Chapter 13 #2
“Better,” she says. “Thank you.”
I stand, putting distance between us again because we both need it, though for different reasons, and I turn toward the kitchen under the pretense of checking the kettle.
The water is hot enough now, steam rising in soft curls, and I prepare tea because it is something to offer that does not demand anything in return.
When I bring her a mug, our fingers brush for less than a second, but the contact moves through me with a quiet force I do not allow myself to show.
She notices anyway.
That has not changed.
“You disappeared into a cabin and did therapy by satellite,” she says after taking the mug, her tone soft but edged with something I cannot quite place. “That is somehow exactly what I would expect from you and not at all what I expected.”
“I know.”
“Did you ever come into town?”
“Rarely.”
“To Calder Café?”
“No.”
Her mouth tightens, just slightly, and I understand why before she says anything. Calder Café and Market was her world, the place she kept showing up, the place where I might have found her if I had wanted to. Avoiding it was not neutral. It was a decision.
“I couldn’t see you from a distance,” I say before she has to ask. “And I didn’t trust myself to see you up close.”
“After all that therapy?”
“Especially then,” I admit. “Because therapy made me honest about what I wanted, and wanting you was never the part I had under control.”
The words shift the room.
I feel it immediately, the way silence changes texture, the way her breath catches softly enough that I might have missed it if every part of me were not tuned toward her.
I should regret saying it. It is too much, too soon, too close to the thing we have not earned our way back to.
But it is also true, and I am tired of making cowardice look like restraint.
“Maya,” I say, before the silence can stretch into something neither of us can navigate, “I am not saying that because I expect anything from you.”
She looks down into her tea, her fingers curved around the mug for warmth. “I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know,” she repeats, and this time she looks at me. “That is what makes it harder.”
Outside, the storm hits harder, wind dragging snow across the windows in thick waves until the glass becomes a shifting wall of white.
The cabin feels smaller now, not because of the space but because of what we have let into it, and for the first time in years, I do not know whether that frightens me or steadies me.
Maybe both. Maybe the difference is not as important as what I do next.
“You should sleep,” I say, because her face has gone pale around the edges, exhaustion finally overtaking adrenaline. “The couch pulls out. I’ll take the chair.”
She studies me for a moment. “You don’t have to punish yourself with a chair, Marco.”
The sound of my name in her voice nearly undoes something I thought I had secured years ago. “It’s not punishment.”
“Then what is it?”
“Distance.”
She absorbs that, and I see the moment she understands not as rejection, but as care, as boundary, as proof of the work I claim to have done. Her expression softens in a way that makes me want to cross the room and undo every careful choice I have made tonight, which is exactly why I do not move.
“All right,” she says finally.
I set up the couch for her with the same deliberate precision I bring to everything now, laying out blankets, adding another pillow, making sure her ankle is elevated properly.
She lets me help her shift, and the moment requires contact again, my arm behind her back, her hand briefly gripping my shoulder as she adjusts, and every instinct in me narrows around the feel of her weight leaning into me.
I breathe through it, steady and slow, not because I want less of the moment, but because I want to deserve it.
When she is settled, I step back and lower the lamp, leaving the room in firelight and storm-shadow.
She looks smaller beneath the blankets, not weak, never that, but tired in a way that makes the years between us feel suddenly cruel.
I move to the chair near the hearth and sit, stretching one leg out, prepared for a long night of not sleeping.
“Marco?” she says after a few minutes.
“Yes.”
“If the storm clears tomorrow, I still don’t know what happens next.”
I turn my head toward her, and in the dim light, her eyes find mine across the room. There is no promise in what she says, no forgiveness wrapped neatly for my comfort, but there is honesty, and after everything, honesty feels like more than I deserve.
“I know,” I say.
She is quiet for another moment. “But I don’t want to pretend this didn’t happen.”
My chest tightens, not painfully, but with the force of something opening that I had stopped expecting to feel. “Neither do I.”
She nods once, then closes her eyes, and I sit there listening to the storm and the slow, uneven rhythm of her breathing as she drifts toward sleep.
I do not mistake the moment for resolution.
I know better than that now. Healing is not a door you walk through once and lock behind you, and love, if this still has any right to carry that name, is not made safe by wanting alone.
But as the fire burns low and the storm keeps us sealed inside the cabin, I understand something with a clarity that settles deeper than hope and steadier than fear.
For the first time in five years, I did not run.
And for tonight, that is enough.