He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 220

Chapter 220

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Chapter 220

Alex’s POV

She was asleep when the city came to life.

I had been awake since six…. I stood on the balcony with the coffee and watched Paris do what Paris did in the early morning, which was become itself gradually and without announcement.

The rooftops first….

Below the rooftops, the street.

A bakery opening… Paris, coming to itself.

I drank my coffee.

Maya appeared in the balcony doorway.

Sleep still visible on her face…..

She looked at the city.

Then at me.

At the two cups.

I extended hers.

She came to stand beside me, taking the cup, leaning forward against the balcony rail to look at the rooftops doing their morning thing.

“It’s real,” she said.

“It is,” I said.

“Paris is real,” she said. “We’re in Paris.”

“We’re in Paris,” I confirmed.

She looked at me.

The smile.

“I have another surprise,” I said.

“Another surprise again? she replied

She laughed.

“Should I even ask what it is?” she said.

“You’ll see soon,” I said.

The car arrived at nine.

Maya watched through the window.

Not at the tower…. we had seen the tower from multiple angles across the previous day, at close range and at distance, from the hotel balcony and from the car and from the bridge we had walked across in the early afternoon.

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Chapter 220

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She had taken photographs and then put the phone away and simply looked, which was the thing she did with things she intended to remember properly rather than just record.

This morning she was watching the city’s ordinary life

The market being set up on a square we passed. The café chairs being arranged on a pavement. The man with the bicycle adjusting something on it with the focused attention…

“People just live here,” she said.

“People just live here,” I said.

“They wake up and Paris is outside their window,” she said. “Every morning.”

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me

“That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Most of them probably don’t think so anymore. But it is.”

The dock.

She saw the yacht before I had introduced it…. we came around the corner and it was there, and I watched her take it in: the white of it on the grey-green water, the flowers at the bow in the same structural arrangement that had been appearing throughout the week, the soft music that was present without insisting on itself.

“Alex,” she said.

“Come on,” I said.

The Seine at this hour.

Maya stood at the bow.

I stood behind her.

She said very little for the first twenty minutes.

Not from absence….. from the full occupation of someone who was receiving something with all available attention and didn’t want to divide it by also producing language.

Breakfast on the deck.

The galley had produced something… fresh bread, which was not extraordinary in Paris except that in Paris the bread was different from the bread anywhere else in the way that food was different in places where the making of it was taken seriously. Fruit. Coffee in the cups that communicated French coffee rather than international hotel coffee.

We ate.

“You’ve barely looked at the scenery,” Maya said.

“I have,” I said.

She tilted her head.

“You’ve been watching me watch the scenery,” she said.

“My favourite view is standing beside me,” I said.

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She looked at me

“That’s very good,” she said.

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“I had two months of practice,” I said. “Everything I heard you say, everything you described…. I was composing responses the whole time and couldn’t use any of them.” I paused. “I’m making up for lost time.”

She leaned against me.

Watching the river.

We talked about the baby.

. The conversations that existed before the practical conversations were necessary, when the person was still someone you were imagining rather than someone you were scheduling around.

What they would make of Paris.

Whether Paris was the kind of city a child understood or the kind of city that a person arrived at in adulthood and found they had been prepared for without knowing.

Whether they would love the ocean the way Maya did or the city the way I did and whether those were different loves or the same love with different edges.

Before we returned to the dock, I reached into my jacket.

Small. The kind of thing that existed in the category of objects that were modest in size and significant in meaning, whose weight was not physical.

A charm

The Eiffel Tower, small enough to sit on the end of a finger, rendered in the clean lines of something that had been made well rather than quickly.

“I want you to collect one memory from every place we visit together,” I said. “One charm from every city.” I put it in her hand. “One day we’ll show them to our child. All of them. And they’ll know everywhere we went together and what it meant and what was happening in our lives when we were there.”

She looked at the charm.

At me….

At the river behind us

She fastened it to the bracelet that had been on her wrist since we left for the coast…. the delicate one, the one she wore on the side of the ring rather than opposite it.

She looked at it. “It’s beautiful.” she said those two words.

The tower catching the light.

“This,” she said, “is my favourite thing you’ve given me on this trip.”

“More than the plane?” I said.

She considered.

“Different category,” she said.

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I laughed.

She leaned against me.

The boat, the river, the city.

The charm on her wrist.

A collection beginning.

A child who would eventually know everywhere we went.

A future that was not hypothetical anymore.

We stepped off the yacht at the dock.

The car was already there.

Maya looked at it.

Then at me

“There’s more,” she said.

“Absolutely yes, there’s more,” I confirmed.

She shook her head.

Smiled multiple times. “I guess you want to choke me with surprises….”

“I’m Just making up.

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