Free Web NovelChapter 236: Still Here
The cinema’s parking structure was nearly empty when they walked out, the late hour wrapping the city in the particular hush that only ever fell after one in the morning.
Stan opened the passenger door of the Huracán for Mia. She slid in with the slightly tired, slightly drifting movement of a woman whose adrenaline had finally fully metabolized, her crimson dress shifting around her thighs as she tucked her legs in. She looked across at him as he settled into the driver’s seat, her eyes soft in the amber glow of the dashboard.
"You’re not allowed to disappear again, you know."
Stan started the engine. The low growl filled the empty structure.
"I’m right here."
"That’s what you said before you disappeared the first time."
"That’s long ago, I’m not sure I said something along that lines as a kid..."
"Don’t worry I’m just playing around..." Mia smiled.
He glanced sideways at her. She was teasing, mostly, but there was a thread of real anxiety running beneath the playfulness, the residual tremor of a woman who had spent nine years missing someone and was not yet entirely convinced he wouldn’t dissolve into mist if she looked away.
He reached across the console and laced his fingers through hers.
"I’m not disappearing. Not this time."
Mia squeezed his hand. She didn’t let go for the entire drive. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
They talked about small things at first, the movie, the soundtrack, the bizarre habits of romantic-film cinematography. About bigger things gradually, what Sacha was doing now, what life had been like for the Madelyns after they left Inksea, how her mother had handled the loss of her father.
The conversation moved with the unhurried, slightly weightless quality. After all they’ve been emotionally wrung out by the evening and were simply enjoying the act of speaking to each other in the calm aftermath.
Every few minutes, Mia would glance at him staring at his face as her heart thumped wildly in her chest, she could help but imagine if Stan left again what was she to do.
Stan kept his hand on hers, acting like as if he didn’t notice the glance.
At one point, Mia squeezed his thigh gently. "Stan... where do you live now? I want to know exactly where to find you if you disappear on me again." Her voice was soft but carried a vulnerable edge, her warm brown eyes searching his face in the dim dashboard light.
"Inksea. The Peak University campus area, there’s a residential tower called Aurelia Heights, about ten minutes from the eastern gate of the campus. My place is beside that place, just a modest apartment."
"Aurelia Heights... It sounds familiar" Mia tested the name against her memory. "Wait now I remember, that’s the tall building with the dark glass exterior? The one near the science complex?"
"You know it."
"I’ve seen it. I was in Inksea last year for a conference and walked past it. It’s beautiful." A small pause. "I assumed only foreign executives lived in places like that."
"They mostly do."
"And one underemployed student tycoon."
Stan smiled at the road and Mia laughed, soft and warm, the first laugh that had carried no residual edge of the evening’s terror.
"I want to see it," she said quietly. "Your home. Sometime soon. When things are calmer."
"Anytime you want."
She let that settle. Her thumb traced a slow, idle pattern across the back of his hand.
They reached her street.
Stan slowed the Huracán to a quiet roll along the curb and pulled up outside the modest single-story house. The porch light was on. The blue door waited like a small, unchanged constant in a night that had contained more than its share of variables.
Mia unbuckled but didn’t move to leave, instead, she turned to him fully, her full breasts rising with a deep breath that strained the plunging neckline of her dress.
"Stan."
He looked at her.
"Don’t drive back to Inksea tonight."
"Mia..."
"I’m serious." Her hand tightened around his. "It’s nearly two in the morning. You’re tired. You’ve already been through a robbery. The roads between here and Inksea at this hour are, they’re empty, and that’s worse, not better. Anything could happen and there’d be no one around to help. After everything that just happened tonight..." Her voice caught, briefly. "It would not sit right with me, Stan. Watching you drive away. Not tonight."
Stan looked at her.
The reasoning was sound. The hour was bad. The exhaustion was real. And the deeper, unspoken truth, that Mia could not, after the night she had just survived, watch him drive off into the dark, was visible in her face with the clarity of something she could not have hidden if she’d tried.
He thought about Sacha. About Sophie. About the small, indignant message Sophie would send when she eventually learned where he’d spent the night.
He decided that was a problem for tomorrow.
"Okay," he said quietly. "I’ll stay."
Mia’s exhale was so visible it was almost audible, the small, full-body release of a woman who had been holding a knot of anxiety she hadn’t fully named until it dissolved.
"Thank you."
"Don’t thank me. You’re right."
He turned the engine off. They got out of the car together.
The house was quiet when Mia turned the key in the front door, the particular quiet of a home where someone has been waiting up but is making no announcement of it.
The hallway light was on.
So was the kitchen light at the back of the house.
They stepped inside, and before Mia had fully closed the door behind them, Mrs. Edith emerged from the hallway in a soft cotton robe over her nightclothes, her hair loose down her back, her face composed but unmistakably wide awake. She had clearly been up for some time.
She looked at them both. Her eyes scanned Mia first, head to toe, with the methodical attention of a mother conducting a verification. Then Stan, then at Mia again.
