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“Wait — if it’s only broken, maybe we don’t need to get you a new bowl,” Max said as he and Miranda enjoyed the warmth of the evening sun and their renewed friendship.
“Fix it, you mean? I don’t have the pieces.” Or the will to bother for something she wasn’t sure she’d actually liked anyway.
Max stood up abruptly. “Let’s go and get them, then. It’s only been a few hours — they’re probably still there. Unless you put them in the bin, Little Miss Neat?”
Miranda shook her head and felt a pang of guilt in her abdomen at the mess she’d left behind. “I was too angry.”
Max grinned and held out his hand to help her up. “Great! Then we have a project.”
Black probably wasn’t the best thing to be wearing for scrabbling about for potsherds on the dusty ground of Plaça de Pere Bonet, Miranda thought as her knees and shins rapidly became filthy. Max didn’t seem bothered; he was just enthusiastically scooping up small pieces of pottery and laying them inside the biggest fragment.
“You really threw this thing, huh?” Max said with a teasing smile as he looked up from a crawling position.
Miranda shrugged, feeling a bit prickly about it. “Told you — I was angry.”
“At me, I know. That was pretty obvious.”
“At you. At Robbie.” Miranda sighed. “At myself, mostly.”
“Next time we fight, I’m going to put all the breakables out of reach.”
“Probably for the best,” Miranda agreed with a lopsided smile.
Max sat up and looked around the dry ground. He clapped his hands together to dust them off. “I think we got all the pieces.”
Miranda scanned the floor too; nothing stood out. “Mm, think so.”
Max shuffled over on his knees and emptied the last pieces he’d had stowed in his pocket onto the pile beside Miranda. He shot her a soft smile. As she smiled back and caught his scent on the evening breeze, she couldn’t help her gaze flicking towards his lips.
“Oh!” she said. “Now you have a little dust…”
She reached over and brushed his cheek. She supposed some secret part of her had been hoping he’d repeat her tender move from the bench earlier. Max did not let her down. His hand swiftly pressed hers to his cheek as he looked into her eyes with a powerful intensity that took the breath from her. After a long moment, he moved her hand to his mouth and kissed it, slowly and softly.
It would be so easy to let this play out, but a voice nagged at the back of Miranda's mind; he had a girlfriend, sort of. She shook herself a little, pulling herself out of the moment.
“Shall we go?” she asked quietly. “If you want to fix this bowl tonight.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Max’s smile dropped as quickly as he dropped her hand. She might have ruined the moment, cut the intimacy short, but Miranda couldn’t in good conscience do anything that might take things further than they’d gone so far while there was still the possibility that Max might patch things up with Carmen. She would have to proceed with caution, especially now the revelation of being so important to each other had given her hope. She wanted Max to love her back, but she would not come between him and his long-term girlfriend.
Max turned the engine off, unfastened his seatbelt, and turned to Miranda. “It’ll take me a little while to find the stuff. I got crazy into Kintsugi for about a week, then I sort of… stopped. So I’m not sure where it is.”
“You want me to come and help you look?” Miranda despaired of his organisational ‘system’, and knew very well it might take some time.
“No! No — I have a phone call to make too.” It came out in something of a panic, followed by a weak smile. “Why don’t you go and get us something for dinner, and I’ll meet you back here?”
Miranda’s suspicions were raised; perhaps he’d let things slip again and was embarrassed by the mess? She was curious about the call, but she knew how annoying it was when he pried over hers. “Alright. What do you want?”
“Your choice,” Max said. He reached across and lightly squeezed her knee. “It’s all up to you.”
Max stuck his tongue out in concentration as he lowered a particularly tricky piece of pottery into place in the almost reconstructed bowl. He wiped some excess gold lacquer off and looked up at Miranda, who’d been watching him work, admiring this hidden skill he’d revealed.
“This bowl is just like us, in a way,” he said.
“You think?”
Max smiled softly. “We might be broken sometimes, but when we fix ourselves it’s even more beautiful.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Max put his hand over Miranda’s. “Every time we’re honest, things get a little bit more wonderful.”
Miranda stared down at his hand covering hers. Why wasn’t he taking it away? This was going on too long, and combined with some of his other gestures, looks, and words… She pulled her hand away and shoved the fingers under her leg, squashing them against the chair in case they should think about seeking Max’s skin again.
She cleared her throat. “And what about you and Carmen? You’ll be mending that into something better too? Once the break is over.”
Max shook his head slowly. “How can you fix something when the pieces are hundreds of kilometres apart?”
“So you think you’ll break up after the six months.” She could keep her feelings in check that long, and a little more for him to be ready — if he ever would think of her quite like that.
“No,” Max said quietly. “Because we already did. That was the call I had to make.”
Miranda’s mouth gaped open. “Oh! You didn’t say. Are you alright?” Just like that, he’d ended a four-year relationship. Was it an impulsive moment he’d regret? He didn’t seem particularly down about it, although perhaps that would come, once it had sunk in.
Max took a deep breath and sat up taller. “Yeah. I’m fine. I feel… lighter?”
“You’re not upset?” If he was, Miranda was prepared to offer some comfort — something she wouldn’t do for many people at all.
“Only a little,” Max said with a small shrug. “I regret the loss of a future I thought I might have. But I think I might have a better one now. It was over a long time ago, anyway. I see that now.”
Miranda nodded. The thought occurred to her that it had all happened in a rush, within hours of the near-death experience he’d said had made him realise what was important to him. What did it mean? “Why today?” she asked quietly.
Max looked down and busied himself with another piece of bowl to add to the reformed vessel in front of himself. It seemed to Miranda that he was avoiding the question — fair enough, she thought. She had no right to be prying about the breakdown of his relationship, especially when it was still so fresh, even if he claimed it wasn’t that painful.
With the fragment in place, Max sat back and eyed Miranda levelly. “I wasn’t sure whether to have this conversation yet, but… I had to end it now because of what we said earlier. What’s important to me: it’s not her.”
“No?” Miranda’s heart hammered hard and fast. Max’s gaze was one of those deeply meaningful ones he trained on her every so often, like he was trying to see into her soul, conveying some unspoken message.
“Hasn’t been for a long time. You know I was talking about you?” Max leaned forward and covered Miranda’s other hand with his. He looked deep into her eyes as the heat tingled into her skin.
Tears welled in Miranda’s eyes and she nodded, her smile wobbly and her voice wavering with emotion as she spoke. “Same; I mean it’s you, for me. I thought about you when—” She cut herself off as the memories of both their brushes with death choked her.
“That means something, doesn’t it? For us?” Max asked eagerly. “There’s something more…?”
Miranda smiled her confirmation. “Slowly, Max,” she whispered. After all this waiting, she didn’t want to risk messing things up by starting off in a rush. They both deserved to do this properly.
“Sure,” Max agreed with a squeeze of her hand. “We make things even more beautiful in our own time.”
He leaned over the table, narrowly avoiding the bowl, and softly kissed Miranda’s cheek. It was brief and tender and enough. They weren’t broken, they just had history — and a beautiful future to come.