Page 19 of Past Lives
Chapter 12
Heath
“If my brotheris in fact the rightful heir to Laird Cameron’s vast Highland estate, then I’m the Earl of Bullshit.”
Maya laughs so hard that tears gleam on her flushed cheeks. She almost veers into a passing cargo van. For the first time in months, I’m startled to hear my own voice ringing with a happiness I’d nearly buried.
She says, “I just can’t believe he found out on Reddit,” clutching her phone, her eyes darting to meet mine, then away.
“It was a Sub-Reddit,” I say. “He’s spent thirty-seven years in the States, and now he thinks he belongs in the Highlands. Before this, the only time he wore a kilt was to try to get lucky on St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Now he owns a cabin on a hundred acres. He’s chasing some strange fantasy, and I want nothing to do with it. Right now, he’s even getting the family crest tattooed on his chest.”
She snorts, loud and unrestrained, and I wish I could keep that sound forever. “I can picture it,” she says, her eyes meeting mine with a gentle look. There’s no mockery—just a kind of respect, like I’m the only real thing left.
We’re holding hands. Neither of us mentions it—pretending this intimacy is routine. Our thumbs tangle, skin burning, asecret electric between us. Towns smear past the windshield: neon bleeding, brake lights haunted by rain. Every time she squeezes my hand, heat surges through me.
I don’t know how to say it. She’s the first woman who’s made me feel—whatever the opposite of alone is. It’s not just her beauty, wild and spectral: blue eyes like ice floes, a smile that could end wars or start them. It’s not even the stories she tells. She can make every shitbox town on the backroads sound like Paris if you squint. It’s that she listens—really listens—when I talk, as if my words could rearrange her.
“I’m taking the next left,” she says, letting go of my hand to turn on the blinker. I miss her touch right away; the space between us feels huge. “I like listening to you. And you said you had stories.”
We cruise through the wet dusk. My mind is a roll of old film: grainy, sepia-toned, thumbprinted. I tell her about the first time I got drunk—sixteen, corner of Lenox Avenue, my father’s tired laugh slicing through the warm night. He poured whiskey into Dixie cups and said the future was a crooked thing. I tell her about the time I lost all my money to a malfunctioning crypto wallet. For forty-eight hours, I half-believed I’d set my entire life on fire. I remember my mother’s piano, every key chipped or sticky. Some mornings, I’d catch her playing “Moon River.” She stared at nothing, eyes half-closed, as if somewhere else entirely.
Maya listens without interrupting. Sometimes she hums, nods, or lets her finger touch mine on the gearshift, quietly telling me to keep going. After half an hour and several stories, I notice my face hurts from smiling. It feels strange, like I’m learning to be human again.
We roll to a stop at a red light. She turns to me, eyebrows raised. “You know,” she says, “not many people are that honest with a girl they barely know.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“A dangerous thing,” she admits, and her voice is all velvet and thunder. “Which is sometimes better than good.”
She looks down. My hand stays open, waiting. I don’t move away; she turns her wrist and laces our fingers together, palm to palm, like it’s something we’ve always known how to do.
I want to freeze this moment, but hunger stirs—a raw, aching need for more, to find out what happens next, to chase the pulse of our story forward.
At the next stop sign, I release her hand only to seize it back with both of mine. I press my mouth against her knuckles—no ceremony, just need, trembling and fierce. The shock of heat between us roars silent and undeniable.
The rush of the kiss jolts me. My vision blurs at the edges—sound recedes, and warmth drains from the car, replaced by a cold breath of fog. In that instant, it’s as if I’m yanked out of myself, pulled across time and memory into a place that’s both foreign and achingly familiar.
The car and city dissolve. Suddenly, I am no longer in the rain-drenched present. I stand in a cold, briny fog at a battered train station. It’s vivid, as if I’ve lived this memory before. I’m in uniform, sleeves slightly too short. Maya stands across from me in a threadbare blue coat, her hair pinned up, her lashes wet with unshed tears. Soldiers push past in all directions, eyes fixed forward, but I can’t look away from her.
I kiss the backs of her hands, holding on tightly. She shakes her head and keeps saying, “You have to come back.” I want to tell her I always will, that I’ve done this before and will do it again. But all I say is, “I promise I’ll come home to you,” and the lie is so gentle I almost believe it.
I return, gasping, her hand still in mine and the feel of her skin still on my lips.
She blinks at me, wary. “Are you okay?”
I almost say no; the past has left me empty and scattered. Instead, I laugh, shaky and open. “I’m not someone who believes in ghosts, angels, or destiny. But I think—” My voice catches. “I think we’ve met before. I think I’ve loved you before. Nothing else explains this feeling—too much, too soon, for a first time.” She looks like she’s forgotten to breathe. Then she jerks the wheel, pulls to the curb, and parks. The rain, drumming on the roof, hammers the truth home.
She gets out, slams her door, and stands by the side of the road under a flickering streetlight. Rain flattens her hair and leaves streaks on her cheeks that might be tears. She looks unreal—and completely real. I can’t remember my life before this, as if it started when she stepped into the rain.
I follow. My shoes sink into the gravel and crunch with each step. It feels like I’ve done this before. Maybe I have—always coming back to the same blue-eyed girl in the cold. Her breath hangs in the air between us.
Maya turns, lashes clumped with rain, her wide eyes luminous, terrified—not of me, but of the tempest between us, this tidal emotion threatening to drown us both.
I take her hands, feeling her pulse racing under my thumbs. “If I ever promised to come back to you,” I say, my voice shaking, “I want this time to keep us together—I want it to last.”
She looks up, water streaming down her face, and says, "Just don't promise if you can't keep it." Her words hang between us, heavy and tense.
