“Pass it up here.” Lizzy accepted hers enthusiastically. “This is way better than pain medication.”
“Get it looked at once we get back anyway,” Gabe admonished. “Maylin, can you hold on to mine till we get back? Can’t drive and enjoy that at the same time, and I don’t want Marc to eat mine.”
“Hey, I haven’t even got mine yet,” Marc protested.
Maylin laughed and passed him his serving.
Victoria was just finishing up her muffuletta and accepted one of the cheesecake jars too. “You pack a wonderful picnic.”
“I figure it’s what I can do to contribute.” Maylin drew in a breath. “Anything I can do to keep everyone fueled up and ready to find An-mei is completely worth it.”
Up front in the driver’s seat, Gabe took another bite of his sandwich and chewed. Maylin watched him and wondered, was it all going to be enough?
Chapter Six
Gabe started and swallowed half a dozen suggestions to move along as he walked Maylin from the SUV back to the guest cabin. She wasn’t moving fast, but he figured she might have a lot on her mind and she was reasonably safe here on Centurion ground. He decided to rein in his hyperawareness and let her take her time. She stopped to study the wooded area around them—the worn path between the main building they’d just left and the cabin, even the freaking leaves of a random shrub.
“Look.” There was something he should clarify. He’d get straight to the point and it wasn’t going to get any better if he dressed it up. “We’re going for one goal at a time. Find your sister first. It’s very possible she’s going to be irrecoverable.”
Maylin turned to face him, her eyebrows raised. “You mean dead.”
Yes.
“Or worse.” And wasn’t he the biggest ass out here?
Her face became a porcelain mask. “I don’t want to believe that.”
No one ever did. But it was better to face the possibility than operate under delusions of happy endings. He started to say...something. Not sure what, but she lifted a hand.
“No. I get what you’re saying. I do. I’m also saying I don’t want to.” She looked down for a moment and then back up to him. “Is it possible to be realistic and hopeful at the same time?”
He rolled one shoulder in an attempt to ease some of the tension across the back of his neck. “In my experience, planning for the worst hurts a lot less in the long run.”
She laughed then, and it was so sad it cracked his carefully built wall a little. “So what would you say this is? Giving me the hard truth?”
When she made it sound like that, he reached for a better fit. “More like managing expectations.”
And wow, way the hell more awkward.
“Liáng yào k? k?u. A good medicine tastes bitter.” She huffed and turned away to study a tree trunk. “Thanks for the medicine, but you sound more like a guy trying to set boundaries with his girlfriend.”
Oh, even better.
“I don’t do relationships.” He gritted his teeth. This conversation had jumped the tracks. “And what’s with the Chinese proverb?”
She shrugged, traced a random pattern in the bark. “Every interaction with every person is a relationship. What kind is up to what each person makes it. And I grew up with random proverbs tossed at me whenever they seemed most likely to teach me an intended lesson. Some of them fit and some of them get lost in translation.”
Didn’t everyone have one of those sage personalities in their families? At least one whose advice was like a repeating track on an overplayed music list, and maybe one whose comments were the kind that stuck with you for life. He was guessing from the bitterness in her tone she was remembering the former.
“You mean from Chinese to English?” He’d heard enough of both Mandarin and Cantonese to recognize the languages apart from something else, like Japanese or Korean. But he didn’t know enough of any of those languages to actually understand even the simplest phrases. Most of his language skills were based on his more recent deployments in the Arabic and Balkan regions. Each language had a cadence to it that helped him separate and identify as opposed to trying to pick out familiar sounds or words.
“I mean from the one culture to another. What seems suitable based on the situation might not be, depending on the perspective.” She chuckled. “And to be honest, having been born and raised here I might not use all of them in the right moment either. I very much loved my parents, but there were a lot of awkward moments through the years. I grew up on a lot of proverbs and I take the sayings I like to heart, but I apply them my way.”
“And the ones you don’t like?”