A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!

December 9th 2019

Chapter 343
His Thoughts of Secrets

Lucas pulled up to the restaurant with minutes to spare. Looking through the windows, he could see the staff in the midst of cleaning up around the now empty dining room. He spotted Maya among them, focused on what she was doing and not noticing him yet, and his first thought was clear. When they got out of here, first things first, they were grabbing ice cream. If he thought he had the time, he'd go and get it now, so he'd have it when she got out.

Eventually, Maya disappeared from his view, probably gone into the back to get her things. She reappeared soon after, and this time she was clearly looking out the window, looking for him, as she made her way to the door. He held up his hand in greeting, and when she spotted him, oh, that smile… She walked through the door, giving a sweetly comical rendition of 'I am so tired' as she dragged her feet toward him and folded herself into waiting arms.

"Everyone missed you at dinner tonight," he told her, lightly brushing his fingers along her back.

"Is it ironic that I missed sitting to eat dinner with all of you because I had to serve dinner to a bunch of other people?" she hummed, holding to him like she would very much like to just stand this way for a good long while, even more than she wanted to go home.

"Maybe?" Lucas smiled. After a few moments of silence and holding, he looked down at her. "You're not going to fall asleep on me right now, are you?"

"No, no," she promised, sighing as she pulled back. "Soon though," she added with a grin, making him laugh.

"Well, if you're too tired and you just want to go home right now, we can stop for ice cream another time…" he casually shrugged and was met with the stare equivalent of getting the front of his shirt grabbed.

"Now, hey, let's not get hasty. The night is young…"

"It stays up too late, does what it wants, deals with the consequences in the morning?" Lucas guessed. Maya grinned.

"Something like that, yeah."

So, they climbed in the car and made their way to the ice cream shop, as Maya told him about her short Sunday turned long. Most nights where he'd pick her up and she proclaimed herself so tired, the car ride and the talk would have a sort of reviving effect on her, a second wind. It was the same as when they'd be struggling to finish some school project or another, and they would just feel their eyes start to sting, to want to close. Whether they actually finished the thing or just decided to stop and start again in the morning, there would be a shift, like suddenly they weren't so tired anymore. With Maya, that turn would resolve itself into such a lightness of being… She'd written a couple of her best songs and drawn some really wonderful images on nights like those, usually still wearing her work clothes.

"How was it today?" Maya asked him, after they'd gotten their ice cream and stopped to sit outside the shop.

How was it… It felt like he had to pull up the events of the day and start tracing thick black lines over parts of it, like some redacted document. There was no point in him rehashing the fact that he hated lying to her, even if it was for a good thing. All these months, whenever he had to actively lie to or deceive his girlfriend, he would something in his gut twist.

There was really no way for this to turn out badly. Deep down, he knew this. Even if she figured out he had been lying about his weekly trips into Austin, once she discovered the real reason he had been driving out there all this time… The only reason he'd been lying all this time, hiding what he'd really been up to, was to achieve that moment, to give her the perfect proposal she deserved. He only had one shot at this, at getting it right, which meant a surprise, which meant lying.

He wanted to get it right, he had to get it right. Plenty of couples out there, one of them would be waiting on that proposal with something like uncertainty. When were they going to do it? Were they ever going to do it. But that wasn't them, that wasn't Maya and him, no… For years already, years, the fact that they would someday get married was a shared, accepted conclusion. They both knew that was what they wanted, enough so that they would be able to just go ahead and think 'we'll do it after college.'

They could have been engaged all this time, he realized that. What would there have been to stop him when he already had the ring? He could have gone and gotten it from the bank, gone to Maya and said 'hey, I know we're not going to actually do this for a while, but let's get married someday.' But they'd already sort of done that, hadn't they, with this awareness they shared for their future. That wouldn't have been the right way of it. He'd felt it then, and he still felt it now. Even if he'd gone all out to plan some kind of grand display of his love and devotion to her, it wouldn't have worked. He knew that, because he'd tried it.

In the back of his mind, all through their trip to Europe after graduation, he'd tried to work out some kind of scenario, because how special would that be? Sure, he didn't have the ring with him at the time, but he had genuinely considered it, had even come close to going through with it at least three times that he could recall. But every time he had finally changed his mind, and the moment had passed.

"Hey…" he blinked, when he became vaguely aware of Maya attempting to take hold of his spoon.

"Just had to see if you would notice," she chuckled. "You just spaced out on me there."

"Oh… Sorry…" If he wanted to give her less reasons to wonder what he was doing back in Austin, to start to ask herself if there was more to it than some really complicated surprise for his mother, this sure wasn't the way to achieve it, huh?

"Maybe next week I should take Sunday off, and you'd do the same, and we'd just spend the day at home," she suggested, taking a spoonful of her ice cream and eating it as she waited for his answer.

He opened his mouth to reply, even as he thought about the house, about what still needed to be done and the amount of time he had left to do it in. Could he justify skipping a week?

What are you even saying right now?

If he stayed this way, so focused on his end result, even if it was done for her and for the two of them, that he would skip out on a chance to spend time with her, then what was even the point?

He thought about this now, after months of feeling like he had to, absolutely had to be out there, whenever they'd be working on the house. He knew that his friends and family who knew what he was doing and who helped him do it would happily carry the load while he took a week off and he just hadn't let them do it, because he had to be there… Now, he was coming to this conclusion that… maybe they could try it that way. They'd all done the attic without his knowing it, and that had turned out so good, hadn't it?

"Yeah…" he finally said, looking back to Maya. "Sounds great," he smiled. She grinned, leaning over to kiss him. "Minty…" he declared. Maya laughed, sitting back with a hum.

"So, come on, tell me about today, how did it go?" she asked. Lucas was no closer to an answer, was he? Most of his day had involved, directly or indirectly, the house and proposal.

"Well… a lot of it had to do with…" he gestured with his spoon.

"Your mom's surprise?" Maya filled in before he could go on.

"Yeah," he sighed.

"So, you can't tell me," she translated. He looked at her. "Hey, I get it, relax," she smiled.

"Yeah?"

"I mean, sometimes I don't get why I can't know what the surprise is if it's for her. I'm very good at keeping secrets, you know?"

"You are," he agreed. She gave him a look, which he took to mean 'and yet here we are.' "I promised my dad I wouldn't tell," he shrugged. It was an easy diversion, wasn't it? It set up his reasons and made them valid in such a way that they couldn't be argued against. And because Maya was the person she was, she would understand that and she would accept it. But on the flipside, all he'd be able to think would be that he had her trust, wholly so She would never presume that he'd ever lie to her, that he'd deceive her. That kind of trust was precious, cherished, and most important of all, it was not to be taken for granted. What if he was setting a precedent that he had the ability to fool her, for as long as he'd done it…

"It's kind of getting to you, isn't it?" Maya asked, tilting her head to the side. He looked at her, unsure of what to say. Did she know? What… "He's having you keep secrets for him," Maya clarified. "I know you don't like those." He breathed out.

"I really don't," he confirmed, in all honesty. He looked at her now, and all he could think was just how much he had missed her, all of today. Something about purposefully being away from her, valid reason or no, had a way of making that separation feel just a bit more… substantial…

"Poor Huckleberry," she laughed sympathetically, reaching up to pat the top of his head. "Would you like to talk about something else?"

"If that's alright," he smiled, especially as she went ahead and turned herself toward him, raising her legs up until she could set them over his, letting her feet dangle over the edge of the bench. "What are you doing?" Lucas chuckled.

"Just getting a bit closer," Maya shrugged. "So, what are we going to talk about?" she hummed as she took another bite of her ice cream.

"How's it going at school?" he asked, thinking about his conversations with his cousins earlier.

"Which one, the one where I'm the student or the one where I'm the teacher-in-training?" Maya inquired. He tipped his own cup of ice cream toward her.

"Your choice," he offered. She smiled, taking a bit of his kind before holding out her own for him to do the same.

"Well, Maya the Student is not looking forward to her workload this week. She'll get through it, but she's probably not going to get a whole lot of sleep."

"Unfortunate… for her," Lucas slowly nodded, getting a smirk from Maya.

"Yeah… Then there's Miss Hart, teacher in the making…"

"And how's she doing?"

"Oh, her…" Maya hummed. Lucas gave her knee a light prod.

"Something wrong?"

"No," she sighed, "Not really, just…"

"Tyler?" Lucas guessed. She nodded.

Maya's adventures at the elementary school, with all those kids cycling through Miss Samuelson's class every Tuesday and Thursday had been an inevitable part of their lives since Maya had started her days working at the school. She would come home at night and she would tell him about the day's classes after it'd be just him and her up in their room, as she didn't want to go around airing out some of the kids' lives to too many people. With him, well, it was different, wasn't it? All this to say that, in the past few weeks, he'd been getting to hear about a lot of them, sure, but above all she heard a whole lot about the saga of Tyler MacDonald.

When Maya had returned from Spring break, as the sixth grader was also returning from his suspension over his actions against Shae, she'd obviously been curious to see what would happen next. She'd told Lucas how she worried whether the suspension would have done any good or if all it would really have done would be that it'd made things worse. But then she'd come home from school on that first Tuesday back and she was just… confused.

The suspension had changed the boy, but all Maya could think upon seeing him was that he'd almost changed too much? As disruptive as he'd been before, you really couldn't miss the fact that he was there, in the room. When he'd returned to Miss Samuelson's classroom after his suspension, Maya just felt as though no one would have even realized he was there if not for the fact that he had been away and this drew people's attention. He'd just shut down, didn't make a peep in class, except when he was called on, and even then, the policy seemed to be 'as few words as possible.'

The way she'd looked at him as she'd said this, Lucas had a feeling he knew what she was thinking, and it was more or less his opinion, too. A change that drastic, for how he'd been before, neither of them believed that the boy had gone and 'seen the error of his ways,' overhauling his entire demeanor. When he'd asked her what she thought had really happened, she didn't even want to say it. She didn't have to. Lucas had that same feeling, that when Tyler had been picked up from school the day he'd been suspended, however his parents had responded, it had knocked something right out of him. Much as it should have been a good thing that he no longer caused trouble at school, it was like he'd been cast adrift. In the weeks since his return, he'd kept up this quiet new demeanor, and in return, in light of his loss of 'power,' he was being ignored. And Maya worried over what that would make of him. She wanted to help, but so far she hadn't managed to figure out any way of getting through to him.

"You'll find a way," Lucas nodded as they sat there with their ice cream.

"I'm running out of time," Maya sighed. "Once I'm through with my field work, I'm out of that school, and what happens to him then?" They sat in silence for a few seconds. "How's that for a new topic?" she asked, looking at him. He gave a small chuckle. She set her head down at his shoulder and he put his arm around her shoulders.

"Time to go home?" he asked, and she nodded. It was time to put that long day to bed.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners