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summer;
In July, Maya makes Lucas wait three days before she agrees to let him live with her while he’s looking for a place of his own to live in. Maya’s mom has taken to going along with Shawn on all of his nature photography adventures, which means it’s usually just the two of them in the shoebox apartment, window ac units sputtering and sweating nearly as much as they do.
On their days off, they lay across from each other in the cramped living room, couch shoved against the far wall and stripped down to their skivvies, a box fan and two swiveling fans aimed at them as they bitch and moan about the smoggy New York heat.
In the evenings, once the sun has gone down, they venture to the streets dressed in the bare minimum of clothing acceptable for public society, and stuff themselves with salads and sushi, still much too warm to even contemplate eating hot food for dinner.
Maya usually convinced Lucas they need to stop for gelato, and the splash pad park near her building is empty enough after dusk that there’s no shame in draping themselves on the swings and swapping flavors. Maya doesn’t ever hesitate in calling Lucas a white bread white boy when he gawks and cringes at all of the exotic flavors she relishes in ordering.
“I never had sushi before I moved here,” Lucas reminds her, laughing even as he pants for long minutes after trying her mango-chili sorbet, his own chocolate gelato turning to liquid in the flimsy paper cup. Maya simpers at him fake-sympathetically, and he rocks sideways on the swing so he can bump her, causing her to swear in protest.
Long after the moon rises and the heat stored in the asphalt starts to dissipate a little, they take the long way back to the building, talking aimlessly over the city din of ambulance sirens and taxis laying on their horns. In the distance, some extra fireworks left over from the fourth celebration get shot off into the sky, their crackling and booms flying through the air a second after the sky gets lit up with colored lights.
Shawn and Katy facetime Maya just before midnight, their faces washed out almost completely from the sun behind them, like Shawn doesn’t make a living as a professional photographer. They’re in Greece this week, and Maya’s mom’s hair has never been blonder, and her nose has never been redder, and her smile has never been wider.
Maya’s lounging on the couch, listening to her mom ramble about all of the places they’ve already seen, Lucas on the floor in front of her and quietly working on his pre-college summer reading while Maya occasionally pipes up, oohing and ahhing and laughing. Shawn rambles about how good Maya’s mom is with the locals, proud and in love and so, so embarrassing.
Maya’s job is exhausting but gratifying, and she frequently comes home with her uniform shirt covered in colored paint and still-sticky glue. It doesn’t take her long to convince Lucas to replace the soccer coach who’d suddenly up and quit, which means every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Lucas gets checked into the local YMCA as a soccer master, because Maya had somehow finagled the paperwork and her boss likes her enough that she allows it to slide.
The older age groups take it seriously, and Lucas keeps a summer-long scoreboard between the red team and the blue team and encourages them to be competitive but not mean about it, has tough talks with some of the boys for getting a little too nasty with each other.
But Maya likes it more when it’s the younger groups’ time, most of the kids in hand-me-downs and some of them still clutching their safety-blanket items as they stumble around the field, totally unaware that they’re supposed to be divided in two different teams. Lucas is just as patient with them, towering over them while trying to teach them how to keep their balance when they’re kicking, showing them over and over how to dribble between two feet.
From the window in her art room, she can watch the early afternoon sun turn the field golden, wiping down tables and washing paint brushes while watching Lucas’ mixed-age pick-up game of the late pick-up kids devolve into kids vs coach madness.
In the beginning of August, Maya and Lucas stake out the Korean place Riley picks to meet her new dorm mate for the first time, wearing bad disguises and trying not to let Riley spot them in their booth, even as they try to listen in on their conversation. It seems to be going fine, so Maya says they should just order, which, of course, is when her phone buzzes with an outraged text from Riley, who has spotted them, despite their stupid, itchy wigs and sunglasses.
Three weeks pass much too fast, and the whole clan of them get together for a movie night at the Matthews’, Zay bringing over both The Princess Diaries movies and Smackle makes her secret-recipe puppy-chow popcorn mix. Farkle splits it in even portions and claims that if he doesn’t, “Lucas the blackhole will finish it before the rest of us even get a shot!”
All of them cheer when Lord Devereaux refuses the crown, and, despite how frequently they choose this movie for their movie nights, they watch with bated breaths when he tells Mia he loves her.
When the Matthews’ get back from their last minute family vacation, a mere two days before Auggie is supposed to go back to school, Riley is over almost every night, her and Maya snuggling up in bed despite the heat, Riley worrying out loud about starting school and Maya helping her find preparation lists and advice posts, scrolling through studyblr tags and deskspo instagram posts, texting them to her despite being inches from one another.
The pair of them compile all of the quarters they can find and head to the library, printing out pictures in color ink for the wall above Riley’s dorm room desk.
autumn;
Maya gets asked to stay on after summer camp as an after-school leader, and she gets a second part time job at a wine-and-painting place called Corks and Colors, quickly rising through the ranks as one of the top teachers, her classes routinely booked out.
The city is still much too hot, which means she and Lucas spend a lot of their food money on fruit, gorging themselves on berries and watermelon cubes as Maya aggressively criticizes Lucas’ essays while he works through his math problem sets. Lucas stops whining about it too, after he fixes a paper how she wants and gets the highest score he’s gotten so far.
Shawn and Katy have two free weeks between trips in mid-October, and they’re forced to pretend they’ve been eating real, adult meals while wearing real, adult clothing choices.
The four of them have a lot of family meals together, and Katy and Maya do their best to squish in an entire months’ worth of mom-daughter activities into six days, going thrift-shopping and having an at-home spa day, seeing a movie during the day. Katy attends one of Maya’s painting classes and comes home gushing and praising her so enthusiastically that Maya goes a little pink in the face with pleasure, even as she protests.
Finally, it’s cool enough that Maya can dig her pile of jeans out from the back of her closet, wiggling into them and realising that a diet of fruit and raw fish have done for her what no gym membership has ever managed: all of her jeans fit looser than she remembers.
Somehow, she’s an honorary member of two of the clubs Lucas has joined since starting college, which books up more of her evenings, attending meetings diligently and causing a ruckus. Most people assume that she and Lucas are some kind of adorable couple, and it becomes too exhausting to keep correcting them.
“I guess your chances with Lucy in Cinema Club are out the window, bud,” Maya laments to him as they walk home, still clutching brown paper bags of too-salty popcorn. Lucas snorts, looking unbothered, and changes the subject to the painting class she’s leading the coming Saturday, asks her to remind him which piece she’ll be teaching tipsy middle-aged ladies how to recreate.
He surprises her by showing up to the class, is an attentive if artistically useless student, and Maya makes sure his awkward interpretation of her Van Gogh-esque skyline is hung front and center in the apartment living room.
Now that the trees are turning all kinds of colors, looking like flames against the sky, Lucas convinces Maya to switch from gelato stops to something a little warmer, and Maya drags him away from the Starbucks he’s trying to tempt her with and towards a man with a little white push-cart, orders two elotes in decent spanish, asking for one of them to have no chili-powder, gesturing at Lucas and laughing with the vendor at him while Lucas looks on, bemused but aware he’s being made fun of.
They make messes of themselves, chowing down on their food while they walk the rest of the way home, and Maya cackles when she convinces Lucas to try her chili-powder one and he sputters as much as always, so they do end up poking their heads into a cafe to buy lattes-to-go so Lucas can stop panting and bitching about the spice.
He’s unashamed when he orders a pumpkin spice one, and, even if he doesn’t seem to notice, Maya’s pretty sure the barista is checking him out behind the espresso machine. Lucas turns and asks her about Halloween as he grabs both of their drinks, dumping a few crumpled bills into the tip jar.
He reminds her she’s said that she will come to the costume party he’s been invited to by one of the sororities, and she reminds him that she’ll be late, because the YMCA is having a Halloween event.
The night before Halloween, Maya teaches a class about pumpkin carving, focuses on trying to get Lucas and the rest of her students to learn the techniques instead of producing twenty six identical pumpkins. After the room empties, Lucas convinces Maya that they should keep a bowl or two of the pumpkin insides, because he knows a good recipe to use with them, and then they splurge on a Lyft, because the idea of carrying two pumpkins and Lucas’ backpack twelve blocks isn’t the most appealing plan.
The kids love the haunted house set up on the basketball court, and they ruin their costumes painting miniature pumpkins and decorating pillowcases for candy sacks. After Lupita and Benji get picked up, Maya rushes through her art room clean-up, her fairy wings getting in the way the entire time. She switches from her converse to her little satin Tinker Bell slippers on the train, tucking her sneakers into her bag.
She texts Lucas to tell him that she’s on her way, and he sends back a bunch of smiley emojis and a thumbs up.
Maya imagines she can hear the music from the train station, but it’s another twenty minutes’ walk before she nears the college town and frat row. Each house is more decked out than the last, but it’s very easy to figure out which house is hosting the party, because the long winding path from the sidewalk to the front door is lined with jack-o-lanterns, plastic witches and ghosts hanging from trees, the front lawn covered in headstones.
Also, the pavement is practically vibrating from the volume of the music being blasted inside.
It takes ages to find Lucas, and Maya is several cups into an orange-colored punch that is definitely more spiked than it tastes when she does, spotting him amongst a couple of girls and two other guys, their whole group talking and laughing, all of them looking pretty animated and engaged. But when Lucas tilts his head, he somehow manages to spot Maya through the crowd and his face lights up. He beckons her over eagerly, so she picks her way through the crowd, laughing when he swings a huge arm over her shoulders and introducing her to his friends as “the best Tinker Bell I know, Maya!”
“Hi, Maya,” they chorus at her, and she grins at them, waving a little shyly before getting her act together and joining in the banter, appreciative of the fact that making fun of Lucas seems to be a fun shared activity of the group.
“Got any embarrassing stories of him?” Grant asks her as Marcus laughs helplessly, and Maya gives them her most incredulous look.
“Try every embarrassing story,” she retorts, smug, and Lucas reaches around her with the arm still on her shoulders to clap one hand over her mouth. He obliges her by spreading his fingers a little so she can poke the straw of her drink through, though.
It’s cold when they leave, several hours into the first of November, and Lucas pulls a sweatshirt from his backpack, pulling it over Maya’s head with little care for her perfect little Tinker Bell bun, and he waits for her to switch her shoes back before they start the long journey back to the apartment, feet crunching leaves and little clouds of their breath puffing out in front of them.
On the train, they pass little fun-sized candies back and forth, giggling and barely tipsy and exhausted.
winter;
Finals week with Lucas is a little scary, but it’s not as scary as Lucas asking Maya to come with him to check out two studio apartments that will be freeing up in the new year.
She quizzes him with flashcards for his anatomy exam and reads his essay out loud half a dozen times to help him work through the third paragraph, which sounds awkward and stiff, and she pulls on boots and wraps a thick scarf around her neck and she goes with him to look at two perfectly nice studio apartments.
In the second week of December, Riley panics that her gift for Auggie isn’t the perfect gift for Auggie, and Maya saying, “Well, I got him a build-your-own catapult set,” does not reassure her.
“You usually go for socks!” Riley protests, but she’s laughing, and she’s been hugging Maya for nearly ten minutes, because it’s been far too long between bay window meetings, since Riley’s college dorm (of course) doesn’t exactly have one.
(“Is it stupid that I was hoping it would?” Riley had asked on move-in day, and Maya loves her so much, but she had only barely managed to refrain from saying yes.)
So Maya abandons Lucas to study for his Calculus final to accompany her to the Manhattan shopping plaza. Riley flirts with the girl at the register in Macy’s and politely accepts some guy’s number when they stop for burritos in the food court, and talks for nearly two straight hours about all of the stuff she hasn’t yet told Maya in their biweekly facetime dates. The next hour is her pressing for more details on everything Maya tells her, asking her to describe the kids who frequent the art room and the return customers who attend all of Maya’s Corks and Colors classes.
Impossibly, it starts snowing a little by the time Maya drops off a drowsy Riley at the Matthews’ house, arms laden with bags and bellies practically protruding with how much they’ve eaten. Inside her shoes, Maya’s feet are aching from spending nearly an entire day walking around the mall and the market streets around, and she gives in when Riley tells her to just stay the night.
When Maya finally finds some of her old pajamas left in the corners of Riley’s dresser, she plaits her hair and then does Riley’s for her, and they curl around each other like puppies, cuddling close under about thirty quilts, because Riley likes to sleep with the window cracked no matter how cold the air outside is.
With Riley’s long arms wrapped around her and the pair of them huddled beneath a pile of Matthews’ family quilts, the same strawberry and cream shampoo scent that Maya has been smelling basically her whole life swirling around her head, Maya feels lines of tension sink out of her spine.
For the past few years, the tradition has always been to have smaller, family Christmas Eve dinners and then for all of their families to gather at the Minkus’ penthouse for Non-Denominational-Winter-Holiday lunch the following afternoon. Lucas and his mom and Katy all dance around the small kitchen, Shawn and Maya heckling safely from the couch. Lucas’ mom’s luggage has been dragged to Maya’s room for the week, which means that Maya is on the pull-out couch and Lucas has been moved to the recliner.
It’s a ridiculous game of musical sleeping arrangements, but it’s better than admitting that Lucas and Maya have mostly been sleeping in a ridiculous pillow fort on the living room floor when Shawn and Katy are gone.
Dinner is great, and Lucas clearly loves spending time with his mother, has missed her since she moved back to Texas after graduation and he decided to stay behind. They draw it out, staying up far too late and eating slowly, having dessert and then coffee and then mulled wine and then snacking on leftovers as they try to figure out how to fit everything in the refrigerator.
Finally, though, the house is quiet, and Maya heads into the hall bathroom to open the window above the bath and sit, bare-legged, in the empty tub, sketchbook propped up by her folded knees. The familiar noise of the streets of New York filters in as Maya fills page after page with half-done portraits and twisting, creeping vines. She cannot contain the feeling in her chest, happy and close to bursting, and it very nearly explodes when Lucas slowly clicks the door open and slinks through the smallest amount of space he can manage.
He hisses when he sits down across from her, the cold porcelain a shock after the warmth of the rest of the apartment, and he leans his head back against the tiles, closing his eyes and listens to the scratch of her pencil and her steady breathing and just exists in their little space together.
Non-Denominational-Winter-Holiday lunch is ridiculous and fancy as always, everyone in their best holiday formalwear, though it doesn’t stop them from heading out into the snow, launching it at one another, shiny black shoes getting scuffed and white stockings getting muddy at the knees. They’re freezing and squealing and breathless with laughter, no formal competition until Maya clamors onto Lucas’ back and starts using the height advantage.
Auggie gets tired before the rest of them do, and they all flop down in their puffy coats and nice clothing to make snow angels, and Maya so so loves this group of people.
Maya’s the one with the scoop on the party for New Years’ Eve, which means Lucas meets her at Corks and Colors in dark jeans and a green button down, her dress in a dry-cleaning bag and slung over one arm. As always, the entire team teases her pretty ruthlessly, but half of them have their own dates to meet, so it’s short-lived and more or less painless.
Maya and Lucas orbit each other throughout the party, but it’s not until the countdown is at four does the thought enter her head: I want to kiss him.
Maya tilts her head and watches him swallow down half a bottle of beer, cheeks flushed from drinking and the heat of too many people crammed into an apartment so small it gives her own a run for its money. Staying friends with Lucas after the drama of their little love triangle when they were all fifteen had taken some maturity, but Maya and Riley had agreed that it was worth it.
Every so often, lingering feelings would remind her of her school-girl crush on one of her very best friends, but this new thought circling through her head like a train loose from its tracks felt totally new.
Almost psychically in-tune with every nuance of Maya’s mood shifts at this point, it takes about three seconds for Lucas to realize she’s lost in her own head. Her head is still tilted, pin-straight blonde hair hanging longer on one side of her face than the other, and Lucas studies her face for just a moment.
Maya is blindingly unafraid of him figuring it out, which is good, because he’s managed to read her every thought in the span of a few heartbeats.
They do not kiss.
spring;
Lucas and Maya spend every second of the rest of his winter break together, exploring their bustling, too-cold city, stomping through the grey slush of plowed snow, sharing cups of hot chocolate, building pathetically small snowmen with what little snow they can manage to clump together in the tiny lot-sized parks.
Lucas wraps a scarf around her neck every morning before they leave, holds her hand when they cross patches of black ice, watches her try to master drawing the footprints in the snow.
Even when he goes back to classes, he’s still spending two afternoons a week coaching at the YMCA, has switched to teaching them how to dribble a basketball and master the free-throw because it’s too cold to run around outside.
March and April tease spring so frequently that when May rolls around, warm for more than a few days at a time, it’s hard to believe winter is finally over. Rain ruins their plans so many times that they stop making the effort, choosing instead to spend their days off lounging in the empty-again apartment, listening to the steady thrum of rain outside while they watch the movies being discussed at their cinema club meetings.
Maya discovers she has a very good eye for setting up cinematic shots, decides to try and pick up photography, like she doesn’t have enough artistic hobbies. Pictures of raindrops splattering onto park tables and galoshes splashing through puddles give way to the returning golden hour over the YMCA fields, paint-covered brushes at Corks and Colors, Riley’s triumphant smile the first time she gets a strike at the bowling alley.
Riley makes them all go take pictures with the Easter Bunny in the park and wins the argument with Farkle about being Christian-centric by pointing out that the rabbit is hardly biblical.
Lucas and Maya spend a lot of evenings out and about again, wake up too early on Saturdays to head to a nearby farmer’s market, stopping by the community gardens after so they can help weed the raised flower beds, the sun beating hot on the backs of their necks.
They discover Lucas is excellent at making pasta from scratch, and Maya insists they have some variation of it most nights for dinner, shouting about how it’ll soon be too hot to eat warm food again, don’t you remember, Huckleberry?
Impossibly, several of her photos get chosen for the camp’s summer brochure and she takes adorable pictures of Auggie and Ava and their dates at their spring formal. The amount of pictures she takes of Lucas would be embarrassing if Maya was anybody else. Every time she looks at him she’s filled with an overwhelming amount of pent-up energy.
They’re at the edge of a precipice, waiting for the exact right second to take the leap. Maya doesn’t want to rush it, wants them to last this time, but that doesn’t mean she’s feeling impatient and eager. Maybe that should also embarrass her, but Lucas is so clearly feeling the same that it becomes another fact of life; another part of their ridiculous friendship.
Despite how early it is in the year still, the pool by Riley’s house is more crowded but also nicer than the one at Maya’s YMCA, so they go to Riley’s whenever they have the chance, spreading out towels and shimmying out of fraying jean shorts, applying sunscreen on one another and spending long hours in the blinding sun, ordering cheap hotdogs and entirely too many jumbo blue slushies from the snack bar.
Riley tells her that she thinks Farkle wants to propose even though they’re so young, and she lays out all of the evidence like they’re running a long-con investigation.
“It must be so hard being the smartest one in the group,” Maya tells her and Riley smirks, agreeing easily. She still asks Maya to be the one to take the pictures when it happens, which means that Maya has a list of their upcoming dates she’s being given permission to spy on, just in case Farkle actually does it.
Maya gets home late, hair a little crunchy from all of the chlorine and skin a little pink across her nose and cheeks despite how many times she’d reapplied sunscreen. Lucas is FaceTiming his mom and also scooping out balls of cookie dough onto a tray, his laptop open to a mostly-empty word document and abandoned on the couch.
“And what did Aunt Gen say to that?” Lucas asks his mom patiently, trying to swat Maya’s hands away from the bowl of raw cookie dough. He points at the pizza box left on the counter and she acquiesces, triumphant enough with her one spoon of dough.
Lucas’ mom interrupts herself to briefly greet Maya, and Maya waves, cheeks round like a chipmunk from too big a bite of their spinach-and-mushroom. When she’s managed to scarff down two slices in record time, she obligingly takes the phone from Lucas so he can focus on his cookies and she can egg on his mom into total petty drama.
They talk so long that he’s able to pull out the first tray of cookies and replace it with the second, scooping them, still hot and too-soft, into two bowls and piling ice cream on top, rounding the kitchen to join Maya on the couch, their shoulders knocking into one another.
Eventually, the pair of them wish her goodnight and they sign off, Lucas’ phone battery dangerously low. Her t-shirt is clinging around her still-damp bikini top and the button on her shorts digs into the soft part of her belly when she slouches. Maya eats way too much cookie-and-ice cream, and fidgets around on the couch, trying to get comfortable.
It takes hardly any effort to convince Lucas to summarize his essay and describe where he’s been stuck. He’s remarkably less stressed about these finals than he had been the semester earlier, which Maya is grateful for. She’s not looking forward to when she’s completely unable to help him bounce around ideas because the subjects are so far over her head.
But for right now, she’s able to draw him into a half-hearted debate, mentions conversations she’s had and things she’s read, and soon enough he’s typing again, the steady clicking of his cheap keyboard lulling her into a doze on the couch.
She wakes up a little when he stretches, groaning slightly when his spine pops and trying to rotate his shoulder, which she knows gets stiff sometimes from when he dislocated it in their junior year. Maya prods him in that same shoulder with a toe and he looks over his shoulder at her, the guilty smile on his face making him look like a little boy.
“Hi,” she says, foot still pressed against his shoulder, and his expression softens into something a little sweeter.
“Hi,” he says back, twisting a little more, her foot getting knocked off him with the movement, but his hands wrapping around her ankles. They sit there smiling at each other for who knows how long, Maya’s eyes droopy with the lingering sun-exhaustion and Lucas’ crinkling at the corners with fondness.
“We still on to pick up a few plants for the flower boxes tomorrow morning?” Lucas finally asks her, quiet, Maya nods at him, reluctant to look away even as she shifts a little more on the couch, ready to doze some more while he finishes up.
summer;
Lucas gets really into grilling. They buy reusable metal skewers and corn and peppers and onions and, occasionally, cheap cuts of meat, and they make use of the cast iron grills in the park closest to Maya’s house, waiting until the sun has set and the street lights have turned on to avoid getting too sun-drunk from their near-daily barbeques.
Now that everyone is done with school for the summer, except the one math class Lucas is taking on Thursday evenings, they spend a huge amount of time at the pool by Riley’s, everyone getting golden under the sun and Maya’s freckles bursting into life across her nose and shoulders.
Maya is a group lead at the YMCA this summer, which means a pay increase and a new set of colored t-shirts that she takes many artistic liberties with, and seeing all of the camp kids return is exciting. Maya hadn’t quite realized how much she’d missed them.
The bigger paycheck means that, at the end of June, Maya and Lucas finally invest in a portable air-conditioner. It lives in the living room, and all of the doors in the apartment are wide open at all hours so that the shoebox can be filled with as much cold air as possible in as short a time as possible.
On the fourth, Riley has convinced her parents to take the whole lot of them to the Hamptons for a few days on the beach. It’s an awful lot of them stuffed into a small beach house that they’ve reserved on AirBnB, but watching the fireworks from the beach and stuffing themselves with burgers and watermelon and getting tipsy on cheap beer is more fun than even Riley had suspected.
It occurs to Maya that she and Lucas have been living together for an entire year, and the fifth beer has her sloppy and affectionate, her and Riley dancing the night away, tinny music coming from Zay’s red pill stereo. Smackle agrees to join them for one song every hour, rocking between them pretty stiffly but smiling reluctantly every time Riley and Maya spin her ‘round, Maya’s long hair flying out in a golden circle around them.
True to American traditions, fireworks get set off the whole weekend, which means everyone gets to sleep far too late each night. On their last day, Maya blinks awake early, the constant sun having given way to a day of rain. The cloud coverage makes the lighting look white and hazy, and Maya feels way too rested for how short a time she had been asleep. She lounges in the warm circle of Riley’s arms and the thin white sheet covering them for a while, listening to the sound of the rain from Riley’s open window and scrolling through her phone and relishing in being on a tiny vacation with her favorite people.
Eventually, though, the need to pee has her twisting expertly away from Riley without waking her, years of experience helping her along. After, she scrubs her face and realizes her tangled hair smells of the bonfire smoke from the night before. She makes a rueful face at herself in the the mirror and piles it all atop her head in a very messy knot, too lazy to wash it.
Maya creeps down the stairs, skipping the one they’d realized was too loud. She turns on the coffee maker and changes the background on Mr. Matthews’ unlocked phone to a picture of Farkle. Maya’s leaning against the counter, swiping through the pictures she’s taken this trip when Lucas comes in, face pink from the exertion of his morning run, hair and shoulders wet with the rain.
“Overachiever,” She tells him and he laughs quietly, using the kitchen towel to dry off his hair a little like the heathen he is. She shows him a particularly nice photo of Zay mid-air in an overdramatic volleyball game. It looked pretty good, even if Zay was pretty bad. Lucas starts rooting around in the fridge, likely looking for the last of the watermelon to snack on before family brunch.
“Hey,” Lucas says after a few minutes of comfortable quiet. Maya makes an inquiring noise without looking up, and feels him move closer to her. He touches her shoulder and Maya finally twists to meet his gaze, curious for only a second before she realizes what’s about to happen.
“Hey,” Lucas says again, quieter, and Maya smiles a little at him, feeling warmth bubble up her spine when he cups her cheek, gentle and almost unbearably tender.
Maya is the one to finally make it happen, abandoning her camera, leaning up on her toes, and bracing herself with a hand on each of his biceps so that she can kiss him, slow and sweet.
They stand there in the kitchen of the quiet vacation house for long minutes, kissing without any sort of rush or impatience, just happy to be there with one another, doing this at last.
Finally, when Maya faintly hears a shower upstairs turn on, they separate, breathing a little hard and wearing matching grins. Lucas brushes his nose against her affectionately before they inch further apart, and Maya links her pinkie with his.
“Hey,” she says back.