Page 8

I swallowed, realising that I had missed the ordinary things. The things I should have been there to notice. What struck me most, though, was the way he held himself. More carefully, and more on guard, like someone who had learned not to expect people to stay. Someone who had learned to have the rug pulled out from underneath them at any moment.

That was my fault. I'd done that to him. I stood there for a moment with my hand still on the door, and Max took notice, staring at me from his booth across the diner. Ricky was beside him. June was getting up to go back to pouring coffee and serving food. People were talking, plates were clattering, and the smell of warm sweet potato biscuits and bacon filled the air, but none of it seemed real anymore. There was just Max.

My Max.

Except he isn't anymore. After what I did, I have no right to think of him that way, or probably to breathe the same air he does.

I took a breath anyway and made myself move. I crossed the diner slowly, stopping beside the booth. Max looked up at me, and I saw the exact moment he put the walls all the way up.

It hurt, but I deserved that, too.

“Hey, Maxwell.” I winced at how formal I sounded. Only teachers had ever called him that, or his mother when he was in trouble, and she did the mom thing, yelling his full name out, middle name and all.

His expression barely changed. “Hello, Josiah.”

Polite. Not warm, but not angry, either, and somehow that was worse. Much, much worse, I swallowed. I had spent years imagining him shouting at me. I’d imagined him telling me he hated me, imagined him demanding to know how I could possibly have left him without saying goodbye. I'd imagined every version of this except the one where he simply looked at me like I was someone he'd once known and not very well.

And now that was the version I had.

“How are you?” I asked softly.

He gave me a small, polite smile. “I'm doing well. You?”

“Good.” That was apparently all I had. ”Good”? Simply brilliant, Josiah. Sixteen years of preparation, and “good” was all you could manage to come up with?

Max glanced toward the coffee in front of him, and I could practically see him deciding whether he wanted to say anything else. He didn't, and I couldn't blame him.

I'd spent years telling myself there had been reasons. There had been, just not any good ones for not owning up to him and letting him choose. Instead, I'd put everything else ahead of that. Lackland and Camp Bulls had come first, and then two years at RAF Mildenhall. After that came Travis Air Force Base, then Mountain Home. Different places. Different versions of the same job, with different people. A whole life I'd built one posting at a time, missing him the whole time and doing bupkis about it. Eventually, I'd left the Air Force and ended up in Baltimore, where I worked as a police officer. And now, I'd come home, despite never returning during my years away, instead making phone calls, and my parents had come to see me when they could before finally retiring to Florida.

At least, that was the short version. The longer version was that I had spent years believing I would eventually have enough time to fix everything. I thought Max would still be there. I thought I'd come home one day and we'd somehow pick up where we'd left off, after a little bit of yelling, crying, and finally, forgiveness. I'd been a twenty-year old dumb ass when I'd first decided that. Twenty-five, when my still dumb ass self was sure we'd reconnect eventually after being a coward for not calling him from Basic or tech school or my first duty station, or the one after that, afraid of how mad he'd be at me. Thirty when I stopped talking about it and him quite so often. And now I was just shy of thirty-seven, standing across from the man I'd loved for most of my adult life, and realizing that there had never been an eventually waiting for us.

There had only been choices. Mine, and I'd made them despite them rightfully being ours to make together.

I'd told myself I hadn't left because I'd stopped loving Max. That was true. I'd never stopped, not once. I'd been eager to get a proper career so we could have a secure, safer future despite the whole War on Terror thing I'd been damned fortunate enough to not end up front and center in. I'd just been young enough to believe love could survive anything if it was real. I hadn't understood that love still needed people to show up for it.

Max had waited for me, or maybe he hadn't. I didn't know; that was the part I had to live with. That I'd hurt him, and somewhere along the line, he'd moved on without me to a future I was no longer part of because I'd left him without giving him the chance to decide whether he wanted to come with me, and never asked him to wait, or what he wanted. I'd simply made the decision for both of us and disappeared.

And now he wore glasses because his astigmatism had gotten worse sometime after I'd gone. It was such a stupid little thing to notice. It shouldn't have mattered, but it did, because I knew there had been thousands of other little things like that. All the ordinary pieces of a life I'd missed because I'd been convinced there would always be time and there wasn't, and that was all on me.

Stupid, stupid me.

I looked at Max again. He was pretending not to notice I was still standing there, and talking to Ricky now, though I could tell he wasn't really listening to what Ricky was saying. His fingers were curled around his coffee cup, and his shoulders were just a little too stiff.

I knew that posture. I'd seen it when we were young, whenever he was trying very hard not to let me know something had hurt him, and it made me want to reach across the table to touch his hand to let him know it was going to be alright. That I wanted to tell him everything and let him tear me a new one as long as he forgave me. Instead, I stood there, because for the first time in my life, I understood that wanting something didn't mean I had the right to take it.

I'd come home, but that didn't mean Max would ever welcome me back. If he did, I was going to have to work really damn hard to earn it. And if it took the rest of my life, then maybe that was exactly what I deserved. In fact, I knew it was.

CHAPTER FOUR

WATERMAN'S HARBOR COMES ALIVE

MAX

By Thursday morning, Hartwell Cove had stopped pretending the Waterman’s Harbor Fest and Fair was merely an event. Named for the shopping center that had sprung up nearly forty years ago after Waterman’s Cannery closed and its property was sold to a developer, the festival had become a way of life in town. The old cannery buildings had been converted into shops and other businesses, giving the waterfront a new purpose without entirely erasing its history.

Then, twenty years later, a separate phase of redevelopment transformed another stretch of the working waterfront. A seafood packing plant was demolished to make room for additional shops and businesses, including places selling locally made pottery and other crafts and a small independent bookstore. The changes brought a different kind of visitor to Hartwell Cove, but not everyone welcomed them, particularly those whose livelihoods had depended on the old waterfront. The new shops had become part of the town’s identity, but the changes had left their mark on the people who remembered what had been there before.

There were boats decorated with strings of lights and flags all along the harbor, their masts and railings festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, crab pots stacked neatly beside the docks, and signs everywhere reminding people where they could and couldn't park. Vendors had started setting up their tents and stalls along the waterfront, with tables topped with burlap runners and more fairy lights festooned with miniature opaque plastic crab and clamshell light covers every so often, and the smell of fried food was already drifting through town despite the fact that the official opening wasn't until Friday. One man was setting up wares, selling models of skipjack boats and banks made to look like old tins of Waterman's Oysters and Waterman's Seafood Chowder and even some of those ”safes” that hide in your pantry, these pretending to be your choice of a can of Waterman's Cream of Tomato Soup or Waterman's Stewed Tomatoes. He also had some plushies made to look like red and blue smiling crabs and a bin of assorted plastic sea life - dolphins, sharks, crabs, even a few lobsters. Small fairground rides were set up blocking the road, and on an empty lot a small ferris wheel was being set up by the traveling carnival workers who owned the rides. More of them were setting up their booths offering games and prizes along the waterfront on either side of the large music stage while leaving room for the sound system and whatnot so folks wanting to play could do so without being deafened.