He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 87

Chapter 87

Zara’s POV

The evening had gone the way I intended it to go.

Not perfectly, nothing went perfectly when Maya Hargrove was in the room, because she had the frustrating quality of someone who refused to behave the way they were supposed to behave. She was supposed to be rattled….

She was supposed to show it. Instead she had sat through dinner with the composure of a woman who had survived considerably worse than a water spill and a few loaded comments, and the composure itself had been its own kind of message…

But the kitchen doorway.

I had seen her face in the kitchen doorway, before she knew I was there.

That had been real

The goodbyes took forty minutes because Catherine was involved, and Catherine’s goodbyes were events unto themselves…… the embraces, the promises to call, the specific warmth of a woman who treated every departure as a small loss and every arrival as a gift.

She hugged me for a long time

“Don’t disappear again,” she said, against my hair. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“I won’t,” I said.

I meant it

I watched her hug Alex and say something in his ear that made him look at her with the expression he used when his mother had said something accurate that he wasn’t ready to fully receive. She patted his face and moved on.

His father shook my hand on the way out….

“Good to see you,” he said. Simply. No performance

“And you,” I said.

The look that passed between us was the look of two people who understood each other’s position without needing to articulate it. Richard Voss had always been straightforward with me in the specific way he was straightforward with people he respected… not warmly, but directly, which was its own kind of respect.

He looked toward the sitting room where Maya was saying goodbye to Olive.

Then back at me

He said nothing…

He didn’t need to.

I waited until the room had thinned

Thomas left. The aunts left. The cousins dispersed with the good-natured efficiency of people who had a full evening behind them and early mornings ahead.

Alex was near the door, talking to the last of his family.

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Maya stood slightly apart, her coat on, her bag on her shoulder.

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She had the quality I had been watching all evening…. present, contained, watching everything with the specific attention of a woman who was recording rather than reacting.

I crossed to Alex…

“Walk me out?” I said.

Not loudly. Directed at him, with the natural ease of someone asking something they assumed was fine.

He looked at me

Then at Maya briefly…. a glance, involuntary, the specific check of someone who was aware of a variable they were managing.

“Sure,” he said.

I took his arm as we walked to the door

Not dramatically…. naturally, the way I had always taken his arm, the way bodies fell back into old patterns when the opportunity presented itself. His arm was familiar under my hand.

The height of him, the pace of him, the specific quality of being beside him that I had spent four years trying to replace with something else and had not replaced.

I didn’t look back at Maya

I didn’t need to.

I had positioned us in front of the sitting room doorway. If she was watching, and she was watching, I knew her well enough now to know she was watching everything… she would see this clearly.

The night air was cold when we stepped outside.

The driveway was quiet, the city visible in the distance, the harbour a dark mass beyond the lights

I kept my hand on his arm and walked slowly.

“I’ve missed this,” I said.

“Zara….”

“Not an attack,” I said. “Just a statement.” I looked at the city. “I’ye missed being in a room with your family. I forgot how much until tonight”

He was quiet.

“Your mother looks well,” I said.

“She is.”

“Your father seems…” I paused, choosing. “Settled. More settled than I remember.”

“He has a clear view of what he wants,” Alex said. Flat delivery of someone discussing a subject they have complicated feelings about. “He always has.”

I looked at him

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At the face I had been looking at all evening with the specific intensity of someone who had been away from something for a long time and was relearning its dimensions. The lines that had deepened slightly. The specific quality of his attention, which had always been one of the things about him that was impossible to imitate or replace… the way he was fully in whatever he was looking at.

He was looking at the city

Not at me.

I watched his eyes move, briefly, back toward the house. The lit doorway, visible from where we were standing.

The small, involuntary navigation.

The jealousy arrived the way it always arrived….. not with warning, not with permission. The specific, burning quality of watching someone look somewhere else with an attention they had once directed at you.

He looked at the house the way he didn’t look at me

I had known this all evening.

Knowing it and feeling it were different experiences.

“We were good together,” I said.

“Zara”

“Let me say it once,” I said. “Just once. We were good. What we had was real. And you ended it without….” I stopped. Found the word that was honest without being the word I had carried for four years. “Without adequate

reason.”

He turned to look at me.

“I ended it because of what I felt for someone else,” he said. Quiet. Steady. “That’s not inadequate. That’s the

most honest reason there is.”

“She was married”

“Yes.”

“She was unavailable”

“Yes….”

“And you ended what we had for a possibility.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I would make the same decision again.” Not unkind. Just true. The specific, devastating honesty of someone who has thought about this and arrived at their answer. “What we had was real. It deserved better than what I gave it, and I’m sorry for that. But I can’t be sorry for why I ended it.”

The city lights reflected off the harbour…

I looked at them

Felt the four years of it… the monitoring, the watching, the careful management of something I had told myself was healing and had apparently been something else entirely.

I had come here for my own reasons, I had told myself in the villa.

Not for Mason’s plan

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For my own.

And my own reason was standing beside me telling me, with the same directness he had always had, that the

answer was no.

I turned toward him

And I kissed him.

Not asking… doing, the way I had always done things I had decided on. My hand on his jaw, my mouth on his, the specific physical memory of sixteen months arriving all at once.

He went still…

Not responding. But his eye said it all… the don’t try it again kinda expression…

…..the stillness of someone absorbing something they hadn’t anticipated.

And he stepped back.

“Don’t try this ever again” he said.

….five words.

I looked at him

“I know,” I said.

Which was the truest thing I had said all evening.

I turned toward the car

From the doorway of the house, a figure stood in the light.

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