The Heart Wants What It Wants
“Oh my god,” Emily says, sinking against the doorjamb for support. “MAYA?”
Maya St. Germain, the look on her face much more awkward than any Emily can ever remember seeing, swallows hard. “Emily,” she says, nervously. Emily feels overwhelmed by every single thing about this situation, disoriented as the time she cracked her head against the side of the pool, when everything went fuzzy and quiet. Then Maya gives her small smile, a ghost of the carefree grin that dragged Emily out of the closet all those years ago, and Emily feels herself smiling back.
“It’s really you?” Emily asks, stepping forward and putting a hand against Maya’s cheek to check that she’s not a hologram or hallucination or a sick masked version of Sara Harvey. But Maya’s skin is smooth and warm to the touch. Her eyes flutter closed for the briefest of moments at Emily’s touch. It’s not a mask, Emily realizes. Maya looks like she could have walked right out of her yearbook picture, but her eyes are more serious, her hair is a little shorter but still a mass of untamed curls. She’s alive, she’s not a teenager anymore, she’s standing right in front of Emily wearing a white nurse’s uniform and a nametag that identifies her as Kendra.
“It’s me,” Maya says, recovering a trace of her old aplomb. “In the flesh.”
“But how-”
She feels a hand clutching her arm, and turns to see Alison regarding the situation through narrowed eyes. “This is all very touching,” Alison interjects, coldly. “But I’m sure it’s a long story, and we need to leave. Now.”
Emily looks at her as if she’s not even speaking English.
“If you two need to catch up,” Wren offers, his gaze on Emily’s hand still on Maya’s cheek, “Alison, I’m sure that Jason or I could be of service. I’ll drop you wherever you like.”
“I need to see Spencer,” Jason announces, striding towards them. “I’ll take you to the barn.”
Alison removes her hand from Emily’s arm. “Emily,” she says, summoning a commanding tone. Then her voice softens, becomes almost vulnerable. “Come on.”
Maya ignores everyone who isn’t Emily. “Let’s go outside,” she suggests.
Emily nods, as Alison puts an imperious hand out in a stop motion towards Maya.
“Give us a minute,” Ali hisses, pulling a confused Emily around the corner.
“What’s wrong with you?” Emily protests. “Do you know who that is? It’s Maya! She’s not dead!”
“I know,” Alison says, sounding a little regretful. “I know who she is, probably better than you do. But this doesn’t change anything, does it?”
“It changes everything,” Emily says, without thinking. She senses how Alison stiffens at her words, and then catches on. “Ali, I haven’t seen her in years. It’s not like that.”
“It’s not going to be like when I came back?” Alison asks, carefully.
“That was different,” Emily assures her. “I never stopped loving you.”
“You never stop loving anyone. That’s what worries me.”
------------
Ten minutes later, the others are finally gone, Alison casting a last baleful look out of the window of Jason’s car. Emily and Maya are sitting on a bench outside on the grounds, Emily pulling her jacket tightly around her shoulders against the wind.
“I don’t know where to start,” Maya confesses.
“What happened to you?” Emily asks as gently as she can. “Where have you been?”
“When we were together,” Maya begins. “Emily, there were some things I didn’t tell you. I was trying to run from my past, and you - you seemed like the perfect new start.” Maya takes Emily’s hand. “My parents moved her because of me. Because I’d fallen in with a bad crowd in San Francisco. My boyfriend - I thought he was just posing as a bad boy, but he turned out to be the real thing.”
“He was a small time dealer, but he was all about the hustle. He’d sell anything to anyone. Dope, pills, coke, club drugs - the guy was a walking pharmacy. I started using. A little at first. Then a little more. I didn’t think it was a problem, I did a good job hiding it from my parents, until they found me unconscious on the bathroom floor and rushed me to the hospital.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Emily asks, her eyes tracing Maya’s face hungrily, still shocked to be sitting across from her, talking to her as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. As if they’ve just run into each other at the dentist’s office and decided to meet for lunch. As if one of them hasn’t just risen from the dead.
“I didn’t want to be that person,” Maya explains. “I didn’t want you to see me that way, a messed up addict on her third tour of rehab. That’s why we came here. My parents got me a space in an outpatient program at Radley. They thought it would be good to get me away from my old friends in California, my old habits.”
“That’s why they freaked out,” Emily realizes. “When my mom found that joint in your purse.”
“They weren’t overreacting,” Maya admits. “I was supposed to be cleaning up my act. But it was hard. New town, new people. I needed something to take the edge off, make me a little less inhibited.”
“You were never inhibited,” Emily says, smiling at the memory of the bold swath Maya always seemed to cut through life, slicing all of Emily’s doubts and hesitations to ribbons.
“Maybe not with you,” Maya teases. “You brought out a different side of me. It was like - the person I wanted to be was the person you thought I was. I know that sounds messed up.”
“You were that person,” Emily insists. “It wasn’t all an act or a game with you. Was it?”
“Two days,” Maya says. “It took me two days to fall in with the wrong crowd all over again.”
“What are you talking about? I met you the day you moved here.” Emily has a vivid memory of the walls of Alison’s old room seeming suddenly close around them. Remembers how she stared at Maya without meaning to. The thrill of possibility when Maya didn’t turn away.
“The day we moved into the house,” Maya corrects. “There was some kind of delay with the closing, we wound up spending a week in a motel outside of town. It wasn’t far from Radley, I guess, but it was creep central.”
“I was walking to the ice machine one night, and I ran into this older guy. He seemed cool, and we started talking a little, and - he was holding. I was trying to stay clear of the hard stuff, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to make a new friend. But the second I took the baggie out of his hands, he whipped out a badge and threatened to charge me with possession.”
“Darren Wilden?” Emily guesses. The baddest bad cop in town.
“One and the same.” Maya nods. “He wanted me to get in with the party crowd, the ones who were always hanging out at the Kahn cabin. He was running a whole scam. He stole drugs from the police property room, sold them through me, and then had me give him the names of the buyers so he could have the option of arresting them if he needed a few busts to get his numbers up.”
“Is that,” Emily says, hesitating. “Is that why you had to leave?”
Maya squeezes her hand. “It was a big part of it. I thought I was off the hook when someone at their church convinced my parents to ship me off to that boot camp rehab. But he was scared I was going to tell someone or turn him in. He found a guy with substance abuse and anger management issues and sent him up there after me.”
“Lyndon?” Emily asks, horrified. “He sent Lyndon after you?” She swallows the bile that rises in her throat at his name, at the thoughts of that night at the Light House Inn. The flash of steel. The smell of gunpowder. Her shoes sticky with blood and her hands shaking so hard as she untied Paige’s wrists.
“I’m so sorry,” Maya says, looking down. “I never meant for all my craziness to come back on you. Especially not like that.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Emily says, automatically. “You couldn’t have known.” She wonders how many times she’s said that, all the dominoes of unintended consequences crashing through the years.
“I should have been honest with you,” Maya says. “But I didn’t have the nerve until it was already too late. I ran away. I stayed at Noel’s cabin. And one night while I was laying low there - Alison DiLaurentis showed up. Seems we had the same taste, in girlfriends and off the grid hide outs”
“I didn’t really have a plan, but after we swapped stories, Alison made one for me. She knew another cop, she had some kind of dirt on him. She promised to get in touch with him, to have him get in touch with a lawyer and arrange for me and my family to go into Witness Protection if I turned Wilden in. She kept her end of the deal, too. She promised Garrett he could be the one to “find” her, as long as he worked with Veronica Hastings to get me safely out of town.”
“But then they arrested him for your murder!”
“Wilden suspected something was up. Garrett was going to testify against him, too, about irregularities in the evidence logs or something. Wilden didn’t buy the story about me being murdered, he had fake autopsy reports and photos, but he went to check the morgue records and couldn’t find a toe tag for my body. That’s - that’s why he sent Lyndon after you. To find out if you knew anything, if we were still in contact.”
“If I had known-”
“He would have killed you. And me.”
“He tried to kill me anyway. I would have rather been in danger, but known you were safe. Or at least, not dead.”
“I tried to tell you. I did. I wrote a letter and dropped in on Hanna’s back porch.”
“The rain,” Emily says. “We found it, but the ink was completely washed away.”
“Everything happens for a reason,” Maya says, with an enigmatic smile.
Emily shakes her head. “There’s still so much I don’t understand.”
“Once Wilden was murdered, there wasn’t much to protect me from. I helped make a case against my ex-boyfriend. I told them what I knew about Wilden’s connections. But the heat was off. I thought about looking you up, when you were at Pepperdine. I imagined driving down there, running into you in a coffee shop someday. But it always seemed too crazy. You were over it. You’d moved on. And then, all these years later-- Alison called.”
“I don’t know how she knew where I was, or that I went into nursing, or even what name I was living under.”
“She’s Alison,” Emily says. “She knows everything.”
“She does,” Maya says, darkly. “She said she helped me get away and that she needed to call in the favor. She didn’t give me the details of her plan until it was too late for me to try and talk her out of it. She wanted me to get hired here, scout things out, quietly find out what the staff buzz was on Dr. Rollins and her sister. The palming meds and helping steal medical files came later.”
“But you -” Emily falters, not sure what exactly she wants to ask, but with a distinct feeling there must be more to the story. “You must have left your whole life behind! To come back here, to help Alison. I know Ali can be persuasive - but as favors go, that’s off the charts!”
“I do have a whole life,” Maya agrees. Her smile seems wistful. “I have a cabin near Mount Shasta and a vegetable plot in the community garden and a lover who calls me Kendra when we’re in bed together, because she has no idea who I really am.” She sighs, and interlaces her fingers with Emily’s. “Maybe part of me wanted to come back here. To be a tourist in my old life for a little while.”
Emily looks at their hands. Remembers the night before Maya got sent away, the candles flickering in Spencer’s bedroom. She tries to imagine what it would be like to walk away from her whole life, to become a person with no history, to have your own name be a lie.
“And,” Maya continues. “Alison said you might be in danger again. I guess I felt like after everything I put you through, everything with Lyndon - I thought I could finally get my karma to balance out.”
Emily squeezes her hand and smiles. “You didn’t have to do that, but I’m glad you did. I felt so guilty after you - after I thought you had died. I thought it was all my fault. That if you hadn’t been in Rosewood to see me, you would have still been alive.”
Maya shakes her head. “I can’t even imagine what it did to you. I’m so sorry, Emily.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Emily tells her. “You being alive is the best apology ever.”
“So,” Maya says, her voice lowering to the timbre of secrets and intrigue. “I know I’ve been out of the loop, but - you and Alison?”
Emily feels herself blushing. “Yes. I mean, it’s all pretty new. Not new. Or, well, it’s old. We have a lot of history.”
“You were always cute when you got flustered,” Maya observes.
Emily’s blush intensifies. “We’ve tried a few times before. But it feels different now. Like it might actually be real.”
“You trust her?”
“I do. She’s my best friend.”
Maya gives her a long, appraising look. “She did it for you, you know. She didn’t hustle me out of town for the sake of my pretty little face. She wanted to get rid of me. To eliminate the competition.”
Emily shakes her head. “No one ever knows why Alison does what she does.”
“I know,” Maya assures her. “But I saw the way she was sizing me up. She didn’t think I was good enough for you. She didn’t think anyone was. Alison DiLaurentis has been wanting you all to herself since she was sixteen, Emily. Not that I can blame her.”
“What will you do now?” Emily asks. “Are you going to stay in town for awhile?”
“No need,” Maya says, shaking her head. “I’ll give my notice and pack up this afternoon. Unless…” she fixes Emily with a lingering suggestive look, “Unless there’s a chance you might want me to stay close. We never really had a chance to say goodbye last time.”
Emily smiles in spite of herself. “You always were a flirt.”
“Lucky for you! You were so shy.”
Emily squeezes Maya’s hand again, for a long moment, then pulls away. “Go back to your regular life,” she says, not unkindly. “It’s amazing to see you, and I’m so glad we got to have a happier ending - ”
“But it’s still an ending,” Maya says, ruefully. “I get it.”
Emily stands up and hugs Maya. “Can we keep in touch? Maybe have dinner sometime if I’m back in California?”
“I’d like that,” Maya agrees, her arms tight around Emily’s body.
“I should go,” Emily says. “We still have a mystery to solve.”
Maya nods, pulling away. “Good luck with that.”
“Thanks.” Emily turns and starts walking slowly back to the parking lot.
She’s halfway there when she hears Maya call out, “Emily, wait!” And then Maya comes running up breathlessly behind her, a hand on her shoulder pulling her around. Maya kisses her, and it feels warm and familiar, like the smell of an old favorite recipe bubbling on the stove. Emily kisses her back briefly, then pulls away.
“She doesn’t deserve you,” Maya says, a hand on her hip.
“The heart wants what it wants,” Emily replies. “You taught me that.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Maya grins. “Well then - I hope she knows how lucky she is.”
Emily’s phone pings, and the smile vanishes from her face as she reads the message. “I’m sorry,” she says, hurrying back towards her car. “I have to go.”
She tosses the phone on the passenger’s seat as she starts the engine. The screen still shows the SOS text from Spencer, with a picture attachment of a terrified Melissa Hastings bound and gagged and tied to a chair.