18. Maya
Some work turned into an entire afternoon’s worth, so lunch turned into dinner, then dinner turned into drinks and conversation long after the plates had been cleared from their table. Being with Reed was just so easy. To say that they had picked up right where they left off would be incorrect because something was different. Somehow they felt closer despite being apart for months.
He had also become easier on the eyes if that was even possible. Handsome in a way she’d never allowed herself to fully appreciate before. His light brown hair had grown out to the point where you could finally make out his curls, and the scruff had grown even thicker than she ever remembered. He wore a light blue oxford shirt tucked into a pair of jeans and what she swore looked like a pair of tan boots peeking out from under them. She’d catch herself staring at him during their brief lulls, just as she was now, searching for more subtle changes or just admiring those she had already noticed.
“How are you two doing over here?” the server asked as she passed by on her way around the dining room of the bar and grill around the corner from their office.
“Can we get another round?” Maya asked. She wasn’t sure what time it was and really didn’t even want another drink, but she had no desire to call it a night yet.
“You got it.”
The waitress walked away and Maya turned to pick up where they’d left off only to find Reed looking concerned. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve still gotta drive home.”
She dismissed his worries with a wave of her hand. “I’m not driving back to my parents’ place at this point. Adam’s out of town and I still have my keys, so I was just going to walk to his place and crash. You can come with.”
She realized how that must have sounded as the words tumbled out of her tipsy little mouth, only she didn’t want to take them back necessarily. She let them linger in the air between them, just to see how he’d react, and he didn’t seem put off at all.
When their next round was dropped off, he traded out his empty and lifted his glass. “We just finished our second to last semester of law school, so we deserve to celebrate. At least a little bit, right?”
She smiled back. “Right.”
“So tell me something…” She rested her elbows on the table and leaned in closer to lessen the distance between them. “Did you ever end up going out for Thai with Lauren?”
“How long have you been waitin’ to ask that?”
“Oh God, like all day, every day. You have no idea how many hours of sleep I’ve lost over it.”
She was exaggerating, of course, but the truth is it had crossed her mind more than a few times while she was away living her life and he was down here living his. She wondered about him quite a lot, actually, and as if her impromptu sleepover invitation wasn’t evidence enough, her filter was pretty much shot at this point.
“You could have called and asked, then,” he teased, prolonging the reveal.
“I suppose I could have, but I didn’t, and I’m here now, so? Did you?”
“Yes,” he answered simply.
And a tiny little dagger pierced her heart. For some reason she was almost certain that he would have kept putting her off. Not that there was anything wrong with them having lunch, but she felt a hint of betrayal upon hearing that she had thought wrong.
She raised her eyebrows with casual interest. “Really?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t keep saying no.”
“So it was just a one-time deal?”
She caught him about to take a sip of his beer, and he grinned over the rim of the glass. “That’s personal, Hendricks.”
“We’re friends now, Reed,” she defended. “We’re allowed to be.”
“So I can grill you on how many dates you went on last semester and you wouldn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable?”
He seemed to enjoy giving her a hard time over this, meanwhile, she felt that tiny little dagger twist in her heart. “Date? Who said anything about a date?”
He held his hands up to assuage her. “It was a poor choice of words. We just went out for lunch a couple of times.”
She knew this was a completely irrational reaction given that she’d gone out on a few dates that went nowhere over the fall semester, but there was something about hearing about what went on in her absence that made her feel territorial. At King and Associates, Stanton and Hendricks were the team, not Reed and Lauren.
“Lauren gave her notice this week, by the way,” he mentioned as he idly picked at the damp paper coaster under his drink. “She finally got her dream job out in Los Angeles. She’s going to be working for Paramount.”
Maya’s eyes went wide, and she hurriedly swallowed the sip of beer she’d just taken. “By the way?” The table behind them gave her a dirty look in response to her too loud outburst, so she leaned in and lowered her voice. “Are you serious just bringing that up now?”
“I was gonna tell you, we got sidetracked.”
“That’s a huge deal, Reed,” she stressed as she set her drink down. “That means Al has a position for a junior associate opening up.”
“I know,” he answered, again, so nonchalant about the entire thing.
“Well, are you going to take it?”
“Me?” He laughed and shook his head. “No, you know I’m not cut out for this kind of work.”
“What are you talking about?” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand in lieu of slapping some sense into him. “Yes, you are. You’re doing it, and you’re really good at it. And Al already thinks the world of you. You’d be crazy not to take it when he offers it to you, and he will offer it to you.”
He smiled softly at her then looked down at their hands which she took as a cue to ease up on her death grip, but when she began to move her hand away, he curled his fingers around hers and gently pulled them back.
“He’s known from the start that my plan is to stay in Clayville and work in the district attorney’s office,” he reminded her.
“But you stayed here. There’s a reason you did.”
He opened his mouth, then hesitated and looked down at their hands again, his thumb gently tracing circles on top of her hand. “I stayed for us. To see our case through.”
He watched her intently, trying to read her, and she wondered if he could tell her heart had stopped beating in her chest. He had taken on all of this extra work and responsibility for them. For her, really, since she couldn’t be there to finish the work they’d started. He felt it, too. It was still Hendricks and Stanton. Us.
“Anyway, I can’t lose track of why I started all this to begin with,” he said quietly after the heavy pause. “I’ve got a life to get back to.”
“You have a wife and kids I don’t know about?” she teased, though he didn’t look too amused.
“No, but I’ve got a home, and my family and friends, and some things I need to take care of. You know that.”
“Why would you go back to all of that corruption, though? You’ve got an out here.”
“For that exact reason. The old guys? They won’t be around forever. People like Dev, and his wife Willa, my friends Sara and Dustin…we’re all working our way up, and hopefully we’ll be able to make a difference soon.”
She had no retort. It was so earnest. So right. So him.
“Well, they have no idea how lucky they are to have you.”
“Thank you,” he mumbled, uncomfortable with the praise. “When Lauren announced her resignation, though, I thought of you.”
Her brow arched as she took a sip of her drink. “Hmm?”
“This is your dream job.”
“I mean, it’s a great job, but moving back home isn’t in the plans for me.”
“It just seems like a waste for the position to go to someone else who’s probably going to put in a few years and move on instead of someone who’s so passionate about the work.”
“You know Al’s firm isn’t the only one doing this kind of work, right?” she asked with a grin.
“Yes,” he allowed. “But I also know that if you go to a big firm, you won’t actually get your hands on a good case for a few years. With Al, you’d hit the ground running. Hell, you’d already have a case waiting for you.”
“Like I said, there’s no shortage of cases or clients out there,” she repeated, firm in her decision. “I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, but I know you, Maya.”
Now he was turning the tables on her, and she never took kindly to people telling her what to do, even if it was Reed. She slid her hand out from under his. “Maybe you don’t.” She punctuated it with an admittedly passive aggressive shrug.
“Yeah, I do. I know how much you love the work, and that’s not gonna cut it for you.”
She sighed wearily, wondering how they’d ended up here. Their perfect afternoon and evening had devolved into tension over dates and jobs and future plans that were decided long before they knew each other.
“Look, this is all hypothetical right now, and I didn’t come here to have it out with you in a bar, so let’s just move on…how about those Braves?” she asked, desperately trying to get back to a good place.
“There’s no baseball in December,” he answered glumly.
“Of course there’s not.”
She tipped her glass at him then took a long sip, and eyed the still nearly full drink she held in her hand. It was going to be a long night.
* * *
After fumbling with her keys and trying two wrong ones before she finally unlocked the door, Maya stumbled into Adam’s house with Reed following behind her. They were both a little buzzed, and unfortunately not the giddy kind of buzzed they had started off as. Now they were irritated and feeling awkward, each wishing they were sober enough to go their separate ways and call it a night.
She locked up and tossed her keys onto the small table in the entryway. “You want the guest bed or the couch?”
“I’ll take the couch,” he said, nodding toward the living room.
“Pillows and blankets are in the closet at the end of the hall right by the bathroom. If you need anything else, just let me know.”
“Thanks.”
She forced a grin and turned for the guest room which Adam still referred to as her room since he held out hope that she would come back frequently enough to use it. Once inside, she shut the door behind her and took a deep breath. How the hell did we get here? she thought as she dug a pair of pajama pants and a t-shirt out of the dresser.
He had plans and she had plans, and they couldn’t be more different. It was as simple as that. And while he answered her questions openly and honestly, she fell back on bad habits and went on the defensive, but how else was she supposed to react? Of course she would protect the life she had meticulously planned and worked towards since she was a teenager. Regardless of what the future held, though, she knew that she hated the tension between them right now. She supposed that was part of being an us.
Maya opened the bedroom door, walked through the dark, quiet living room and into the kitchen where she took two glasses from the cabinet over the sink. She filled them both with tap water then grabbed the bottle of Tylenol Adam kept on his kitchen counter. She walked towards the couch where Reed was stretched out on his back in jeans and his white undershirt, his head propped against the rolled armrest, and his hands folded across his stomach as he stared at the ceiling. His boots sat on the floor next to the couch, and his blue shirt was draped over the back of it.
She took a seat on the sliver of cushion left between his leg and the edge and handed him a glass of water. She shook out four pills, two for herself and two for him which he also accepted without words. He just clenched his fist around them and rested his hand back where it had been as he stared up at the ceiling again. He was obviously not in the mood for talking anymore, and she knew she probably deserved that after dinner. She popped the pills into her mouth and took a sip of water to swallow them down then set her glass on the table.
“I can see the neighborhood I grew up in from your office window,” she offered quietly.
He finally looked at her then pushed himself up into a seated position, his legs still stretched out in front of him as he came face to face with her.
“Going away and coming back just feels wrong,” she continued now that she had his attention. “Like I’m moving backward instead of forward.”
“I’m probably the wrong person to say that to considering my family is a ten-minute walk from my house in one direction, and the job I’m trying for is ten minutes in the other direction.” His voice was strained from the alcohol and late hour. “I never even left.”
“And I love that about you,” she assured him quickly, her hand landing on his thigh for emphasis. “It’s right for you. I’m just saying it feels wrong for me.”
“Yeah, I know,” he assured her all the same. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. I just had it in my head that it was meant to be, but…” He shrugged as he trailed off.
But what?And what was meant to be? The job? Their friendship? Us?
Her breathing slowed, but her heart and mind raced while they sat staring at each other in the middle of the night. She loved working with this man. She loved talking to him. She brought her hand up, running her fingers through the curls on top of his head and then down the back before settling her hand on his cheek. She loved looking at this face. She loved that even after months apart, they were still an us.
She leaned in and closed her eyes. Her lips brushed against his, feather light and tentative until she felt his hand on her cheek, drawing her face in closer to his. And with that, they pressed their lips together tightly as they each inhaled, breathing each other in and feeling the heady rush of coming together for the first time. After just a few moments, they broke apart, resting their foreheads against one another’s as they caught their breath.
“You’re leaving,” Reed whispered.
She clenched her eyes shut upon hearing the sobering reminder. “In two weeks,” she whispered back, trying to be optimistic.
“But you’re not coming back.”
“No.”
She pulled away from him and dropped her forehead into the crook of his neck. The moment was over and would have to remain just that because after this break, their lives would go in completely different directions, never to meet again if all went according to plan. His arms wrapped around her back, and she leaned into him to enjoy this closeness for just a little while longer.