Chapter 16: The Space Between
1196 Words
The first three days back felt like wearing clothes that didn't fit anymore.
Not uncomfortable exactly. Just — off. Like everything was the right size and the wrong shape. Her apartment was the same. Her classes were the same. The route from her building to campus, the coffee place on the corner, the library where she worked three shifts a week — all exactly as she'd left them.
She was the one who had changed dimensions.
She went to class. She took notes. She had a conversation with her professor about the assignments she'd missed that went better than she'd expected, partly because she was apparently good at looking composed and partly because Dr. Reeves had always liked her and was willing to be flexible.
She sat in the library on Tuesday afternoon and catalogued returns and tried not to think about a kitchen table and paper maps and coffee that was better than it had any right to be.
She mostly failed.
Jess texted her constantly, which helped. Jess had a gift for the perfectly timed distraction — a meme at exactly the right moment, a voice note while Maya was walking to class, a sudden appearance at her door with takeout and no explanation required. She didn't push for more of the story. She seemed to understand instinctively that there were parts Maya was still working out how to hold.
On Wednesday, she got a text from a number she didn't recognize.
It said: Cole gave me your number. Hope that's okay.
She stared at it for a moment.
Then she saved the contact as Ethan and typed back: It's okay.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
How are you settling back in.
She thought about the clothes-that-don't-fit feeling. About sitting in lectures and taking notes and doing all the right things while something in her chest kept pulling in a direction she wasn't supposed to be going yet.
Fine, she typed. Adjustment period.
That's normal.
Have you done this before? Sent a human back to their life after two weeks of — whatever that was.
A pause.
No.
She smiled at her phone in the middle of the library and then looked around to make sure no one had noticed.
How's the terms implementation going, she typed.
Slowly. Rennick moves at his own pace.
Is that a problem?
Not yet.
She put her phone down and tried to focus on the catalogue system.
Picked it up again thirty seconds later.
The Hollow Pack, she typed. Any movement?
Not in the last three days. We're watching.
Tell me if that changes.
Another pause. Longer.
You'll be the first to know.
She set the phone down again.
This time she managed twenty minutes before she picked it up.
But she thought that was pretty good, all things considered.
---
On Thursday she ran into her neighbor in the hallway.
Mrs. Petrova was seventy-three, originally from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and had an opinion about everything including Maya's irregular hours, her diet, and the structural integrity of the building's plumbing. She also had a cat named Dmitri who was large and grey and regarded the world with profound suspicion.
Dmitri was sitting outside Mrs. Petrova's door when Maya came up the stairs.
He looked at her.
Maya looked at him.
He stood up, walked to her, and butted his large grey head against her shin.
Maya stared at him. Dmitri had never, in two years of cohabiting this hallway, voluntarily approached her. He had regarded her with something between indifference and mild contempt.
She reached down slowly and scratched behind his ears.
He purred. Loudly. Insistently.
Mrs. Petrova opened her door and looked down at this tableau.
"He likes you now," she said, with the air of someone reporting a minor geological event.
"He never liked me before."
"No." Mrs. Petrova looked at Maya with sharp, assessing eyes that had always made Maya feel slightly transparent. "You smell different."
Maya straightened up. "I — sorry?"
"Different." The old woman waved a hand. "Not bad. Just different. Like forest." She looked at Dmitri, who was still winding around Maya's ankles. "He likes forest."
She went back inside and closed the door.
Maya stood in the hallway with a large grey cat weaving between her feet and thought about Rennick saying interesting and Cole saying you're perceptive for a human and Ethan saying that you know of.
She looked down at Dmitri.
"You're not going to tell me anything useful, are you," she said.
Dmitri meowed once, with great authority, and walked back to his spot outside the door.
Maya went to her apartment and sat on her bed and stared at the wall for a while.
Then she texted Ethan.
My neighbor's cat has never liked me. He just spent five minutes following me around the hallway. My neighbor said I smell like forest and then went back inside.
She waited.
The reply came faster than she expected.
Animals are sensitive to pack territory. You spent two weeks in ours. It fades, but it takes time.
She stared at this.
So I smell like your territory.
A pause.
Yes.
She didn't know what to do with that information so she put her phone down and looked at the ceiling.
Picked it up again.
Is that why Rennick said 'interesting' when he shook my hand the second time? After the dissolution?
A longer pause this time.
Probably.
What did he notice?
Another pause. She was learning to read his pauses — this one felt like he was deciding how to say something rather than whether to say it.
The dissolution removed the old agreement. What remained was — simpler. Just you, in my territory, for two weeks.
She read this three times.
She typed: And that's interesting because?
He didn't answer immediately.
She put the phone down. Made tea. Came back.
His reply was there.
Because it means you chose to be there. The agreement didn't pull you. You stayed because you wanted to.
Maya sat with this for a long time.
The tea went slightly cold.
She drank it anyway.
She typed, eventually: Rennick can tell all that from a handshake?
He can tell a lot from a handshake. It's one of the things that makes him effective and occasionally insufferable.
She smiled at her phone again.
Does it bother you, she typed. That he knows.
The longest pause yet.
It bothers me less than it should.
She read that four times.
Then she set her phone on the nightstand and lay back on her bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about a man who planned three exit strategies and said honest things quietly and bothered less than he should about things that should have bothered him.
She thought about two weeks.
She thought about one more week until the meeting.
She thought about what she was going to say when she got there.
She didn't have it figured out yet.
But she was getting closer.
Outside, the city hummed its ordinary hum.
Dmitri was probably sitting outside Mrs. Petrova's door, smelling forest.
Maya closed her eyes.
One week.
She could wait one week.
Probably.
- Writer
