Uncharted Us

The phone buzzed against my hip at 2:47 in the morning. I didn't need to look at the screen. Only one person on this earth had the audacity to call at that hour, and she knew I'd answer.

"You're awake," Maya said. Not a question.

"I am now."

"Good. Look out your window."

I lived on the fourth floor of a walk-up in the Mission District, the kind of building where the radiators clanked like they were dying and the landlord painted over the roaches instead of calling an exterminator. I pushed the curtain aside. Down on the street, Maya's beat-up Jeep sat idling under the orange glow of a streetlamp, passenger door hanging open. She stood on the sidewalk with her phone pressed to her ear, head tilted back, grinning up at me like she'd just pulled off a heist.

"You're insane," I said.

"I'm bored. There's a difference. Get dressed. Bring your passport."

"Where are we going?"

"Does it matter?"

It should have. I had work in six hours. A relationship that was technically still a relationship, even if Danielle hadn't touched me in three weeks and we'd devolved into the kind of couple that communicates exclusively through passive-aggressive Post-it notes on the refrigerator. I had reasons to say no. I always had reasons.

Maya knew I'd never use them.

I pulled on jeans and a hoodie, grabbed the passport from the shoebox on the top shelf of my closet, and was in her Jeep within ten minutes. She didn't say anything when I climbed in. Just shifted into gear and pulled away from the curb, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a gas station coffee that smelled like burnt caramel.

"You know it's a Tuesday, right?" I said.

"It's Wednesday now. Technically."

"Even worse."

She laughed. That laugh, low and rough from too many cigarettes she swore she'd quit, the one that made me feel like we were nineteen again, sneaking into rooftop pools and running from security guards. We'd been doing this since freshman year of college, when she'd knocked on my dorm room door and asked if I wanted to drive to Vegas with a stranger she'd met at a gas station. I'd said yes. I'd been saying yes for eleven years.

Maya's right arm caught the streetlight as she turned onto the freeway on-ramp. The tattoos twisted from her shoulder to her wrist, a patchwork of coordinates and half-finished sketches. There was a wolf in there somewhere, a compass, the outline of a mountain range she'd shot in Patagonia. She told people the tattoos were about freedom. I knew they were about her father, who'd died when she was sixteen and left her nothing but a beat-up camera and a note that said *go see the world, kid*. She never talked about him. But she'd inked his handwriting onto her forearm, small enough that you had to get close to read it.

I'd gotten close enough.

"Danielle's going to kill me," I said.

"Danielle's been killing you for two years. Slowly. Like a frog in a pot."

"That's a myth. The frog thing."

"See, this is why I keep you around. Useless trivia."

I watched the city fall away behind us, the skyline shrinking into a cluster of lights, then nothing. Maya drove fast, the way she did everything, weaving between trucks and drumming her fingers on the wheel to a song I couldn't hear. She'd cut her hair since I'd seen her last, a month ago, maybe two. It was shorter now, brushing her jaw, still that sun-bleached blonde that made people assume she was harmless. She wasn't. She was the most dangerous person I knew, and I'd spent over a decade pretending that didn't thrill me.

"So," I said. "You going to tell me where we're going, or is this another one of your mystery trips where I end up handcuffed in a foreign prison?"

"That was one time. And you said it was fun."

"I said it was terrifying. You heard fun."

"Same thing."

She reached over and squeezed my knee. Just for a second. Her hand was warm from the coffee cup, and I felt it linger a beat longer than it should have, the way it always did. We didn't talk about those moments. We'd built an entire friendship around not talking about them.

"Mexico City," she said finally. "There's a photographer I've been following for years. He shoots the underground lucha libre scene. I got an in. Two days, maybe three. You in?"

"You already know I'm in."

"I like hearing you say it."

I looked at her profile in the dark, the curve of her jaw, the loose strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail and framed her face. She was beautiful in the way that a storm is beautiful, something you watch from a distance and know better than to stand too close to. Except I'd been standing too close for years.

"What about you?" I asked. "What about what's-his-name? The climber?"

"Marcus. We broke up."

"When?"

"Last week. Or the week before. Time's a construct."

"Maya."

"He wanted me to move to Colorado. Get a house. Have a routine." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Can you picture me with a routine?"

I could picture her with a lot of things. I just couldn't picture myself in any of them.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I'm not." She glanced at me, and there was something in her eyes I couldn't read, something that flickered and died before I could grab hold of it. "He wasn't the one anyway."

We drove in silence for a while after that. The highway stretched ahead of us, dark and empty, and I thought about all the times we'd done this before. The road trip to Joshua Tree when her car broke down and we slept in the backseat. The weekend in New Orleans when she kissed me on a balcony at 4 a.m. and then pretended it never happened. The night she showed up at my apartment after her mother's funeral and cried on my shoulder until the sun came up, and I held her and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

I'd been in love with Maya since I was twenty-two years old. She didn't know. Or she did, and she chose not to. Either way, we'd spent eleven years circling each other like planets caught in the same orbit, close enough to feel the gravity, too far to touch.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Danielle. *Where are you?*

I turned the screen off and shoved it back into my jeans.

"You're not going to answer that," Maya said.

"No."

"Good."

She turned up the radio, some tinny pop song in Spanish, and rolled down her window. The night air rushed in, cool and sharp, smelling like exhaust and possibility. Maya stuck her hand out, letting it ride the wind, and I watched her, this woman who'd been my best friend for over a decade, who knew every ugly thing about me and stayed anyway, who was probably the only person on this earth who could convince me to drive to another country at three in the morning without a single question.

I didn't know what I was doing. I never did when I was with her.

That was the point.