Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 22: Why Don’t You Kiss Anymore
Three weeks had never been so long.
Reaper had done difficult things. He’d done genuinely hard things, the kind of hard that left marks — long stretches in the desert on runs that went sideways, situations that required a specific kind of nerve to walk into and a different kind of nerve to walk back out of. He’d built a business from zero. He’d survived the foster system and its particular education in impermanence.
Living with Maya Santos and not being with her was the most refined form of patience he had ever attempted.
She was right there. Every morning at the table, every evening in the living room, every quiet night in the house that was, structurally, his, but which had become, completely and without negotiation, theirs. He could hear her moving through it — her footsteps, the sound of her in the kitchen, the low murmur of her voice when she was on the phone or putting Emma to bed. He knew her patterns the way he knew the shop’s sounds, had catalogued them without meaning to, and now every time he heard them he was aware of the specific distance he was maintaining and the cost of maintaining it.
He didn’t complain. He’d agreed to this; he’d agreed because she was right and because Emma mattered more than his comfort and because three weeks was three weeks and he could do three weeks.
He was doing three weeks.
He just hadn’t expected it to be this particular variety of difficult.
The issue was proximity. The issue was knowing exactly how good it was, specifically, and then removing it — that was the torture, not the wanting itself but the comparison, the constant awareness of the difference between now and two weeks ago. He’d been fine before he knew. He’d been alone for years and it had been, if not comfortable, at least functional. This was something different. This was knowing the shape of the thing you were missing.
He’d gotten philosophical about it by Thursday of the second week. Picked up the Nietzsche and read the parts about suffering as a means of understanding what you valued.
He put the Nietzsche down.
He was being dramatic.
He was not being dramatic.
Emma noticed on day four.
She’d been watching them — he could see her watching, the way she tracked adult behavior with the specific, calibrating focus of a child who read rooms before she walked into them. She’d been doing it since he’d known her: cataloguing, comparing, drawing conclusions. He’d found it endearing. He found it slightly less endearing now that the conclusions she was drawing were ones he couldn’t deflect.
It was a Tuesday evening. Maya was on the late shift, not home yet. He was in the kitchen making dinner — something simple, pasta, because Emma had requested it — and Emma was at the kitchen table not coloring but watching him, which he became aware of with the peripheral sense of someone under observation.
“What?” he said, without turning around.
“Why don’t you and Mama kiss anymore?”
He kept his hands on the pot. Took a breath.
“We’re —” He stopped. Turned around. Emma was watching him with those dark eyes, Maya’s eyes, with the patient, data-gathering expression that could apparently be genetic.
He sat down across from her. He’d always talked to her straight — she was four but she wasn’t four in the way some adults seemed to think, the way that required softening every sentence beyond recognition. She was four the way a certain kind of person was four: fully present, fully aware, taking in everything.
“Your mama has some important things happening right now,” he said. “With the court stuff. About you.”
Emma nodded. She knew about this, age-appropriately — Mama’s fighting for us was how Maya had explained it.
“While that’s happening,” he said, “we’re just — being careful. About how things look. On the outside.”
Emma thought about this. “Because of the bad man?”
“Yes.”
“So you still —” She paused, constructing the sentence. “You still like each other?”
“Yes.”
“You just can’t show it.”
“Just for a little while.”
Emma absorbed this information with the grave processing he’d come to know well. Then: “That seems hard.”
“It is,” he said honestly.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she said, with the absolute uncomplicated certainty of a four-year-old: “But you love us.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of observed fact, the way she stated facts — flat and clear and requiring no confirmation because she’d already done the math.
He looked at her. At four years old and Maya’s eyes and the stuffed rabbit she’d set on the table to observe dinner proceedings.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
She nodded, satisfied. The case was closed. She picked up her coloring book.
“That’s okay then,” she said. “You can just show us later.”
He turned back to the pasta.
He was quiet about it, because the situation didn’t call for anything more than quiet, but something had settled in him when he said it — said it out loud, to another person, to the small person who had made it completely possible to say by accepting it as obvious.
He loved them.
He’d been carrying that around for a while — in the way he carried most things, privately, without announcing it. He’d said it to himself in the dark, in the particular way of someone who knew a thing but couldn’t say it yet because the timing mattered and the saying mattered and he didn’t want to rush it.
Emma had apparently resolved that ambiguity by deciding it was simply true and moving on.
He drained the pasta and thought about what it would mean, after the hearing, to say it to Maya. He thought about that specific thing — not the relationship, not the living arrangement, not the three weeks of careful separation that was, by his count, about to end in seven days — just those three words and the particular weight they carried when you meant them without condition.
He’d never said them easily. He’d said them once or twice, years ago, in situations that hadn’t been what he’d thought they were, and the residue of that had made him careful about the word. He didn’t want to be careful about this one. He wanted to mean it without reservation and he wanted her to know he did.
Seven days.
Maya came home at ten, when Emma was already asleep, and she came into the kitchen for water and found him at the table with his book, and she looked at him with the particular expression she’d been wearing for eleven days — aware of the distance, aware of the cost of it, not quite resigned to it.
“How was she?” Maya asked.
“Good. She had questions.”
A pause. “About us?”
“Yes.” He closed his book. “I told her we were being careful. For the court stuff.” He looked at her. “She said we love you. That we’re just showing you later.”
Maya stared at him.
“Her words,” he said.
She pressed her lips together. Looked at the counter. Back at him. “She’s four,” she said, her voice doing the too-level thing.
“She’s four,” he agreed. “And she figured it out.”
Maya was quiet for a long moment. Then she looked at him and said, very quietly: “Seven days.”
“Seven days,” he said.
She went to her room, and he sat at the kitchen table in the quiet house, and he thought: seven days is manageable.
Seven days, and then they’d show her.
He was already sure of what he wanted to say. He was just waiting for the right moment.
He was very good at waiting.
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