He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 88

Chapter 88

Alex’s POV

1 stepped back.

Not slowly… immediately, with the instinctive withdrawal of someone who has encountered something they hadn’t prepared for and whose body had responded before the mind caught up.

Zara’s hand was still near my jaw

I looked at her.

She lowered her hand

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Zara…..”

“I know.” She looked away. Toward the car, toward the harbour lights, toward anything that wasn’t my face. “I know. That was…..” She stopped. Started again. “I came here telling myself it was for my own reasons. That I had my own clarity about it.” A pause. “That wasn’t fair to you”

I looked at her….

At the profile of a woman I had known for sixteen months and had left without adequate explanation and had not thought about with the frequency she had apparently been thinking about me.

That was its own kind of guilt

Not love. But guilt.

“You don’t have to…” I started.

“I handled it badly,” she said. “What we had. The whole of it.” She turned back to face me. “I was always…. I was always running the comparison. Even when you never said her name. Even when there was no reason to. I knew.”

She held my gaze. “I always knew there was someone in you that I wasn’t reaching”

I said nothing.

“I cheated on you,” she said.

The words landed in the cold night air between us.

“Once,” she said. “Toward the end. Three months before you ended it.” She looked at her hands. “Not because I wanted to..

Because I was exhausted from competing with a person who wasn’t even in the room. Because I thought if I….” She stopped. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. It was wrong. And I never told you.”

I stood on my own driveway at midnight and felt the specific, complicated weight of information that arrived too late to change anything and too honestly to dismiss.

“Why are you telling me now?” I asked.

“Because you deserve to know.” She looked at me directly. “And because I’ve been carrying it for four years and it’s been heavy.” A pause. “And because I came here tonight thinking I could…. reclaim something. And I can see

173

+25 Bonus

very clearly that I can’t.” Her voice was steady now, the embarrassment burned through to something quieter “1 can see how you look at her….”

I was quiet.

“How do I look at her?” I asked.

She almost smiled

“The way you never looked at me,” she said. “The way I spent sixteen months hoping you would.”

The harbour was dark and flat beyond the lights.

I thought about what to say and found that honest was the only option.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For ending it the way I did. You deserved a proper explanation…”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“And I’m sorry I never fully…. arrived,” I said. “In what we had. I was always somewhere else”

“I know.” She said it without bitterness, which was its own kind of generosity. “I think I always knew.”

She reached for the car door.

She got in the car.

The engine started….

I stood in the driveway and watched the tail lights move to the gate and disappear into the street and thought about sixteen months and four years and a woman who had come back to confirm something she already knew and had, in the confirming of it, told me something I needed to hear….

The night was cold.

I turned it all over.

Zara had been competing with Maya for sixteen months… with a version of Maya that existed only inside my head, inside the part of me I had never fully managed to close off, inside the specific gravity of someone who had been with me in a summer and a rooftop and a harbour dock and had gone away without the ending being properly

ended….

I had not been fair to Zara.

I had not been conscious of being unfair. I had genuinely tried. I had been present in the ways I knew how to be present. But there had been a room she couldn’t enter, and she had known it, and I had been too committed to the performance of moving on to acknowledge it.

Four years of building an empire……

Still that room.

And then Maya had walked out of a service elevator and opened an apartment door with a candlestick and the room had simply opened.

Not dramatically. Not with declaration….

Just opened.

2/3

• 25 Bonus

I stood in the driveway and felt the exhaustion of the night settle through me, the explosion that wasn’t, the family that was, my father’s accusations, Zara’s kiss, the conversation I was going to have to have with Maya about all of it, and the fear underneath all of it that Maya would hear Zara kissed him and reach for the wall she had been looking for.

I turned toward the house.

And froze.

Maya was in the doorway.

Not coming out…. standing in the lit frame of it, coat on, arms at her sides, watching me with the quality of someone who has been there for a period of time they are not going to disclose.

She was very still

I looked at her.

She looked at me

The specific, complicated expression on her face lasted approximately three seconds before the composure came down over it and her face returned to the version she wore when she had decided something and was not yet going to say what.

“Maya…..” I started.

She turned and walked back into the house.

P

Comments

Support

Share