Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
S unny drove up in the car Gabe now knew intimately. He and the Mercedes had gone on a quest together. At the low point, when he’d found the faulty crankshaft sensor, he’d despaired that they’d both make it out alive. But they had, Cinderella—the name he’d given her after Ramirez’s comment and for her silvery-blue paint job that reminded him of the dress the made-over commoner wore in the movie—now road-safe. Gabe was only slightly nicked with a bandaged knuckle, the bump on his head hidden under his hair, and a missing left pinky fingernail.
Sunny opened the driver’s side door that no longer squeaked, rounded the hood, and then opened the rear door with a flourish. “Your carriage, sir.” She smirked and bowed.
Scowling, Gabe tossed his bag onto the seat. “I’m not riding in the back.” God, why’d she have to make things even more uncomfortable than they were? He opened the passenger-side front door, slid the seat all the way back, and folded himself inside. He shoved his shaking hands between his knees.
Her smile was gone when she got into the driver’s seat. “Okay, you have everything you need? Your brother’s address in Vegas?”
She might look like a fairy princess, but she was pressing every one of his buttons. Gabe didn’t bother responding. Instead, he pulled out the printed directions and handed them to her. “Here’s how I want you to go.”
“Wait, what?” She wrinkled her nose at the paper. “No, this says it’ll take eight hours to get to St. Louis. We’ll just hop on I-70. We’ll be there in six hours, including pee breaks. You can practically see it from here.” She tossed the paper onto the console between them.
“No,” Gabe said. “We agreed. I pay, you drive. And since I’m paying, no interstates.” Just the thought of driving sixty-five or seventy made his breath shallow. She might weigh a hundred twenty pounds, but now he feared most of it was in her lead foot.
Sunny rolled her eyes. Somehow she did it so her entire body showed her frustration. “Fine.” She grumbled something Gabe couldn’t quite hear, something that sounded suspiciously like “Miss Daisy,” as she started the car.
Gabe directed her along the route to the state highway. He tried to keep his eyes on the paper, but he had to keep checking the road for their turns. It wasn’t so bad at first since traffic kept their speed low. But when they hit the state highway, the length of it stretched ahead of them, and the speed limit leaped to fifty-five. He couldn’t see the speedometer without leaning toward Sunny, but he suspected they were going at least sixty.
He wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans and checked the tautness of his seat belt. “Slow down,” he snapped. “I’m not paying for your ticket.”
Her eyebrows slammed down, and her pink lips tightened. But she eased up on the accelerator. “It’s going to take us an extra day to get there at this speed. Maybe two. I have a deadline, you know.”
She’d said she had a job opportunity. But she hadn’t said she was in a hurry. “When’s the interview?”
She checked the rear-view mirror. “Audition. In two weeks.”
Of course. She was an actress. “We’ve got plenty of time. No need to speed.” He leaned over to try to glimpse the speedometer and caught a whiff of something sweet and floral.
She inhaled sharply. “Stop that.”
“Sorry, I…” Had he meant to get into her personal space? He shook his head. Being in the car was doing funny things to his brain. He leaned back against the door, but it still didn’t leave a lot of space between them. He shoved his hands between his knees. Not because he was tempted to touch her—God, why would he touch a stranger?—but to try to compact himself into the small cabin.
He’d be less anxious if he didn’t watch the road. His gaze landed on Sunny where she sat, her shoulders stiff and her hands tightly gripping the wheel. He studied her profile. Her nose sloped straight until the tip, which turned up the slightest bit. It hadn’t been broken like Gabe’s, which still had a hard ridge right where a piece of metal from the track had slammed into his face during the accident. “You, ah, you going to stay in Los Angeles for a while?”
“Yeah. Now that my promising career in customer service is over”—one corner of her mouth quirked up—“I’m going to focus on acting. I’m hoping I’ll get this part.” She swallowed.
So she wouldn’t be going back to Ohio. In her Beach Island personnel file, a note from her manager had recommended that they try to hire her for the summer season. So that wouldn’t be happening. Too bad. For the entertainment director they still had to hire. He rubbed a hand over his stomach.
Picking up the paper with their route, he checked the next turn. He always did what others needed him to do. Not this time. He’d fixed her car, and he was paying for everything. This trip was about him and what he needed. And to avoid having a panic attack, he needed to keep their speed at fifty-five.
Sunny had plenty of time before her audition. He remembered she’d said her parents lived in Los Angeles. He envisioned a loving set of parents, just as gorgeous as Sunny. She was headed toward a joyful family reunion with banter and laughter. Not like the one-way conversation Gabe had with his parents at the cemetery the day before. When he’d asked them why they hadn’t told him he was adopted, they’d remained silent.
Could Gabe be headed toward a joyful family reunion, too? Would his siblings accept him just as he was? Would they give him answers? If the DNA results were accurate, would they be able to tell him why his birth parents had given him up? And only him?
He looked down at his callused hands and rubbed the bandage on his knuckle. Maybe he hadn’t fit in with them, either. They’d taken one look at him, with his shock of dark hair, his thick eyebrows, and his hands that must’ve already looked better suited to holding a wrench than a computer mouse, and decided he didn’t belong.
No, he and Sunny had nothing in common.
He directed the heat vent away from himself and rolled up his shirt sleeves.
In his jeans pocket, his phone buzzed. He pulled it out. Darlene.
“Sorry, I have to take this. It’s work.”
The frown line between Sunny’s eyes deepened.
Darlene started talking as soon as he answered. “I’m sorry to bother you on vacation?—”
“It’s not a vacation,” Gabe growled without thinking.
“But you said?—”
“Never mind. What can I help you with?”
“It’s Brandon. He emailed me to ask for the latest financials and the historicals going back five years. Is it okay to give it to him?”
Why had he waited for Gabe to leave town to ask Darlene for them? Gabe would’ve provided them to Brandon himself. He liked that his cousin was showing an interest in Beach Island again. If Brandon wanted to be involved in the park, and if these people in Vegas really were his family, it might make a transition easier when Gabe needed to give up his role. Because that role wouldn’t belong to him anymore. If it ever had.
“Gabe?” Darlene’s voice startled him.
“Sure, go ahead. Give him the reports. He’s going to the Expo next week. He probably wants to familiarize himself with the numbers before he goes. Remember, he’s an MBA.” Not like Gabe, who hadn’t even finished his bachelor’s.
“Okah.”
Gabe clutched the phone. “Darlene, are you all right?”
A frustrated noise came through the phone. “Jus’ a li’l slurry today. Don’ worry.”
Don’t worry? What if her symptoms flared up while he was gone? What if she fell? “I’m going to have Ramirez look in on you.”
“He’s busy. I don’t need a babysitter.” The consonants crackled back into her voice, and Gabe eased up his death-grip on the phone.
“Then I need someone to make sure you’re not slacking off while I’m gone.”
Next to him, Sunny shifted in her seat.
Darlene knew he was joking. “If only I had the time,” she said, airily. “I’m doing my job and yours now, you know.”
“I owe you a vacation when I get back.” Though her vacations might not be his to approve anymore.
“Yes, you do,” she said, her voice tart.
“Anything else?”
“No, that’s it.”
“Thanks, Darlene.”
“Take care, Gabe. And try to relax.”
As he disconnected the call, he looked up at the road and caught a flash of tan and white. “Watch out!”
He braced one arm on the dash and one on the door as Sunny hit the brakes hard. Don’t go off the track. The road. Don’t go off the road.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Let’s take a ride, see if we feel anything unusual.” That was what Gabe had said, minutes before Beach Island opened that day nine years ago, after Ramirez and his crew hadn’t been able to figure out what was making the trouble indicator flash. Sometimes it did that. Fright or Flight was young and capricious. She’d been closed the day before, and while Gabe worked the Guest Relations desk, everyone had chewed him out, disappointed that the most popular coaster in the park had been shut down.
Before the park opened that day, Mom and Dad had let him make the decision. Well, that’s what they’d said. Their hopeful expressions and glances at the park entrance where guests already queued up at the gates told him they wanted to open the ride. So he’d gone along and said they would. After a test run, of course.
“First car,” Dad had called.
That was okay. Gabe had always preferred the last car. The sense of weightlessness at the top of the first hill, the way it whipped over and down, made his heart leap every time.
Ramirez lifted off his ball cap and scratched his head. “We need to do more checks. It might be the train, not the light, that’s malfunctioning.”
“We’ll tell you if we hear anything. Promise,” Mom said, patting Ramirez’s broad chest before she stepped into the car.
Dad slung an arm around Mom’s shoulders in the front car and twisted back to look at Gabe. He winked and gave him a thumbs-up. Gabe tightened the belt over his hips and grinned back. Sure, Fright or Flight was temperamental, but she was the best ride in the park. His parents’ favorite.
Sid’s black curls bounced as she leaned over him to check the restraints. They’d dated the previous summer, and she tugged the belt a second time. “Enjoy the ride.” She gave the thumbs-up to Calvin in the booth, who pressed the button that set the train in motion. Gabe’s head jerked back as the car pulled forward. Then his body pressed against the seat as the train clacked up the first tall hill. Way up front, Mom’s blond ponytail hung down beside the headrest, framed by the pale early-morning sky.
At last, Mom and Dad raised their arms and disappeared over the top of the hill. For just a second, Gabe was jealous of the swoops in their stomachs, the empty track stretching ahead of them, the terror of facing the practically sheer drop. The rush of panicked pleasure. But four seconds later, his own car crested the hill, his butt lifted off the seat, and he plunged down, down, down, to join them careening over the hill.
Mom was a screamer, and she didn’t disappoint. Her giddy “Eeee” wafted back, along with the rush of the wind on his face.
Gravity jolted back at the bottom of the hill, and the coaster flattened out. He braced himself for the S-curve. As his right shoulder slammed into the side of the car, he heard it. A clunk and a grinding roar that juddered into his bones. His chest slammed into the restraint, and his head snapped forward as the car screeched to a shuddering halt. Something smashed into his face, and the pain that sliced across his nose and cheeks made him squeeze his eyes shut.
When his vision cleared, the front car was gone. Mom didn’t even have time to squeal before the thundering crash sounded below. A cloud of dust wafted up, stinging his eyes.
“Gabe! Are you okay?” Sunny’s voice came to him from far away.
“What?” he blinked his eyes open. The Mercedes idled, unmoving, in the middle of the rural highway. The sun’s angle was too low, the sky winter-pale and not July’s bright blue.
“Everything all right?”
“Fine.” He shuddered out a shaky breath. He couldn’t feel his hands. “There was a deer.”
She leaned her head back against the headrest and stared up at the car’s ceiling. “I saw it. It was minding its own business at the side of the road.” She scanned the road before easing back onto the accelerator.
“They can be unpredictable.” He rubbed the center of his chest like he could slow his racing heartbeat.
“If you’d let me take the damned interstate, there wouldn’t be so many damn deer. Stupid cornfields.” One at a time, she wiped her palms on her jeans.
The fields stretched out to either side of the rural road, the dry brown stalks sticking up where the tops had been sheared off during the fall harvest. A pair of deer stood in the center of the field to the right, scavenging for fallen kernels and any bits of green that remained on the frozen ground.
“Listen, you’ve got to let me drive and chill the hell out,” she said, her gaze on the road. “Your anxiety is making me twitchy.”
“I don’t have anxiety.” It was a lie, and they both knew it. PTSD, too, if they were listing his issues. He closed his eyes and took a long breath in, held it, and let it out slowly like he’d done with his therapist. The breathing exercises she’d taught him were useful. Talking about his emotions? Not so much. He’d given it up a few years ago.
By the time they stopped for lunch in a small-town diner, Gabe’s nerves were frayed, and if Sunny’s tense shoulders were an indication, so were hers.
While he paid the check, she went next door to the drugstore. She met him at the car and pulled a bottle of iced coffee and a small canister of pain medication from a sack.
He couldn’t stop himself from saying it. “You shouldn’t take that while you’re driving.”
Glaring at him, she swallowed two pills with a swig of coffee. She rolled her shoulders.
Reaching into the bag, she pulled out a bottle of no-caffeine soda and handed it to Gabe. Then she held out a carton of sleeping pills.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“You need to take one to relax. You’re making me tense, and now I have a headache and sore shoulders. It’s for both of us.”
“I don’t want to take it,” he snapped. Who was she to make him take a sleeping pill?
“Look.” She dipped her chin. “I could’ve ground it up and put it in your drink. You’d have never known the difference. But I’m asking you to take it so you can relax and we can make it to St. Louis in one piece.”
She was right. He’d never have known. But she wasn’t exactly offering him a choice. “Fine.” He checked the recommended dosage and took it, choking back the pills with the soda. “Happy now?”
“Ecstatic. Now, do some breathing exercises or something.” She flipped on the radio and hunted until she found a station playing classical music.
As she pulled out of the parking space in front of the diner, Gabe leaned his head back. She hadn’t touched her phone or even fiddled with the radio while they drove. Her small hands were steady on the wheel. She seemed like a safe enough driver, if a little heavy on the accelerator. If he closed his eyes, he might not even notice how they hurtled down the lonely country roads. He focused on his breathing, slowly in and out, until his eyelids drooped.
Voices woke him.
He lifted his too-heavy head from where it rested against the window. Ouch. He rubbed the twinge in his neck.
Reaching for the glove box, Sunny met his gaze. “Oh, great, you’re awake.” But she sounded less than thrilled.
She handed the registration to the highway patrolman peering inside the car.
“You all right, son?” he asked.
What was happening? Where were they? “Mmm,” Gabe grunted.
The trooper unclipped a flashlight from his belt and shone it into Gabe’s face. Too bright. Gabe squinted and held up a hand.
All the good-old-boy softness left the officer’s tone. “Have you taken any drugs, sir?”
Gabe’s tongue was thick in his mouth. “Yeah.”
“Gabe!” Sunny’s voice was sharp. “Sorry, officer. My friend gets anxious in the car. He took a sleeping pill to relax, and he’s still a little fuzzy. Want to see the package?”
Gabe leaned back in the seat and tried to keep his eyes from closing again. It wouldn’t help Sunny’s case if he looked like he’d taken more than an over-the-counter sleep aid. He bit his tongue to wake it up in case he needed to use it.
Sunny ended up showing the patrolman the pill carton and saying a lot more words that flowed past Gabe’s sleep-fogged brain. Her hands fluttered around the car like butterflies, and he suspected those long eyelashes were getting a workout, too.
Finally, the trooper said, “All right, now. Slow down, and maybe give your boyfriend a lighter dose next time.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Her back was to Gabe, but Sunny’s dazzling smile was reflected in the other man’s face. She waited for him to return to his patrol car, then she put on her indicator, checked the mirrors, and slowly pulled back onto the road. Her hands shook a little where she gripped the wheel.
“Did you just talk yourself out of a speeding ticket?” Gabe asked. Back when he used to drive, he didn’t know that was even an option. He’d just sat, sullen, hands visible, while the police officer wrote the ticket.
“Yeah.” She glanced down at the speedometer and eased off the accelerator. She flicked on the headlights.
“Really? You have New York plates. Those aren’t too popular around here.”
“All you have to do is be friendly and reasonable. And sparkle a little. It’s easy. Though”—she glanced at him—“maybe reasonable and friendly aren’t your thing.”
Gabe grunted. He was plenty reasonable. Friendly, too, with his friends. Which Sunny was not. Sparkle, though, was beyond him.
The sun sank low ahead of them, melting into a red puddle at the horizon. The road had filled with a few cars. Brown fields still stretched out on either side as far as Gabe could see, but the houses had started to cluster together.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Around five. We gained an hour with the time change. We’re coming up on St. Louis.”
She’d been driving all day. They’d taken a lunch break, and he might have missed a fuel stop while he’d slept. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah.” The corner of her mouth quirked up. “Without your nagging, it was an easy drive. Until I got careless and hit that speed trap.”
Sunny slowed at a stop sign, and instead of crossing the larger road, she turned onto it.
“Wait, I don’t think you were supposed to turn there.” Gabe fished on the floor for his printed directions.
“We’re taking a detour.”
“A detour?” That woke him from his sleepy haze.
“Don’t worry, there’ll be traffic. We won’t move too fast.”
She was right. Cars crowded around them, though far more cars were coming toward them, out of the city. Sunny drummed the wheel impatiently as she navigated through the tangle of interstates and across the bridge over the Mississippi River.
“There it is!” She pointed across him out the right side of the windshield.
The Arch looped, dark and gray against the thin clouds lit orange by the sunset. The buildings of downtown St. Louis huddled behind it, and in the foreground, the river flowed, sluggish, reflecting not one sparkle now that the sun had sunk below the horizon.
“I’ve only seen pictures of it,” she said. “Do you think it’ll still be open?”
Gabe looked it up on his phone. “The arch is open until six, but the tram—” He shuddered. No way was he going up inside that thing. “The last tram has already left.” Thank God. “The grounds are open later. You can stand beside it if you want. I’ll take your picture.”
She shimmied in her seat. “Let’s do it.” Then she launched into “St. Louis Blues,” and Gabe didn’t mind the speed, the traffic, or the quick way Sunny changed lanes anymore. Her clear voice filled the car, belying the mournful lyrics. He wanted the song to go on forever.
In the end, Gabe was glad they stopped. The bright lights around the Arch illuminated the joy on Sunny’s face as she ran her hand along the sleek metal exterior. Then, farther away, she made him take a picture so that it looked like she was hanging from the Arch like a child on the monkey bars.
Later, as they tugged their bags into a nearby Marriott, he said, “I thought you were in a hurry. We could’ve shaved an hour off the drive tomorrow if we’d stopped on the other side of St. Louis.”
“Seeing the Arch was totally worth it. You have to stop and enjoy the world around you, Gabe.”
That was what his parents used to say to him. Until they’d taken that last risk and stopped Gabe’s enjoyment altogether.
The truth stiffened his resolve. No matter how attractive she was, how enchanting her voice was, no matter how much her joyful personality lit up the dark corners inside him, Sunny was a thrill-seeker who enjoyed the world in a way Gabe never could. She was a princess, off on an adventure, and he was the ogre, along for the trek. But this wasn’t a fairytale. He and Sunny were only travelers on a journey together, much too different for a happily ever after.