And then two swift steps back as if she were a ghost.
Or maybe he was just getting old and needed a little distance to see clearly.
She propped herself up on one elbow. The vertigo she felt when she did that wasn’t entirely because she’d been banged in the head. It was because she’d been dragged backward through decades.
For an absurd moment, suspended in time, they stared at each other. The sensation was weightlessness, of all boundaries being kicked away. Like taking an underwire bra off after a long day, only infinitely better.
“Avalon?” He sounded like a spy whispering a password to an enemy guard.
She toyed for a mad millisecond with denying it.
In the end, she said nothing. Mainly because she couldn’t speak. Her every cell was preoccupied with singing a sort of ill-advised “Hosannah.”
It was resoundingly clear that the proverbial years hadn’t simply been kind to him. They had pretty much crowned him their king.
Mac towered now, though. And while his shoulders were doing a pretty good job of blocking the sun, he was still lean as a runner. His dark hair was shorter but still waved a bit up off his forehead; she saw a couple of silver threads.
Finally, his mouth quirked at the corner. “I always knew animals would be your downfall.”
He instantly dropped back into a crouch and rummaged about in the little cooler he’d been carrying, then handed her a plastic bag knotted around ice.
“Here. It’s been keeping a steelhead trout and a beer cold but I think you’re going to need it. Can you sit up all the way?”
She demonstrated that she could sit up all the way by sitting up all the way. She remained on the ground, however.
She wordlessly took the pack and held it to her head. Oh, the bliss.
It did indeed smell like fish.
They still didn’t speak. And then he cleared his throat. “It’s been a while, huh? I thought for a moment there I slipped through some sort of time portal, Harwood. It’s still... Harwood?”
She nearly did herself another injury by keeping her neck motionless in an effort not to inspect his hand for a ring.
“Yes.” She hated that she sounded subdued. That her voice still sounded dazed and wondering as he’d materialized just like the wizard she’d once thought he was. She didn’t trust it yet to tackle multisyllabic words without shaking.
Not a single one of the fantasies she’d had about running into him again had featured her in rumpled yoga pants staring up at him from the ground.
“You kind of disappeared a few years back, Harwood.” His tone was light. But there was something a little too careful about it. The way he was holding his body suggested that maybe his breath was held, too.
So. He’d noticed she’d disappeared.
There was no way in hell she was going to reveal to him why.
She shrugged with one shoulder. “Huh. Did I? It was such a long time ago.” She gave him a remote little smile.
Something jaded, guarded, and cool moved across his eyes then.
And it was silent.
She gave a start when two squirrels suddenly began chasing each other around and around a pine trunk. Either fighting, playing, or about to have noisy squirrel sex. One never knew with squirrels.
“So how many pets do you have now?” His voice was wry. But a little uncertain.
So he remembered that day, too.
She was shocked by a sudden sense of violation that a person who’d caused her so much pain still walked around knowing the contents of her heart. Her precious memories. The vulnerable parts of her.
“None,” she said shortly.
