He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 193

Chapter 193

Chapter 193

Alex’s POV

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The darkness was familiar…. I had been in it for two months or so Maya had told me, and I had no reason to doubt her, though two months felt both too long and too short for the place I had been.

Familiar enough that stepping back into it in sleep did not produce immediate alarm. Just the dark, the

silence….

And then Maya’s name.

I called it and the calling went nowhere, absorbed by the dark the way the dark absorbed everything, without echo, without any indication that the sound had mattered.

I called it again….

Nothing

The gunshot had no warning.

I turned.

She was falling.

The white dress…. the one from the garden, the one she had said yes in, the one that had been the last thing I saw before the pain and the dark…. the white of it changing colour, the terrible progression of a thing that had been one thing becoming another.

I ran

The distance did not change….

That was the particular cruelty of the nightmare, the effort and the motion and the desperation, and her on the ground ahead of me, and the ground between us not shrinking regardless of how hard I moved.

“Maya!”

The word leaving me with everything behind it.

My eyes opened….

The room

The monitor.

The window with its morning light.

My heart was doing something the monitor was apparently noting, because one of the numbers on the screen had changed from what I had been watching it do for the past several hours.

I breathed….

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Chapter 193

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Pressed both hands flat against the bed to confirm the surface was real

Then I felt her hand.

She was in the chair.

Exactly where she had been when I closed my eyes. Not the chair she had been sleeping in for two months… she had told me about the sleeping in the chair, and I had received the information with the same mixed feeling of gratitude and guilt that most of the information from the past two months produced.

The chair beside my bed. Her hand around mine.

“Hey,” she said

Her voice quiet. For the room, not the corridor.

“It was only a nightmare. You’re safe”

I looked at her….

At the face that had been the last thing I had been trying to reach in the dream and was now simply here, present, requiring no running.

“I know,” I said.

She reached up….

Her hand in my hair…. the same gesture from before I slept, the thing she had apparently been doing for two months when she thought I might be able to feel it.

I had felt it….

“You were shouting,” she said.

“I know,” I said again….

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” I said. Then: “Not yet”

She nodded.

Stayed where she was.

The doctor arrived twenty minutes later with two nurses, which was the rhythm I was beginning to map…. the assessment schedule, the monitoring, the careful measurement of the gap between where I was and where the discharge threshold sat.

I answered the questions…..

I let the nurses do what the nurses needed to do.

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Chapter 193

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I watched Maya from the other side of the room where she had moved to give the team working space, and I thought about the nightmare, which was not going to be a recurring event if I had anything to say about it but which had communicated something I needed to sit with.

The white dress….

The sound.

The distance that didn’t close no matter how hard I ran.

I had been three seconds faster

Three seconds earlier in my turn and the angle would have been different.

I did not regret the turn.

I would make the same turn again, given the same garden and the same sound and the same angle of the barrel.

But the dream was apparently going to need some time before it understood that.

The knock came while the nursing team was finishing.

Not the corridor knock…. the door opening….

A man in the casual uniform of a delivery service, holding a bouquet

The flowers were white…. structural, architectural, the specific kind that took skill to arrange.

I had seen flowers like these before.

“Delivery for Miss Maya,” he said.

Maya looked up from across the room.

The smile arrived before she had consciously decided on it….

“You really didn’t have to,” she said.

I looked at the flowers

Then at her.

“I didn’t send those,” I said.

The smile in her expression became something else

Not alarm….

She crossed to the flowers.

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Chapter 193

The delivery man had set them on the side table

Maya looked at the arrangement.

Then at the small card attached….

She turned it over.

I watched her read it.

Or rather, I watched her not read it…..

“There’s no name,” she said

Her voice was level.

Her eyes came up to mine.

I looked at the flowers….

White. Structural.

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