Maverick’s fingers brushed over my forearm, and I peeked out from behind my hands. He offered a small, reassuring smile. He was so damn handsome it almost hurt. For the first time, I wasn’t the only one dressed up. He wore a dress shirt with his jeans, and I realized just how much I loved the color red on him.The dim lights in the restaurant only played with the contours on his face, sharpening his features and intensifying every micro-expression in those stormy eyes.
“We can go home,” he offered. “Or I can drop you off at home and leave you alone.”
I didn’t deserve this man.
“No.” I shook my head. I didn’t want that, considering this whole thing was my idea. “No. I’m sorry. Life’s just...”
“A lot?” he finished for me.
“Yeah.” That was one way of putting it. Pushing my plate away, I sat back in the chair and crossed my arms. I wasn’t all that hungry anyway. I never was.
“Tell me one thing going on in that pretty head of yours,” Maverick said. “Just say the first thing that comes to mind.”
“I love you,” I replied. That was the very first thing that I could think of.
“I know.” I liked the smile that lit up his face as he said it.
“I just... sometimes I wish I’d never left,” I admitted. “When we were kids... it would’ve been reckless and probably a disaster, but... all I can think of is that we’d be happy. At least, happier than we are now.”
Granted, that wasn’t a hard feat to accomplish. Pretty much anything was happier than I was right now.
“I’m happy in this moment, Harley,” he said.Oh, how I wished I were.“Yeah, there’s a lot of bullshit in my life, but I’m happy. There’s bad, but there’s good. You have to learn how to take the bad with the good, and then you just learn how to navigate the in-between.”
I stared at him becausewhat? I could hear the words coming out of him, but it didn’t feel like him talking at all.
“You sound like a motivational poster,” I told him.
“Yeah.” He chuckled. Shifting, he pulled his wallet out of his pocket. “My sponsor has a thing for motivational posters. Hetried to give me this big poster with this comical cat on it, but there was no fucking way I was putting that thing anywhere. So, he made me this.”
He handed me a black metal business card. I took it and read it.
You are not what happened to you.
You are what you choose to become after.
I ran my thumb over the engraved words. Something slowly tightened in my chest as I reread them. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time, the words seem to cut deeper, etching into my bones.
Swallowing hard, I handed it back to him.
“I can’t change what happened to me,” Maverick said quietly as he took it back. “I can’t make it suck less or make the bad days go away. All I can do is remember the good things and navigate the in-between.”
Just navigate the in-between.
He made it sound so much simpler than it was. What if the in-between was nothing but dark waters and heavy tides dragging you under? What if the in-between was full of pain and misery? What if you couldn’t find the good? What if the in-between wasn’t worth navigating?
“What are your good things?” I asked, desperately needing something to pull me out of my head. I latched hard onto the deep tones of his voice.
“Right now… you,” he replied. “And I… bought a house.”
“Really?” I failed to hide my surprise, making him laugh.
“I know, me? A house owner,” Maverick said. “To be fair, it’s a disaster of a house. I’ll be fixing it for years.”
“But it’s yours.”
“Yeah, it’s mine.” The look of pride on his face was one I oddly envied. I’d never had it work so hard for anything in my life, so I couldn’t imagine how he felt. I wished I could, though.
“Can I see it?”
