He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 157

Chapter 157

Chapter 157

Alex’s POV

I didn’t know how long I had been here.

Time didn’t move the way it used to. There was no morning, no evening, no measurable distance between one moment and the next…. just a long, undifferentiated stretch of dark that occasionally produced something close to awareness before folding back into itself.

I couldn’t see anything

I could hear, sometimes.

Voices, distant and unclear, the way sound traveled through water. A machine, somewhere, with a rhythm I couldn’t place. Footsteps that came and went without staying long enough to mean anything.

And then, cutting through all of it, clear in a way nothing else was:

Maya.

The first time I heard her, I thought I was imagining it

That seemed like the more reasonable explanation…. that wherever I was, my mind had decided to manufacture the thing it wanted most, the way a person dying of thirst imagined water. I had spent ten years imagining her in one form or another. It would not have surprised me if this darkness had simply

continued the habit.

But she kept coming back

Not as a single memory replayed on a loop, but as something new each time…. different words, different tones, the specific texture of a real conversation rather than a recollection. She told me things I hadn’t known before. Things that hadn’t happened yet, as far as I could remember. Things that could only be real because I had no way to invent them.

I understood, somewhere in the dark, that she was actually there.

That she was sitting beside whatever I had become, talking to me, even though everyone around her had probably told her I couldn’t hear any of it.

She was wrong to listen to them.

I could hear everything.

I heard her apologize

For things that were never her fault… for pushing me away, for the walls she’d built….. I wanted to tell her none of that mattered anymore. I wanted to tell her I had understood it the whole time, that I had never once needed the apology because I had never once held it against her.

I couldn’t say any of it

1/4

Chapter 157

+15 Bonus

I heard her cry.

Not loudly….. quietly, the kind of crying someone did when they thought the room was empty of anyone who could be hurt by hearing it. I wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, to reach over and wipe the tears from her face. I wanted to tell her to stop carrying something that was never hers to

carry.

My body gave me nothing.

I heard her talk about the baby

About a heartbeat she described as textbook, about a scan photograph she’d kept in her bag like something sacred, about a future she was afraid to fully believe in because believing in things had cost her before. I wanted to tell her I believed in it enough for both of us.

I heard her talk about the wedding.

The garden. The vows we’d written. The three seconds before everything went wrong, replayed in her voice with a precision that told me she had gone over them a thousand times, looking for the moment where she could have done something differently.

There wasn’t one

I wanted to tell her that too.

Every word she said reached somewhere deeper than the bullet had.

The bullet had been physical…. sharp, contained, a wound a surgeon could locate and address. What Maya’s voice did was something else entirely. It went past whatever was keeping me under and found the part of me that was still fighting, still listening, still desperately trying to claw its way back toward the

surface.

I tried.

God, I tried.

I tried to open my eyes. I tried to move my hand toward hers. I tried to make any sound at all that would tell her I was still in here, that I hadn’t left, that every word she was saying was landing exactly where she

needed it to land even if she had no way of knowing it

Every attempt failed.

My body had become a door that wouldn’t open no matter how hard I threw myself against it from the inside. I screamed inside my own skull and nothing on the outside moved.

When she blamed herself, I wanted to argue

When she cried, I wanted to comfort her.

When she begged me to wake up, I wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything, to simply answer.

2/4

20ter 157

+15 Bonus

But she couldn’t hear me.

Nobody could.

I refused to stop trying anyway.

Somewhere ahead of me… I didn’t know how else to describe it, there was no ahead or behind in this place, but it felt like ahead, there was a light. Small, at first. A point so distant and so faint I might have imagined it the same way I might have imagined Maya, except that it didn’t disappear the way imagined things eventually did.

It grew

Slowly, over what might have been days, the light became less faint. I noticed it most clearly when Maya held my hand…. there was a difference, something I couldn’t have explained to anyone but that I felt with absolute certainty, between the darkness when she was there and the darkness when she wasn’t. When her hand was in mine, the light moved closer.

When she said my name, it pulsed, brighter, like something responding directly to the sound.

Maybe it was hope

Maybe it was simply the body healing, some process too deep for conscious thought to track.

Maybe it was Maya herself, somehow reaching past everything that separated us and physically pulling me back toward the surface.

I didn’t know which

I didn’t care which.

I followed it.

I followed it because there were promises I hadn’t kept yet

There was a wedding sitting unfinished in a garden, the vows half-spoken, the I do that never arrived. There was a child I hadn’t met, growing inside the woman who never left my side, who deserved a father who showed up rather than one who disappeared into the dark at the first real test

Most of all, there was Maya.

The woman I had loved since before she knew I was watching. The woman who had finally, after everything, stopped running from what we were. The woman who believed, somewhere in her exhausted, grieving heart, that she might have already lost me.

She was wrong.

I wasn’t leaving her.

Not after a decade of waiting for the right moment. Not after surviving everything that had been thrown at us to get here. Not now, when we were finally, finally on the same side of every wall she had ever built.

3/4

Chapter 157

+15 Bonus

My finger moved.

Barely.

A twitch, nothing more… the kind of movement that’t have registered to anyone not paying full

attention.

But it was real.

I had done it.

Somewhere in the dark, for the first time in days, I felt something close to relief flood through whatever

was left of me.

The door hadn’t opened. Not yet. But something on the other side of it had shifted, just slightly, just enough to prove that I was still in here, still fighting, still finding my way toward the light that grew brighter every time she said my name.

I held onto the feeling.

And in the dark, where no one could see it, I smiled.

The light was close now.

I kept following it home.

ENJOYING THE BOOK?

Give it a rating to show your support!

Comments

Support

Share