Chapter 31
MAYA
I fold a sweater and press it flat against the top of the bed.
My hands are not cooperating. Not with the dramatic tremor of a woman in crisis.
I did that already, in the dark, for hours, until my face swelled and my ribs ached from the effort of keeping the sound inside my chest. This is what comes after.
The fine, persistent vibration of a body running on nothing.
A shirt. Two pairs of jeans. Underwear. The inventory of departure, the same motions I made in the Los Angeles apartment when the walls closed in and every notification was another piece of me distributed to strangers.
I packed that apartment with the same numb efficiency. Hands moving. Brain offline.
But in Los Angeles I was running from destruction.
This is running from the only thing that has ever felt like repair.
My hands stop on the jeans. Fingers pressed into denim, the stillness spreading up through my wrists, my forearms, my shoulders, until I am standing in the center of a room holding a pair of jeans and staring at a wall.
I love them.
All three of them. Differently, specifically, with a completeness that terrifies me because the last time I thought I loved someone I handed him the tools to destroy my life.
These men are not Daniel.
I know this.
And I am leaving them anyway.
I can feel it. Spreading Contaminating. Like an oil spill, sticking to everything if I don’t contain it.
I try to inhale. My ribs are trying to expand against a chest that has decided to contract.
I sit on the edge of the bed. Both palms flat on the mattress. The texture of the cotton weave against my skin.
The air comes in. Not enough. But some.
I stand. Go back organizing my things to leave. The motions are jerky, imprecise, but the movement gives my body something to do other than fail at breathing.
A knock. "Maya." Jace's voice. Low, rough, stripped of every layer of charm.
A pause. I hear him swallow.
"I made you something to eat. I'll leave it by the door."
I'm across the room before the decision finishes forming. Hand on the knob. Turning. Pulling.
He's there.
Dark circles deeper than mine. Stubble. Red-rimmed eyes looking at me with something so undefended that my hands fist at my sides to keep from reaching for him.
He looks wrecked.
That's my fault.
We stand in the doorway. Two people who have learned to be careful with the distance between their bodies, close enough to feel each other's warmth and not touching because touching would end something we're both trying to survive.
He looks past me. Into the room. His gaze finds the folded clothes, the evidence.
His jaw works.
"You're packing."
The words land flat. Careful.
I don't answer. I had hours to prepare for this moment and I spent them crying and packing and failing to breathe and I have nothing ready for the look on his face.
He's holding the tray. Rosemary bread, sliced. A small bowl of chicken soup. A glass of water. He arranged everything with care. Napkin folded, spoon placed.
He lifts the tray slightly. A question made physical.
I step aside.
He sets it on the bedside table with controlled placement. Then he turns and sees the folded clothes again.
His eyes go bright.
He blinks. Clears his throat with a sound like something tearing.
He nods. Slow. The nod of a man granting permission for something that is destroying him.
Then he reaches into the pocket of his jeans.
He comes closer. Close enough that the air between us becomes a living thing, charged with everything we are not saying.
He pulls out a key. Small. Brass.
"I don't understand why you're doing this." His voice is quiet in a way I've never heard from him. "But I get it. Leaving. I've been doing it almost my whole life."
He looks at the key.
"Then I found someone who made me stop." A breath that I can see costs him. His throat works. "I hope someday you find that too."
He takes my left hand. Opens my fingers and sets the key in my palm. Brass against skin. Cold, small, and weighted with something that has nothing to do with mass.
"Key to our house," His voice cracks on our. "So maybe, someday, you find your way back."
The half-smile that surfaces is a ghost of the Jace grin.
The one that gets him into trouble and out of it in equal measure.
"I'd say it's the key to my heart but that's the worst line I've ever considered saying out loud, and also it'd be wrong, because you've owned that since I watched a woman in a bath towel come at me with an axe. "
The sound that comes out of me is broken and jagged and half sob and the moment he hears it his face collapses and he's blinking hard.
"Don't." A whisper. "Please. I can take a lot but I can't take you crying."
He folds my fingers around the key. His hand over mine. His palm warm against my knuckles.
The tears come. Not the silent ones from behind the door. These have sound. These move through my body in waves, racking, ugly, the crying of a woman who has run out of ways to hold herself together.
"Come here," he says, and pulls me in.
His arms close around me. One hand at the back of my head, fingers in my hair, holding me against his chest where his heart is hammering fast and hard.
The other arm around my waist, tight, the grip of a man holding something he knows he's about to lose.
I press my face into his shirt and I cry the way I haven't cried since Los Angeles.
Whole-body. Shoulders heaving. The sounds ugly and real.
He doesn't tell me it's okay.
He just holds on.
And like a demolition it comes to me.
I can't leave. And if I can't leave, then I owe them the only thing I've been withholding.
The truth.
All of it. The photos. The profiles. Daniel. What I am. What followed me here. What it might cost them if I stay.
They deserve to decide. With all the information. The actual, ugly, complete truth of what I'm carrying.
I pull back. Enough to see his face. Enough to find his blue eyes that are red and wrecked.
"I need to tell you something," My voice is destroyed. Barely functional. "All of you. And it might… it might change things."
"Never," he says.
He kisses me. Not gently. Not with caution. He kisses me like a man planting a flag in the ground he's chosen, and I kiss him back with the taste of salt between us and the key hold tight in my fist.