Work Text:
For the longest time, she'd thought Riley was supposed to be her soulmate. They met on the first day of seventh grade, and that's when it began:
It was, initially, barely anything, starting off as just a small half circle above Maya’s hipbone, similar to the one growing just underneath Riley’s collarbone. When she was younger she'd ask her mother why her mark hasn’t begun showing like some of her other friends, and she'd tell her it’s because she hasn’t met her soulmate yet, because it's not the right time, not the right place. But she'll know, one day, she'll know.
And Riley’s mark, she noticed as she sat down next to her in Mr. Matthews’ history class, started etching itself on her skin just like hers. You're it, she thinks and releases something like a sigh of relief, you're my soulmate, I found you.
It was easy, because she liked Riley almost immediately, with her long pretty hair and a radiance that's almost blinding. She thinks her bones might be made of stardust.
A kid wearing a turtleneck sitting behind Riley raises his hand and asks Mr. Matthews a question. She doesn't hear it though; she's too busy leaning her elbow on the cowboy’s desk behind her, feeling the hope she buried blossom in her chest again when she looks at the girl with light in her eyes sitting next to her.
*
In eighth grade, the other half of the circle is complete and Riley holds her hand for the first time. They're best friends now and they kiss each other on the mouth, and sometimes she'll feel Riley’s fingers skim the skin underneath the hem of her shirt, right where her mark rests. Maya likes looking at it, likes touching hers and then touching Riley’s like it's an actual tangible reminder that they were made for each other, that out of the eight billion people in the world the universe wanted them to be together.
It's ridiculous, that she's only thirteen but she's already found the girl who's supposed to be the love of her life. Some aren't so lucky.
*
She spends the entire summer before high school with Riley. They go swimming in the community pool on weekends, and ride their bikes to the lake close to Lucas’ house with mango juice dribbling down their chins and cherry stems in their teeth. They end up lying in the grass with Riley’s head in her lap while they count their scars. Maya always ends up with a little bit more.
It makes her laugh when Riley starts talking to the birds sometimes, her voice getting low and deep because she says that's the only way they'll understand her. She thinks she's ridiculous. She thinks she's beautiful. She thinks she'll never know someone like Riley in her entire life.
After the sun sets, they usually go back to Riley’s apartment with sweat-slicked skin and dirt underneath their fingernails. Maya will steal kisses while Riley makes them grilled cheese sandwiches, and it’s so simple, being with her. She'd stay over at her place some nights when hers got a little too loud, a little too hard, and they’d hide under the blanket forts they built until the sun came back up again.
It was easy to allow Riley to be her escape, to whole-heartedly believe that she was the answer to all the prayers she never spoke aloud. Maybe that was part of the problem.
*
When she's fourteen, her father leaves and her mother takes up smoking. She comes into class on the first day of high school smelling like cigarettes and heartbreak and doesn't bother wiping the smudged mascara from her eyes. No one even blinks; they all think her life is a tragedy anyway.
Riley’s talking to Lucas when she hops onto his desk, swinging her legs back and forth and ignoring whatever highly lame and boring thing they're talking about. Pausing the conversation for a second, Riley leans towards Maya for a quick, chaste kiss and she smiles against her mouth. Her thumb rubs at one of the corners of Maya’s smudged eye, whispers “you okay?” and doesn't say anything else when Maya nods and smiles her reply.
She doesn't notice it at first, not until Riley absently scratches the base of her throat and Maya’s eyes are instantly drawn to the column of her neck. Something’s different about her today but she can't really figure out what. New hair? No, still just as long and just as pretty. New clothes? No, still the same atrocious denim boot cut jeans she begged Riley to throw away last year.
And then she sees it. There's more to her mark now, a slight outwardly diagonal line inside the circle that wasn't there before. Maya lifts her shirt quickly, pulls down the waist of her jeans to see –
“Shit,” she mutters, swallows the hard lump suddenly in her throat. “This isn't happening. This isn't – “
“Maya, you okay?” It's the cowboy’s voice, she realizes, but it sounds too far away, like she's in a tunnel, like she's Alice and she’s falling down the rabbit hole to a place where everything she thought she knew was just a distorted version of reality.
“What's wrong?” It's Riley this time, her voice careful, concerned, and just so much that it hurts.
We're not soulmates, she thinks because it's too hard to even speak it, How can you not be my soulmate? How is that even possible? How can I be with anyone but you?
So she points at the too curved line inside her own circle, and the too straight line inside Riley’s, and doesn't say anything, and waits for her to speak first.
“No,” Riley says, softly, a crack in her voice breaking the word in half. “No - you're - I'm - you're mine."
“It doesn't have to matter, right? This is just some stupid mark, what does it know anyway?” Maya asks desperately. She's always believed in soulmates, everybody does, but this is wrong . How can she love someone this much but not be right for them? “The world made a mistake. It's supposed to be me and you . Right? We can work it out, right, Riley?”
But she knows Riley, probably more than she does herself. And Riley wants it all – the perfect soulmate with a perfect fairy tale ending. Not this. Not whatever mistake Maya is. Maya can already see Riley shrinking inside herself, away from her.
“I mean,” she wonders how a voice that soft can manage to break her heart so severely, “Fate is never wrong, Maya. If - if we're not….meant to be….then that means that we each have our own person. Don’t you think we owe it to them, to ourselves, to see it through?”
The world seems to disappear for a moment, so that it's just Riley standing in her front of her. And she wants to hold her, to kiss her, to remind her that it's you and me, forever. But she starts fraying at the seams too quickly until she fades out completely and she's back in English class. She glances behind Riley, sees Lucas talking to Farkle at his desk, away from them, from this mess, and she's so grateful for that at the moment.
“So this is it then?” she asks as she looks back at her. Harper comes in just as Riley leans forward to kiss her forehead and it feels too much like a goodbye.
Maya thinks it's ridiculous, how one little mark has the power to change everything completely. One day she's lying in Riley’s bed kissing her fingertips and whispering about the future, about getting a dog for their 2.5 adopted children and buying a house in the heart of the city when they're older; and the next she's picking up pieces of herself from the floor after Riley shredded what was left of her between her teeth. It's funny, how life dangles a promise of forever in her face just to rip it away as soon as she gets too comfortable.
*
Lucas finds her sitting at the steps behind their school. She's smoking a cigarette that she stole from her mother's purse when she wasn’t looking, her chin resting in her palm. She reminds him of an old sepia photograph, a little torn and soft at the edges, timeless. He sits down beside her and she doesn't look at him.
“I didn't think this week could get any worse, you know,” she tells him, her voice uncharacteristically flat. He watches her, waits for her to continue. “First my dad leaves us, and now Riley isn't even willing to try to make it work because some stupid mark we can't control is telling us who we’re supposed to be with.”
He places a hand on her shoulder because he didn't know about her dad and a comforting gesture is all he really knows how to do. She still isn't looking at him but he sees the corner of her mouth pull up.
“I thought you loved this stuff,” he says, shaking his head when she offers him her cigarette. “The whole soulmates thing.”
Maya shrugs. “I did,” she says, her voice muffled as she sticks it back between her teeth. It dangles precariously on one side of her mouth. “And then I didn't.”
“All because of this?” he asks. “Because of this…middle school relationship that didn't work?”
“She was more than that,” she tells him quietly, and she finally looks at him. His heart breaks for her. “She was – still is, the one thing that ever gave me hope. You know?”
He doesn't, but he nods his head anyway. The air around them is thick with smoke and the smell of yesterday's lunch in the dumpster a couple feet away from them, but he stays beside her.
“Maybe I should've seen this coming,” she says, blowing smoke into the air. He watches it curl in front of them. “Mom thought my dad was her soulmate and he up and left like that didn't even matter. And maybe it doesn't, in the end.”
“My mom doesn't have a mark,” he tells her after a few moments of silent contemplation, fidgeting with his hands. “But my dad does. He left his soulmate to be with my mom, and the mark’s starting to fade away now. Maybe the world does make mistakes.”
“It doesn't matter anymore,” says Maya, “Riley doesn't care. She wants her soulmate, and I shouldn't keep her from having what she wants.”
“I'm sorry,” he says, sincerely. “That must suck.”
She lets out a bitter laugh. “It sure does, huckleberry. But anyway, enough about me, what about you, huh? You got a tattoo yet? Lemme guess, it's a horse. Or – a lasso, that would be fun. Or maybe a cactus wearing a cowboy hat. Imagine sporting a mark like that for the rest of your life. Your soulmate must be so lucky.”
Lucas chuckles, ducking his head. “None of the above. It's still coming in, so I'm not really sure what it's gonna be. It's taking a damn long time, though.”
“My mom told me that some come in quicker than others,” she says. “Dave, Sarah, and Darby went to sleep one night as a blank canvas and woke up the next morning with a pyramid mark on each of their ankles.”
“Good for them.”
“Yeah,” she says, “They're happy.”
“Hey,” he addresses then, and takes her hand. She jumps slightly, not used to really any casual physical contact from him. “You're gonna be okay. You'll find your person, and they'll make you happy too.”
Maya frowns. “Why do I even need someone else to make me happy?”
“You don’t. But if you want, it'll sure be nice to have someone that loves you waking up next to you every morning, don't you think?” he says with a shrug, letting go of her hand. It's cold now, so she sticks it between her thighs.
“I can't see myself with anyone else,” she whispers, throwing the cigarette on the ground and he puts it out for her with the heel of his shoe. “It's only been Riley for me. What if I can't love them the way they want me to?”
“Don't stress yourself about it,” he tells her like it’s the easiest thing in the world, “you've got plenty of time to figure that out.”
*
Riley’s soulmate ends up being Farkle and she doesn't let it bother her. Maya smiles until it hurts and she doesn't let it bother her.
“At least she's happy. She finally found her king,” she whispers, around the burning lumps of coal in her throat, to Lucas after she sees them walking down the hallway together, hand-in-hand, their corresponding crown soulmate marks glaring mockingly back at her. She tightens her fists into balls until her nails leave crescent shaped moons on her palms.
She throws up later in the bathroom stall before fourth period and covers her mark with make up before leaving.
*
Maya starts hanging out with Lucas more often, when Riley’s too busy being sixteen and in love with a boy who she probably wouldn't have even care about if the mark didn't tell her to.
(She used to love looking at her mark, tracing its edges with the tip of her finger, but now it just leaves a bitter taste in her mouth.)
*
Recent Google searches:
How to take off a soulmate mark
How to love someone with a different soulmate mark
How to stop loving someone with a different soulmate mark
How to stop loving
*
She gets paired up with Charlie Gardner for a science project, so he comes over to her apartment on a Sunday afternoon to work on it.
Which means, obviously, that she's taking a nap on her bed while he's sitting at her desk actually doing the assignment for the both of them. Maya likes him. If he were Riley, she would've forced her to help and she just doesn't have the mental capacity at the moment to care enough about atoms or electrons or whatever to do a good enough job.
A couple hours later Maya wakes up suddenly with a start when she hears something drop on the floor. She sees Charlie leaning over to pick the fallen stapler up, his shirt riding up to reveal a mark crawling up his side. It looks like some kind of dragon maybe, and Maya clicks her tongue in annoyance that his mark is so much cooler than hers.
“Ah, sleeping beauty awakens,” he muses when he turns around to find her watching him. “You gonna help me with our project now?”
She laughs loudly, genuinely. “That was a good joke; you're funny.”
He rolls his eyes but he doesn't protest, swiveling back around in the chair to finish the assignment. “Your phone wouldn't stop buzzing, by the way. I think it was Riley.”
She sighs, closing her eyes again, and mumbles, “I'll call her back later.”
Charlie doesn't reply, so for the next fifteen minutes all she hears is the typing of his fingers on her computer. Until: “Hey, can I see your mark?”
She's sworn off soulmate marks - doesn't like talking about them, doesn't like seeing them, doesn't like anything to do with them really. Which is…unrealistic, considering that pretty much everyone in the world has one. Yesterday, when Harper was reaching up to clean the top corner of the white board, she saw her mark peeking out from the bottom of her shirt: a simple, geometric rose. She saw Joey Ricciardella’s mark crawling up his neck, a serpent with its tongue coiling behind his ear. She saw the lunch lady’s constellations on the inside of her wrist when she filled her tray with mashed potatoes. No matter how hard she tries, she simply can't escape them.
Charlie turns around then to look at her. “Okay,” he says, “but you have to look at it in the light.”
She's confused, until he takes off his shirt and she sees the full image. The dragon curls around almost half of his body, the tail licking around his belly button, breathing fire at the edge of his shoulder blade. It takes up most of his back, and it's only just an outline of a dragon, but it's the eyes that grabs Maya’s attention. It sparkles in the light, a rainbow of colors reflecting with each new angle.
“Holy shit,” she breathes. “How did you even get something so beautiful.”
He just shrugs. “Lucky, I guess.”
“Do you mind if I draw it?” Maya asks him, already pulling her sketchbook out from underneath her pillow. She sits up in her bed, her eyes wide as she waits for his permission.
“Sure, why not,” he agrees and turns back around, “but we really do have to finish this project.”
“Okay, go ahead,” she answers absently as she starts to sketch the outline of his body, picking out the blues and yellows she wants to use for the eyes. She doesn't notice Charlie’s unsurprised chuckle and shake of his head.
She draws until the image of Riley’s face walking away from her is replaced with dragon scales and sapphire eyes.
*
Maya’s putting away unused textbooks and brand new notebooks she hasn't bothered to open yet back into her locker when Lucas comes and slams it shut. He leans against the wall, casually, his legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded over his chest, and gives her a smile.
Maya eyes him warily, and rests a hand on her hip. “What.”
His grin grows exponentially. “Why don't you guess?”
She rolls her eyes then and clicks her tongue in feigned annoyance. “Look, Sundance, I really don't have time to play guessing games with you right now – I have math next and you know how much I love solving equations, so if you please – “
“Oh come on, Maya,” he says lightly, easily, nudging her foot with the tip of his boot. “You don't give me enough credit. I know you're about to skip class and smoke weed behind the school, so you can just humor me for a sec.”
She squints her eyes at him. “How could you know that?”
“Because you're carrying a bag full of sour patch kids,” he tells her, and it almost sounds like he's bored, like he's exasperated, like he expects her to just know and accept the fact that he’s familiar with her, “and you only ever need that much when you get high.”
Maya purses her lips and shifts her weight onto one leg, appraising him. “Okay, fine,” she says as she lifts her chin, “I’ll play.”
Lucas is absolutely beaming at her. He's so fucking lame. “I'll give you a hint to start: it's tomorrow.”
“It's tomorrow?” she repeats, raising her eyebrows. “That’s my hint?”
He only nods eagerly.
“Got it!” she exclaims and pokes his chest with her pointer finger. “It's tomorrow. The day you die. Because I kill you. Great surprise, huckleberry, I'm really looking forward to it.”
“Come on, Maya, just guess,” he presses with an impatient groan. “Use that brilliant head of yours. What's tomorrow? What's something that you really really wanna do tomorrow?”
She sighs and rubs her face with her hand tiredly. “Besides club you over the head with your own baseball bat? Uh. I'm trying to think – oh. Riley and I were gonna go see a band at O’Malory’s tomorrow night. I guess that's out of the question since she was talking about doing whatever the fuck it is that she and Farkle do together. Probably solving quantum physics equations for fun. Good thing we didn't buy tickets.”
“Hm, still not over it, I see?”
“Course not. I'm gonna be bitter about it for the rest of my life.”
“Okay, that's fine, but will this at least make you slightly less bitter?” He pulls out a folded up piece of paper from behind his back and offers it to her.
She stares at it for a long time and he waves it in the air, raising his eyebrows in expectation. Maya sighs and takes it from his hands, unfolds it to see that it's concert tickets. For the band she was supposed to see with Riley. For tomorrow night.
“You got me tickets?” she asks and glances up at him. She feels something warm in her chest when he sees the smile on his face because - he's so nice to her. And she doesn't even know why . All she does is make fun of his accent and steal the bacon from his BLT salads when she thinks he isn't looking.
“There's two,” he tells her with a shrug. “One for me and one for you. Can't let you have all the fun now, can I?”
She feels the overwhelming and surprising urge to hug him, but she refrains. There's no way she'd let people see her showing any type of affection or gratitude, especially towards Lucas. “But you don't even like them.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I put them on one time when you came over to study and you called it ‘aggressively sad girl punk’ and switched it to some country musician instead. Which I did not appreciate, by the way,” she reminds him.
“Oh that's who they are,” he responds with a snap of his fingers, like a light bulb just flickered on in his head. But then he waves a hand dismissively. “It's fine, anyway. I'll bring ear plugs. Or at least try to understand why you like them so much.”
She lets herself smile at him then, which of course makes him smile. It's so easy, she finds, to amuse him. “This is really nice of you, Lucas.”
“It's no problem,” he answers with a shrug. And she's learned that that's the way he is with her – he just likes doing things for her, without expecting anything in return. When she comes into class without any supplies, he'll give her some paper and a pen even though he knows she won't use it. If she doesn't have any money for lunch one day, he'll split his sandwich and bag of chips in half and pester her until she accepts the offering (he's learned now to pack a double lunch on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Sometimes when she's mad at the world for whatever she chooses to be mad about that day, he'll give her her space. But she knows he's never too far away because he'll slip little notes of encouragement on post-its through her locker and it's so lame and cheesy and stupid but it'll make her crack a smile because it's so him . She doesn't know why he's taken to directing his attention towards her, but she's thankful for it. And she doesn't tell him, of course, but he knows that she is, and that's all that matters.
“Just you and me, huh?” she says instead, her teeth caught on her lower lip. “Let's hope I don't end up strangling you by the end of the night.”
“I'll bring a body bag just in case.”
*
He arrives at her apartment at exactly six pm in his red pick up truck. They're almost juniors now which means most of her friends have drivers licenses and their own cars. She’s not quite to the point where she can afford any of that yet, but she doesn't mind. She's used to it.
The concert venue is actually a bar, so she dresses in her shortest skirt and tightest low cut shirt just to see if she can convince anyone that she's actually older than she really is and buy her alcohol. It happened once, when she and Riley went to a music festival together this past summer and she managed to get this really cute redhead to order her beer. She was fifteen at the time, and definitely didn't look of legal age, but the girl was already drunk off her ass and Maya batted her eyelashes enough to get what she wanted. She's sixteen now and she's learned a lot about what red lips and some confidence can get a girl.
She’s hurriedly applying makeup over her exposed mark when she hears a knock on her door. Maya’s trying to slip into her shoes quickly, hopping on one foot, when she swings open the door to see Lucas on the other side. He's holding flowers in his hand, a sheepish smile on his face.
“We've never really hung out just the two of us before,” he tells her. His feet shuffle on her welcome mat. “I didn't know what – if I should – “
Maya rolls her eyes and grabs the flowers from his hands, throwing it carelessly on her couch. “This isn't a date, Lucas. Don't make it weird.”
“No, yeah, I know, I just – “ he shakes his head. “Sorry – you ready?”
“Yeah,” she replies and tousles her hair with her fingers. “How do I look?”
“Good,” he says while throwing his keys into the air and catching it effortlessly after sparing a quick glance in her direction, “you look good.”
Maya grins and follows him to his truck, sliding into the passengers seat. She sees the car freshener in the shape of a tree dangling from his rearview mirror, and it smells like earth and campfire. “No cowboy hat just to spite and/or embarrass me? I'm surprised, huckleberry. Don't tell me you've lost your touch.”
He lets out a laugh as he pulls out of the parking space, his hand on the back of her head rest. He's got a impish smile on his face when she looks at him. “Don't worry. You'll never see me coming.”
*
A girl with too much blue eye shadow and a fake ID ends up buying Lucas drinks throughout the night, which he hands off to Maya.
Maya likes to be all the way in the front so she elbowed through everyone until she stood at the edge of the stage. Lucas was slow to follow her, carrying the drink in his hand, careful not to spill, and hands it to her. She pouts when she accepts it.
“I can't believe she was actually hitting on you." she tells him indignantly. “Straight girls are the worst.”
Lucas laughs good-naturedly, acting as a shield for her from the crowd because she's probably the smallest one there and she's already got bruises on her face from pointy elbows. She's surprised that he seems to be enjoying himself, even if he doesn't like the band still.
“They sound even worse live,” he had said to her. “I didn't think that was even possible.”
Maya just ignored him and continued to yell back the lyrics and wave her arms in the air and feel the alcohol humming in her veins. He'd come and go with drinks for her between songs and she’d throw it back with a grin. He wasn't drinking, obviously, since he was driving, so she ends up being completely hammered by the end of their set.
Later, when she's sober, she’ll look through her phone and see a picture a stranger had to take of the two of them. Her on his back with her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, and him, looking up at her with the kind of smile on his face that she's never seen on him before.
When she gets home, she takes the flowers he gave her and presses it between the pages of her favorite book.
*
This is how it ends:
Maya hides under her covers and calls her. She picks up on the third ring.
“Maya? It's 4am, are you okay?” Her voice is laden with sleep, and she hears rustling of sheets on the other end.
Lucas dropped her back home a couple hours ago after the concert so she’s still slightly drunk and if she regrets this in the morning, then it's no one to blame but herself and the six shots of tequila she had. “I had a dream that you still loved me.”
Riley sighs tiredly. “Maya – “
“Sometimes I think it's still gonna be us, you know?”she interjects hurriedly before she can say anything else. She needs to say it. She needs Riley to hear it. “Because we promised each other, didn't we? And I thought that – that maybe if I gave you enough time that you'd come back. But now I realize that you're not going to keep that promise. And I think the reason why it hurts so much is because I just wanted it to be you so badly that I didn't even think it could be anyone else. And then you just – you just dropped me.”
“Maya, I still love you. I'll always love you, please believe that,” she says softly. “It's just different now.”
“Yeah, you left me for a twig with a bowl cut,” she says a little too bitterly.
“Maya – “
“I'm kidding,” she interrupts before Riley lectures on about being polite and treating people the way you'd want to be treated and other boring shit like that. She's going to be a great mom someday. “I like the kid, really. He's okay when he's got his mouth shut.”
She's quiet then, and Maya just listens to the sound of her breathing. “I know you don't want to hear this, Maya, but … even if we were soulmates, I don't think we would've worked out in the end.”
That, she would say in hindsight, is the moment she realized that Riley is never going to come back to her. That she should stop waiting for someone who's already moved on. That she deserves more than all this hurt. She swallows the heartache that burns along her throat the same way the tequila had and asks, “Why?”
“Because, we just – we were good together, sometimes, we were, but that's it. We were kids, Maya, and awful at communication, and way too dependent on each other, and - and we were too good at bottling everything up until it boiled to the surface. We were focused more on trying to suppress it than actually figuring out a way to solve it. I loved you, more than anything, I still do, but we needed to find a balance. And your soulmate, whoever that will be, will help you with that.”
“Farkle does that for you?” she asks, even though she doesn't really want to know the answer. Doesn't really want to talk about Farkle, ever.
“Yes,” she responds.
“Well. I'm glad then. Happy. For you.”
Maya hangs up without saying goodbye. Riley doesn't call her back.
*
Somehow she ends up hanging out at Lucas’ house a lot; she's finding out that she genuinely enjoys his company, and even if Maya doesn't feel like talking to him some days, he’s always been a comforting presence.
It's raining when she steps in, her clothes drenched and her hair sticking to the nape of her neck. He herds her inside and tells her to take a warm shower and he'll order in some Chinese food, orange chicken and lo mein because he knows how much she likes it. He leaves some clothes for her to wear, a blue long sleeved thermal that she pulls over her hands because it's too big for her short arms.
When she pads into his living room, he's sitting on the floor with the food set up on the coffee table. He smiles at her and pats the spot next to him for her to sit and she rolls her eyes but sits there anyway. It's warm in his house, in his shirt, and he gives her a big helping of chicken and noodles and asks her which movie she wants to watch, and this is something she thinks she can get used to.
“Fight Club, duh,” she says like it’s obvious, “This was, like, Brad Pitt’s prime, of course this is the movie we should be watching.”
So he puts it on and they eat all the Chinese takeout and some time during the movie she ends up with her head on his shoulder and their backs against the couch. He's absently playing with her fingers, scratching away her chipped nail polish until they're clean. When she looks up at him without lifting her head from his shoulder, he's still watching the movie, his mouth set in a firm line. He smells like soap and laundry detergent and she's never noticed but he's got freckles scattered along his neck.
“Hey,” she says softly. He looks down at her, his fingers still busy with her own. “Thanks for this. For everything, actually.”
His eyebrows shoot up high, amusement pulling the corners of his lips in a crooked smile. “That's a first. I can't believe no one was here to document this unexpected turn of events.”
She squeezes his fingers and he looks down at them. “I'm serious. I don't deserve a friend like you.”
Maybe it's the thunder storm outside, or her full stomach, or just the fact that she's so grateful for him that makes her confess. But it's been a long time coming and he needs to hear it. She thinks he deserves that much.
“I like being your friend,” he tells her. “Never a dull moment.”
She smiles into his shoulder and nudges her nose against his collarbone. His mother comes in sometime later to find them both asleep, Lucas’ head tipped back on the couch and Maya with hers on his lap and his arm around her waist. She doesn't wake them up.
*
Charlie's over again, to finish the science project while simultaneously modeling his mark for Maya, when Riley barges in to her room. There are words already on the tip of her tongue but she hesitates when she sees Charlie, shirtless, sitting at Maya’s desk. A pretty pink blush spreads down her neck and she clears her throat.
“Um, I have something to say.”
“So say it,” says Maya without looking up from her sketchbook, a ghost of a smile on her mouth at Riley’s flustered expression.
“I – I forgot,” she sputters. Charlie smiles at her. “Lemme go outside and come back in.”
Riley turns on her heel, closes the bedroom door behind her, and Maya counts to three until –
“Maya – “ Riley barges in once more and frowns as she takes in the scene again. “Charlie's still here. Shirtless. In your room.”
“Hey, Riley,” Charlie greets with a wave.
“Yep,” Maya responds. “I'm drawing his soulmate mark and he's doing our project. You can join us if you want, but you'd have to be doing something productive like the rest of us.”
Riley sits at the edge of Maya’s bed, eyes wandering over Charlie’s back as she appreciates his mark. “I've never seen anything like that before.”
“Beautiful, innit?” Maya mumbles noncommittally. “So what'd you want?”
“Oh. Right.” Riley clears her throat again and turns to face Maya. “I have a problem. I think I wanna get a tattoo.”
Maya looks up at her in surprise, the pencil in her hand stilling on the paper. “You hate needles.”
Riley worries her bottom lip. “That's my problem. But I really wanna get one so I need you there with me.”
“Are you sure about this?” asks Maya doubtfully. One time, in their freshman year of high school, Riley went to go with Maya to donate blood and she fainted at the first sight of the needle. She wasn't even the one that was going to donate.
“Yes,” she says determinedly. “My mom is always telling me that it's good to try new things.”
“You do realize that this permanent, don't you? You can't just wipe it off if you decide you don't like it one day.”
“I know. I'm ready to do this, Maya. I want to do this. And I need you there. Please?”
Maya sighs, closing her sketchbook and shoving it back to its place underneath her pillow. “Sure. If you want me there, I'll be there.”
*
She's taking a shower one night when she notices her mark has grown. There's more swirls now, and she thinks it's supposed to a symbol of fire. Fitting, she muses. As she watches the water run down her skin, Maya lets herself wonder who her soulmate could possibly be.
Maybe Missy in her math class, with a machete for a tongue. Or Kyle from gym class, with charcoal hair and a smile so wicked he could burn down cities with the sparks of embers flickering from his fingertips. Or maybe it's someone else entirely, someone she hasn't even spoken a word to.
She shuts the water off and doesn't let it bother her anymore. She might be on better terms with Riley, but she's decidedly done with the prospect of soulmates.
*
It ends up being Maya and Zay and Lucas and Charlie coming with Riley to get her tattoo the following weekend. Farkle, Riley told them, is significantly worse than she is when it comes to needles so he decided it would be best for everyone if he didn't accompany them. Which was fine with Riley since she only ever wanted Maya with her to begin with, but where Maya goes, she's learning, Lucas is sure to follow. Charlie is there also because of Maya, but Maya thinks it might be because of Riley too. And Zay, well, he's always ready to witness a potential disaster in the making.
“I've decided to get one too,” announces Maya while they're waiting. Riley made sure to pick the cleanest, highest rated tattoo parlor in the city as a precaution. Maya's almost positive she's going to ask the tattoo artist if she can inspect their equipment before it even touches a hair on Riley’s skin.
“Really?” beams Riley, her grin evidence of her excitement.
“Yeah, why not? It'll be fun,” she nods. “I'll get it wherever you're getting it.”
“It's going on my shoulder blade,” she tells her. “That okay with you?”
“Perfect.”
It's like this: Maya and Riley in the same room getting the same tattoo on the same place on their body at the same time. Lucas asked Maya with a cheeky grin if she wanted him to hold her hand if it hurt too much but she just flicked him off and told him to go fuck himself, so he's sitting in a chair next to the cot she's lying face down on. She turns her head to the side so she can see him smiling at her, his hands clasped between his legs as he leans forward to watch.
It hurt a lot at first, but after some time it's just become a dull ache on her shoulder. She reaches out and he slips his hand in hers anyway.
Riley, on the other hand, isn't dealing with it as valiantly as Maya is. Charlie’s whispering words of encouragement in her ear as she cries and clutches at his arm.
“ Maya!" she exclaims. “Why would you ever let me do this? What's the matter with you?! Ohgodthishurtssobad."
“It'll be over soon, honey,” Maya calls back patiently. She watches as she bites down on Charlie’s arm and he takes it in stride. Zay's watching it all with unveiled amusement and catching Riley’s hysterics on camera so that he can show her later.
It's a relatively small tattoo so they're done in less than an hour. Riley is all red-eyes and tear stained but she's smiling and happy as she surveys the work in the mirror. Maya stands next to her and looks at her own. It's a sunflower, Riley’s favorite of all the flowers, so consequently Maya’s too. And this is important to them because it's a mark they decided to get on their volition, without the universe’s guiding hand. Maya thinks that the world still brought them together for a reason, that they're still soulmates, but maybe a different kind.
“Looks good on you, peaches,” says Riley.
They're not supposed to wear anything that'll rub against the tattoo while it heals so they go braless, relieved that they decided to wear loose fitting shirts.
Riley’s eager to show Farkle so Charlie and Zay drive with her to her place, and Lucas takes Maya back to hers. When she gets to her room, she swipes off her shirt and collapses onto the bed, her face smushed into the pillow.
“Scoot,” Lucas says, and she obeys, giving him room to lie down next to her. He's lying on his back, his arms crossed behind his head and he's watching her watch him. He reaches out and his fingers skim the area right under where her tattoo is placed. Her skin hums.
“Hey,” Maya begins softly, “be careful. I'm still healing.”
His touch is light, barely there. “I know.”
*
Maya comes home from school one night to see her mother cooking dinner for the both of them and chewing spearmint gum (“trying to quit smoking – nasty habit”). They haven't had a meal together in a long while, her mother’s schedule making sure of that. But she's here now, out of her baby blue dress and white apron, in jeans and a Rolling Stones tee shirt with too many holes in the sleeves.
And she's smiling. It's small, but it's there.
“Mom, what's that?” she asks after dinner. They're washing the dishes together when she notices it.
“What's what, baby girl?”
“That,” she says articulately. “Right there, on your forearm. Mom, you have another soulmate mark.”
“Oh, right,” she says in a way that makes Maya think it's really no big deal to her. “Yeah, it showed up a couple days ago. Wonder who it is.”
It's a rose. A simple, geometric rose. Maya smiles.
*
Riley and Farkle are fighting, and apparently it's bad. Or at least that's what Lucas says. Riley doesn't talk about that stuff with Maya, or anyone really, because she thinks it's her own business. But Farkle tells Lucas everything. And naturally, Lucas tells Maya.
They're at the beach and it's a Saturday, which means everyone else is at the beach too. Riley and Farkle are in the water, splashing at each other like children, Charlie and Zay are building sandcastles with Auggie, and Maya and Lucas are sharing a towel in the sand. He has his head on her bare stomach and she has his sandwich in her mouth.
“They seem okay right now though,” Maya observes. It's a hot day, so Lucas has had to help her apply sunscreen about three times since they've arrived not even an hour ago, because if she doesn't she'll burn brighter than a freshly painted stop sign. He doesn't need to as much as she does, considering his skin is naturally darker than hers and therefore less susceptible.
“That's just for show,” he explains, taking his sandwich back. She grumbles quietly and he ignores it. “But it's something different every night. Small things he does that make her angry. He says that she says he doesn't appreciate her enough.”
Maya sighs. “I wish she'd talk to me about it.” But she knows why she doesn't. Riley and Farkle are supposed to be soulmates, the king and his queen, happily ever after. She's not supposed to end up resenting him because that would mean that’d she'd have to acknowledge the fact that Maya was right all along. Sometimes the world does make mistakes. Sometimes you don't end up up with who you're supposed to. And sometimes, like Maya's mom, you end up with two.
“Just give her time,” he tells her, “they're still trying to work things out.”
“She’s just…” Maya shakes her head and nudges his side with her knee. “Sometimes I just wanna ask her, like, hey, Riley, what's a six letter word for that river in Egypt?”
He laughs and flips over. His arms are crossed on her stomach, and his fingers trace over the edges of her mark. She thinks it completed now, a flame settling just over her hipbone. “You don't cover it up anymore.”
Maya shrugs and puts her sunglasses back on. She doesn't tell him that she kind of likes it. “I'm too lazy. I already have to put make up on my face every day, there's no need to waste any more time on something I couldn't care less about.”
He's quiet for a long time, the silence stretching far too thick, that she thinks she's said something wrong. “So when can I see yours, cowboy? Where's it hidden, huh?”
“It's not important,” he mumbles.
“I'm gonna guess that it's on your dick so that's why you don't want me to see it.”
He rolls over so that he can look at her face but have his head still resting on her stomach. “Yes, Maya, I have a soulmate mark in the shape of a lasso around my penis.”
She covers her mouth with her hand when she lets out a laugh. “I'd pay money I don't have to see that. I swear to god, you don't know how much I want that to be true.”
Lucas clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes.
“So do you know her?” Maya asks, a little bit more seriously. “Your soulmate? I mean, obviously you know her or else you wouldn't have it, but do you know her know her?”
He falls quiet again and it's frustrating her because he's not saying anything, he never says anything. “Yeah,” he answers finally, “yeah, I’d like to think so.”
*
Maya starts their junior year by dating this girl named Lily that she met over the summer. She has dirty blonde hair and green eyes and a mermaid wrapped around her thigh. Maya likes to drag her lips over it when it's dark and they're hiding under her covers, likes to imagine what the other person with the same mark is doing at that exact moment.
Lily likes to tell her that she doesn't care about soulmates, that I’m all yours, baby, you know that, but sometimes Maya catches her eyes skating across every bare flesh she can find on the subway car or in science class for the one that matches her mark. When she sees Maya looking at her, she just smiles sadly and kisses her mouth and she doesn't deny it.
Riley and Farkle are still together, barely hanging on by a thread. Maya tells Riley that she knows what's going on and just to break it off already but Riley’s Riley and she's so fucking desperate to fix everything that she doesn't notice that she's falling apart in the process.
Lucas has a girlfriend too, the first one Maya knows of since he and Missy tried and failed in the beginning of high school. Her name’s Casey and Lucas says her eyes are like the ocean and he likes to skip class sometimes to drive her around on his truck because she's into that kind of stuff. She likes all the same things he does, like country music and horses and other stupid shit that Maya doesn't understand, like kissing in the rain and staying up until four am just to watch a couple of shooting stars.
She's nice to Maya, and it irritates her. Her smile is too bright, too saccharine, her accent too twangy. She's like an itch under her skin that she just can't quite reach.
Maya tells Lucas all the time that his girlfriend’s annoying, but he just rolls his eyes, thinking she's just being cute with him. That bothers her too.
Lily’s listening to her talk about it at lunch one day and she cuts in to say –
“Maya, you're jealous of her.”
She sputters on her next words. “I'm – what?”
“You're jealous,” she says and it bothers her that she's saying it like it’s the most obvious thing. “Lucas is spending more time with her than you, so you're jealous. It's only natural; he is your best friend. You should just talk to him about it.”
So that's what she does. Because she misses Lucas, and Casey is taking him away from her and she doesn't like that. She catches up to him after school in the empty hallways, tugging on his sleeve to get his attention.
“Oh hey, Maya,” he says with a grin. He jabs his thumb in the direction of the exit. “I was just gonna go hang out with Casey.”
“No.”
He's taken aback and furrows his eyebrows in confusion. “What do you mean ‘no’?”
“I mean,” she chews on her lip and he watches her. She knows he'll never let her live it down if she tells him the truth, but she's got enough against him that she's not worried about it. “I mean, I'm jealous. I mean, we don't hang out as much anymore now that you've got yourself a girlfriend. I mean, you're kind of like my best friend and I miss you and I’ve always been kinda bad at sharing. Also, fuck you for making me jealous.”
(So of course he reschedules his plans with Casey, because that's just the type of person he is when it comes to Maya.)
*
Lily breaks up with her in the middle of the semester when she finds the girl with the mermaid mark in gym class. It doesn't hurt. Maya didn't love her anyway.
She's walking with Charlie to their English class with Harper (again) when she sees Lucas with Casey by his locker. She's learned to control her irrational annoyance that comes along whenever his girlfriend is concerned, so she smiles over when Casey catches her eye. She smiles back, of course she does because she's always been polite, but it doesn't quite reach her eyes. Maya stops suddenly, because she knows what a break up looks like, and this is it.
She can't hear what's being said but she can see faces and she wishes she doesn't have to see Lucas’. Casey gives him a kiss on the cheek before walking the other direction and Maya reaches out to him before he walks into their class, but he just shakes his head and flinches away from her.
She can't explain the hurt that crushes her rib cage, but she remembers her anatomy teacher saying that a human heart beats over 115,000 times per day, even when it aches. It doesn't do much for comfort.
*
She finds Casey before school ends.
“Hey,” she breathes. “I saw – I mean, I don't exactly know what happened between the two of you, but I'm sorry. About, you know, Lucas.”
Casey eyes Maya, her mouth in a tight line and her eyes piercing. But then she just sighs, and visibly deflates against the lockers with a sad sort of bitter smile directed at Maya. “You know, sometimes I really really hate you.”
She doesn't know why she apologizes but she does anyway. It feels like the right thing to do.
“We could've been happy,” she continues, and glances over to where Lucas is standing in front of his locker, putting his books away as he laughs with Zay and some boys from the football team, “in a world without predetermined soulmates getting in the way.”
Maya, at least, could agree with her on that.
*
When Maya was little, her father used to tell her stories, fairy tales, about hardened kings and sleeping queens and talking animals and poisoned apples. It used to help her go to sleep at night when the thunder shook the entire house.
She grew out of that phase, obviously, knew that fairy tales were just the stuff of dusty books left underneath her bed, but she remembers how much she wished that her life was like the ones in the stories. She imagined it would be a lot easier.
But sometimes, when she sees Harper and her mother lying on their torn up couch together, and Harper’s reading about some classic Gothic poet while chewing on a toothpick and Katy’s rehearsing her lines for a part she'll never get, she thinks that this – this is better than the stuff of fairy tales her dad used to tell her about. Because this is real. It's messy and hard and too much some days, but it's real.
*
Riley ends things with Farkle in the summer because sometimes soulmates don't end up being soulmates for forever, and that's okay.
She learned that from Lucas’ parents, from her own parents, and she's learning it now. She doesn't think she'll ever find her soulmate, knows that they're somewhere out there, probably within reaching distance, but it doesn't matter to her anymore. Because she thinks she likes it when Lucas’ eyes crinkle at the corners when she says something he thinks is funny. She thinks she likes it when they're sitting across from each other at lunch and he lets her steal his French fries and she lets him steal her broccoli. She thinks she likes it when he's lying on her bed and she's curled into his side and she's ignoring whatever it is that he's saying because he's so warm and her mind fuddles when his hands find her hipbone.
And she thinks that, if Riley is made up of stardust, then he is the stuff of galaxies, of supernovas exploding, of the Big Bang that created the cosmos and the beginning of time. He just – is.
*
“Hey, Lucas?” He's sitting between her legs on the floor of her bedroom, his own spread out before him. It's late at night but Riley’s on a date with Charlie at the moment, so they’re waiting up to hear from her. A couple weeks ago, Maya started to notice a small dragon curling itself around Riley’s thigh.
“Yeah, Maya.” His voice is slow, his head resting on her chest. She remembers him saying one time that people playing with his hair makes him sleepy.
So she dives her fingers into his hair, tugs just enough that it wakes him up, and whispers, “I like that you exist at the same time that I exist.”
“Mm,” he replies, groggy, when she rests her chin on his shoulder. “You're a pain in my ass, but me too. I like that you exist with me too.”
*
She's the first one to kiss him – which isn't surprising at all once she's realized that it always had to be her.
It's the day before graduation and everyone is in their robes for rehearsal, the locker rooms echoing with mindless chatter as they wait to go in the auditorium.
Lucas is in the hallway, fiddling with his tassels as he waits for Maya to show. She had texted him not to go inside yet, that she had to tell him something, but he's been out here for half an hour and she has yet to make an appearance. Riley and Charlie have been texting him, asking him about his whereabouts, and he's just about to reply that he's coming in when he hears the scurried clack of high heels headed in his direction.
He glances up to see Maya running towards him, holding her cap in place as her robe billows with every hurried step.
“Maya, oh my god, finally, they're about to start without us, what in the hell were you – “
She shoves him, this tiny girl a head shorter than him, against the lockers with a reverberating thud and kisses him hard on the mouth. He’s shocked silent at first, but then he realizes that Maya Hart is kissing him and he's not about to let this pass without him participating. So he closes his eyes, one of his hands disappearing into her hair, finding the back of her neck to bring her closer.
Her mouth is soft and rough at the same time, pulling and soothing, and he wants so much of her, always, that he doesn't know if it's killing him or keeping him alive.
“Thank god you're better at that than I thought you'd be,” she teases when she pulls away. He chases her mouth with his absently, but she bites his lower lip softly in retaliation.
“I'm glad,” he replies because he has to say something before he starts kissing her again, which is the only thing he wants to do right now. It's the only thing he wants to do, ever.
“How important is it that we need to go to this rehearsal thing?” she asks, but he knows what she's going to do without him having to answer the question. Maya tugs on his hand and drags them out of the school, until they're in his truck and he's driving them further away from campus.
“Where do you wanna go?” he asks as she swipes off her robe and throws her cap into the backseat. She runs her fingers through her hair, sweeping it into a messy bun on top of her head. He smiles over at her, fights the urge to flick at it like he usually would.
“Anywhere,” she tells him, “it's a big world out there, huckleberry.”
*
They end up back at his place because, hello, no dramatic exits until after graduation. She's on his bed and he's finding it hard to stop touching her. He kisses her nose, her neck, her sternum, her belly button, the mark on her hipbone, the back of her knee, everything his hands and his mouth can reach. It's addicting, the feel of running the pads of his fingers over her skin.
And she only notices it after the high, when they're eating sour patch kids and licking the sugar from each other’s fingers. She lies down the other way, so that her feet are by his shoulders and her head is by his knees. Her hands find the mark on his calf.
“Why didn't you ever tell me?” she whispers as she traces the flame with her pointer finger. It looks exactly like hers.
“Because I didn't want it to change your opinion of me,” he tells her. “And if you were to ever fall in love with me, I wanted it to be on your own terms. Not because you thought you were supposed to.”
She's quiet for a long time and he's listening to the sound of her breathing as he waits for a response. “How long have you known?”
“Since the day you found out that you and Riley weren't soulmates,” he answers. “I saw yours, and it looked exactly like mine, and I knew. It'd always been you.”
Maya sits straight up then, swings one leg over him to straddle his hips. He can't tell if the line on her mouth is angry or not. “Are you fucking kidding me? You knew this whole entire time?"
He nods and she groans, his hands snaking their way into her hair when she lets her head fall on his chest. “This whole time. Through - through the whole Riley thing and Lily thing, and everything else in between, and oh – poor Casey. You knew."
“Yeah.”
“That must've sucked.”
“Yeah,” he laughs then. “A little.”
“You and me, huh?” she says after a few moments, her chin resting on his sternum. It's a little pointy, but he doesn't want her to move from him so he doesn't say anything about it. “I guess we were always just inevitable.”
“Guess so,” he answers. “I think the world hates me.”
She scrunches her nose at him and he smiles because she's just so fucking cute, and he knows that no one really belongs to each other in this world, but he's hers, as much as a person can be someone else’s, and that's something that's never going to change.
*
The world makes a lot of mistakes but sometimes, Maya thinks, sometimes the world gets it right.