me, and I let my eyes close. The afternoon sun was warm on my back. The street was quiet. The man I loved was holding me and he was going absolutely nowhere.
We stood like that for long enough that my breathing evened out and my tears to dried. Long enough for the trembling in my hands to still and the wild hammering of my heart to settle.
When I finally stepped back, his hands lingered on my arms, sliding down to catch my fingers.
“I, uh, I need you to come for a drive.”
I wiped my face with the heels of my hands. “Why?”
“Because I need to show you something.”
“Nate, I swear to god, if you don’t tell me what’s going on this minute, I will lose my goddamn mind.”
His lips twitched. “You kind of already did, Slayer.”
A shaky laugh escaped me before I could stop it. He wiped my cheeks with his thumbs and kissed my forehead. The tenderness of it after all the rage and the grief made my knees buckle.
“Get in the truck,” he said again. “Please.”