27. Chapter 27
Maya
***
I take one step toward him.
I don't get a second one.
Mrs. Calloway reaches me first, both hands around mine, telling me she always knew it would work out, that she said so to her sister just last week, and I am nodding and thanking her and trying to see past her shoulder to where Sawyer was standing a moment ago.
He is still there. He is also, I notice, being intercepted by his own small crowd, one of the Conservatory vendors shaking his hand with both of his, an older man I don't recognize saying something that makes Sawyer's expression go briefly, genuinely warm.
I lose sight of him in the gallery's general drift toward the doors.
I find him again near the steps, and I am three feet closer than I was, and then Bette is there, taking my face in both hands and telling me that her grandmother would have loved this, would have loved me, and I am laughing and crying at the same time and losing track of Sawyer again entirely.
By the time the gallery thins out enough for me to actually move freely, he is being walked toward the parking lot by his attorney, a tall man with a folder under his arm, both of them talking in the low, efficient tone of people who still have paperwork between them and the rest of their lives.
I catch his eye over the attorney's shoulder.
He catches mine.
Something passes between us, a held breath stretched the length of the courthouse steps, and for one suspended second neither of us moves, and then Lily is pulling me toward Carl who wants to tell me something, and when I look back Sawyer has been pulled the other way by Grace, who is holding her phone out to him with an expression that means it cannot wait.
We do this for twenty minutes.
Drift toward each other. Get pulled apart. Find each other again across a widening, narrowing, widening gap of well-wishers and reporters and people who have waited their whole lives to shake the hand of the man who saved their town.
Finally, near the fountain at the edge of the courthouse lawn, we both arrive at the same gap in the crowd at the same moment, and there is no one standing between us, and for the length of three full seconds, neither of us says anything at all.
He reaches for me.
I step into it before he finishes reaching, his hand cups my cheek and slides down gently to my jaw, and I lean into it, and mine finds the front of his shirt, and the world tilts the way it tilted once in a candlelit room during a storm, and we are perhaps half a breath from finally, finally closing the distance that has been sitting between us since a phone call I was too afraid to answer honestly, when someone calls his name.
"Mr. Ransome. Mr. Ransome." A reporter, notepad already out, already walking toward us. "Could I get a quick comment on the ruling?"
Sawyer's hand stays on my jaw for one more second, his eyes still on mine, something between frustration and quiet laughter moving through his expression.
"No," he says to her, without looking away from me.
"It's a good question though." I say, my voice not quite steady. "What do you have to say."
"I have a great deal to say." His thumb moves once, slow, along my cheekbone. "None of it for a notepad."
I meet his eyes.
He holds my gaze.
And I understand, without either of us saying it, exactly where we need to go.
"The shop," I say.
"The shop," he agrees.
***
I get there first.
I drive faster than I should down Main Street in the late afternoon light, and I let myself into Finch and Fern with hands that are not entirely steady, and I stand in the middle of the shop I have spent my whole adult life building and wait.
Five minutes pass. Then ten.
I refill the water buckets that don't need refilling.
I straighten stems that are already straight.
I tell myself he is finishing a conversation, signing something, doing one of the dozen practical things a man like Sawyer Ransome has to do before he can simply walk away from a parking lot full of people who want a piece of him.I do not entirely believe it.
Some old, familiar voicein the back of my mind has started whispering that maybe this was the moment, maybe the courthouse steps were as far as it was ever going to go, maybe I had spent twenty minutes chasing something that already slipped away from me a while ago.
The bell above the door rings.
I turn around.
Sawyer is standing in the doorway, his jacket slightly rumpled, his tie loosened at the collar in a way I have never once seen him allow it to be, and the look on his face when he sees me is the look of a man who drove here faster than he should have too.
He closes the door behind him. He turns the lock without looking away from me.
Neither of us moves for a moment.
"I kept getting pulled away from you," he says. "All afternoon. Every time I thought I'd reached you, someone else needed something."
"I know. Me too." I press my hands flat against my apron, a habit I have never managed to break. "I thought maybe that was it. I thought maybe we'd run out of chances."
"We didn't."
I cross the shop floor and stop in front of him, close enough now that I can see the day's exhaustion sitting at the corners of his eyes, close enough to smell the rain that must have caught him somewhere between the courthouse and here.
"Sawyer, before anything, I wanted to say..." I take a breath. "Thank you. For everything." Another breath. "Not just for me. For everyone whose lives would have been affected as much as mine if the ruling had gone the other way." I meet his eyes. "Thank you."
He shakes his head slightly. "There's no need to thank me."
"I know." My voice catches, just slightly. "Which is somehow harder to say thank you for, because it means so much more."
He is quiet, watching me, the way he watches everything that matters.
"The truth is... I was afraid." The tears come now, and I let them.
"I was afraid that if I let you in, I would lose myself the way my father lost himself.
That loving you would mean handing you everything, until there was nothing left of me to hand over.
" I look at him. "And so I kept you at arm's length.
Even when every part of me wanted the opposite. "
His expression, watching me say this, is the most unguarded I have ever seen it.
His jaw tightens once, the way it does when something costs him.
He touches his mouth, briefly, the way a person does when they are trying to hold a feeling in.
Something in his expression breaks open, quietly, the way it breaks open in a person who has just understood the full weight of what someone else has been carrying.
"Would you forgive me?" I ask.
"There is nothing to forgive."
"Sawyer."
"Maya." He steps closer. "I loved you from the moment you climbed out of that van of yours, furious, soaked from the storm, demanding to know why my gate had the audacity to be where it was instead of apologizing for hitting it.
I had never met anyone like you. You walked into my morning like a hurricane, completely unimpressed by me. "
"I was not unimpressed."
"You were."
"I was running late and you were standing in front of an enormous gate looking like you owned the entire road."
"I did own the entire road. I still do."
"That is not the point." But I am laughing through the tears, and so is he, and for one moment the whole weight of everything simply lifts.
The laughter fades.
"Maya, seriously." He says it quietly. "I've grown accustomed to people freezing the moment I walk into a room.
Not because they respected me. Because they were afraid of what I represented.
And there you were, entirely unafraid, telling me precisely what you thought of my gate.
" He pauses. "It undid something in me I had thought was permanently fixed in place. "
"I'm sorry," I say. "For yelling at you about your gate."
"Don't be." His hands find my face, both of them, gentle. "I needed that. You brought me back to a place I had forgotten existed."
A breath. Then:
"You owe me nothing, Maya. Not the building, not gratitude, not an explanation for any of the time or distance you needed. I love you. I am not interested in owning you or controlling you. I only want to love you. If you will let me."
I don't answer with words.
I close the distance between us, my hands finding the front of his shirt, and I pull him down to me and I kiss him.
It is slow at first, and then it isn't. It is the answer to every question either of us has been too careful to ask out loud.
When we finally part, I am breathless, and so is he, and the late afternoon light is coming through the front glass the way it always does, gold and ordinary and completely indifferent to the fact that everything has just changed.
"Does that answer your question?" I ask.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then that smile, the real one, the one I have never seen fully until right now, spreads slowly across his face.
He kisses me again, and this one is not slow at all.
His hand slips into my hair while his other arm draws me in until there is no space left between us.
I feel his careful restraint give way to something he has been holding back since the moment he locked the door behind him.
I rise onto my toes to meet him, and the kiss deepens into something unhurried and certain, the kind that comes from finally having all the time in the world.
When we finally part, just enough to breathe, his forehead rests against mine.
I can feel his heart pounding as hard as my own.
This is what it was all for. The gate and the tulips and the ranunculus and the sketch on the worktable. All of it leading here. To this man. To this shop. To this.