His Forbidden Human

Chapter 18: Six Days

Six days was both too long and not long enough.

Too long because she was aware of every hour of it — the slow accumulation of classes and shifts and ordinary moments that kept happening regardless of the fact that her attention was somewhere else entirely. Not long enough because she had no idea what she was walking into and six days wasn't sufficient time to prepare for something she couldn't fully define.

She tried to prepare anyway. It was what she did.

She went to class. She caught up on the assignments she'd missed, which took most of Monday and all of Tuesday evening. She worked her library shifts. She had dinner with Jess on Wednesday and said nothing about the text exchange because some things were still too new and too uncertain to say out loud twice.

Dmitri continued to greet her in the hallway every time she came home.

She started bringing him small pieces of whatever she had in her pocket — a corner of a granola bar, a piece of cracker. He accepted these offerings with the gravity of someone receiving tribute.

Mrs. Petrova observed this from her doorway twice and said nothing, which Maya was choosing to interpret as approval.

She and Ethan texted.

Not constantly. Not urgently. Just — present. A consistent low frequency, like a signal she could tune into whenever she needed grounding. He told her when the Hollow Pack moved, which they did twice — once north, once back south, an erratic pattern that apparently meant something to him and Marcus that she didn't have the context for yet. She told him about her Environmental Sciences seminar, about the professor who could make water table data genuinely riveting, about the way the campus looked on a clear cold morning when the light came in at a low angle.

She didn't know why she told him that last one.

He replied: I know that light. It comes through the kitchen window in November.

She had stared at this for approximately four minutes.

She was doing that a lot — sitting with his words, turning them over, finding more in them than their surface suggested. It was, she was realizing, a skill he used deliberately. He chose words the way he chose everything: precisely, with full awareness of their weight.

It made every text feel significant.

It was, she admitted to herself on Thursday night, a little devastating.

---

On Friday she went home.

Not Ethan's house — her actual childhood home, two hours by bus, the small town where her mother still lived in the house Maya had grown up in. She went once a month usually. She'd missed October and November because of — everything. Her mother had been patient about it in the way she was patient about most things, which was to say she'd asked twice and then waited.

Her mother was a quiet woman. Thoughtful. She had a quality of attention that had always made Maya feel both seen and safe — like being in a room with someone who was genuinely interested in what was happening in it.

They had dinner on Friday night, the two of them at the kitchen table, the same kitchen table Maya had done homework at as a child. Her mother had made the soup she always made when Maya came home, the one that had no formal recipe and tasted like being twelve years old.

They talked about classes. About Jess. About the neighbor's renovation that was apparently audible from three houses down.

Her mother waited.

Maya recognized the waiting. She'd grown up with it.

After dinner, over tea, she said: "Can I ask you about grandmother?"

Her mother looked up. "Of course. Which grandmother?"

"Your mother. Grandma Vera."

Something shifted in her mother's face. Not alarm. Something more like — recognition. Like a question she'd been expecting for a long time.

"What about her?" her mother said.

"Did she ever talk about her family history? Old history, further back than she would have known personally."

Her mother wrapped both hands around her mug. She had the same hands as Maya — same shape, same way of holding things.

"She talked about it once," her mother said carefully. "When I was maybe twenty. She sat me down and told me there was something in our family line that I should know about." She paused. "An old agreement, she called it. Made by someone before her by many generations. She said it was dormant and not to worry about it, but that if I ever felt — watched, in a specific way, in wild places, I should trust the feeling."

Maya stared at her.

"You knew," she said.

"I knew there was something. I didn't know what." Her mother met her eyes. "Has something happened?"

Maya looked at the table.

She thought about the circle on the lodge floor. The carved lines in the old wood. Rennick's voice saying the Old Northern Claim. The loosening in her chest.

"It's been handled," she said. "The agreement — it's been dissolved. You don't have to worry about it."

Her mother was quiet for a moment.

"How?" she asked.

"I met someone. People, actually. They helped." She paused. "It's a long story and some of it is — unusual. But I'm safe. I'm actually safe."

Her mother looked at her for a long time.

"The someone," she said. "Is this the same someone Jess mentioned?"

Maya looked up. "Jess mentioned—"

"She texted me. When you were missing." Her mother's voice was perfectly even. "She wanted me to know you'd been in contact and were safe. She also said you'd met someone, and that he was — her word — different."

Maya made a mental note to have a conversation with Jess.

"He is," she said. "Different."

"Good different or worrying different?"

Maya thought about this in the specific way she'd been thinking about it for two weeks.

"He put a blanket on me when I fell asleep on his couch," she said. "He makes good coffee. He told me the truth even when the truth was difficult." She looked at the table. "He planned three different ways to get me out safely before we walked into a room together, just in case."

Her mother was quiet.

"That sounds," she said finally, "like someone who pays attention."

"He pays attention to everything."

"And you like him."

Maya looked at her mug.

"Yeah," she said. "I do."

Her mother reached across the table and put her hand over Maya's, briefly. Warm and certain.

"Then go back," she said. "Whatever unusual means. Go back and don't overthink it."

Maya looked at her.

"That's your advice? Don't overthink it?"

"You've been overthinking things since you were eight years old." Her mother stood to clear the mugs. "You're very good at it. It's also occasionally held you back from things that were good for you." She paused at the sink, looking out the dark window. "The agreement being dissolved — does that mean the danger is gone?"

"Mostly. There's still something to resolve but it's being handled."

"By your someone?"

"By several people. Including him."

Her mother nodded slowly.

"One more week?" she said.

"Six days."

"Then go." She turned around, and her expression was the one Maya had seen her whole life — the quiet certainty, the love that didn't require performance. "Whatever it is, it sounds like it's worth going back to."

Maya sat at the kitchen table in the house she'd grown up in, with the soup still warm in her stomach and the tea in her hands, and felt something settle.

Not the loosening from the dissolution. Something different. Something that came from being known by someone who had known you your whole life.

"Thanks, Mom," she said.

Her mother smiled. "Stop thanking me and help with the dishes."

Maya stood up.

Six days felt, suddenly, very manageable.

---

On the bus back on Saturday, she texted him.

I told my mother about you. Generally. She says go back and don't overthink it.

A pause.

She sounds sensible.

She is. I get it from her.

Another pause, shorter.

Six days.

Five now, she typed. I took the early bus.

She felt, rather than saw, something in the silence that followed — a warmth in it, the particular quality of a pause that was pleased rather than considering.

His reply, when it came, was simple.

Five days.

She looked out the bus window at the winter landscape going by — fields and bare trees and the occasional small town, all of it ordinary and familiar.

She thought about a house at the edge of a forest.

She thought about five days.

She smiled at the window.

The bus moved steadily forward.

So did she.