She smiled at me, as though she wasn’t surprised. I was beginning to think nothing surprised her.
As worried as I was about her and the fact she wasn’t sleeping when she so desperately needed to, I also had to fight the urge to lean over and kiss her. This time of night was brutal on the impulse-control. It made everything seem unreal, irrational. It was as if anything could happen, as if the laws of the universe had been deferred. As if you’d found a loophole, and if you were brave enough, and the stars were shining brightly enough, you might just be able to slip under the radar and escape your reality, if only for a while.
I looked over at her, my attention immediately captured by her eyes. They glowed a kind of honey colour. I’d never seen them that colour before. It was the moon, I convinced myself.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said quietly. “I can’t shut my brain off.”
I didn’t tell her that she was the one mostly occupying my thoughts, robbing me of sleep.
She sighed, resting her head on top of her knees. “I know what you mean.”
I looked out over the harbour. The water was dead flat and almost black. I didn’t come down here often anymore, even in the daytime. This was our spot, mine and Em’s. In the dark, her with a glass of wine, me with a beer, sharing secrets and getting things off our chest. It wasn’t the same without her.
Yet here I was, with Maia, and there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather have been.
As if she could tell I was thinking about her, she scooted closer to me and reached for my hand. I took it, pleasantly surprised, and smiled at her. But she was deadly serious. The kind of deadly serious that made my pulse race.
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
Her hand was trembling in mine. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me, as if she was about to say goodbye.
“I want to be honest with you, because you’ve been honest with me,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Except, I don’t really know how to say this without you thinking I’m some kind of… “
“What?”
It seemed neither of us were capable of speaking above a whisper.
She took a shaky breath and squeezed my hand. “Promise me you’ll hold my hand until I’m finished? Because I don’t know if I can do this if you don’t.”
My heart began to pound so loudly in my ears, I could barely hear her. “I promise.”
I had spent the past few hours wondering what she had been through, who she had lost, how it had shaped her. And now she looked like she was about to tell me and I was scared to death. My mind spun through the possibilities while she searched for the right words. Above all, I wanted to make sure I smiled, squeezed her hand, offered her the kind of support she had offered me. She didn’t deserve anything less.
“From the first moment I saw you, I knew you were the one I’d been looking for,” she whispered. “I can’t explain it, but everything just seemed to fall into place. It felt like we were meant to be, and it made me feel so complete.”
Tears formed in her eyes and I think mine, too. I knew exactly how she felt. Yet, I couldn’t help but hold back the elation. She hadn’t finished.
“I know what we have isn’t normal,” she continued. “But maybe that’s the point – maybe the fact that we can’t explain it is what makes it magical. Maybe that’s what love is. Magic.”
I nodded. After all, I’d come to the same conclusion myself, not too long ago.
“I’ve been lying to you,” she whispered, tears finally escaping and sliding down her cheek. “And I’m so sorry. I don’t want to lie to you anymore – I wish I could tell you everything you want to know, but it’s not that easy.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I opened my mouth to seek clarification, but she shook her head, silencing me.
“My name isn’t Maia – not my real name, anyway. I don’t know what my real name is. I don’t remember.”
I blinked, confusion whirling up inside of me.
“I woke up one day in a hospital and I don’t know how I got there. I was naked, I had no ID, I had a shaved head and a fresh scar on my scalp. No one knew where I came from. I don’t know my name, or where I was born, or what happened to me. I don’t remember any of it.”
She had tears crawling down both cheeks now, almost white in the moonlight, and she was staring at me with such a haunting intensity that I wondered if this was all just a dream. Was I really here? Maybe I’d fallen asleep already, and this was just some kind of twisted nightmare, brought on by stress. Maybe I was still inside, in bed.
“I don’t understand,” I managed, my voice hollow. “How can you not remember who you are? Are you talking about amnesia?”
She nodded, sniffing. God, the pain was just rolling off her. I was right. This was some kind of nightmare, and we were stuck in it together.
“So Maia isn’t your real name?”
“Do you know what Maia means?” she asked, flashing me a ghost of a smile that tore up my insides. “I looked it up. I chose it because it means the goddess of spring… and I was reborn.”