Chapter 5 Sam #2
Then again, I’ve known him for less than twenty-four hours at this point, and it’s a dumb assumption for me to make.
He’s a cagey dude and he clearly doesn’t like talking about himself.
Also, he’s simply too good looking for me to believe no one’s been on that ride at least once.
Plenty of girls are into that grungy look.
Look at Kurt Cobain. (Who, like River, is also dead. Oops.)
Maybe Ash is like me—doesn’t do the serious relationship thing, not often. Doesn’t like anyone often enough to do all that. Doesn’t get attached or particularly like getting attached. It sure didn’t work out very well for me my first go around.
“I guess…” I speak up, breaking the quiet beyond the radio and road noise.
“You know, me and her, we never really had the same goals. She’s studying law.
I’m…doing whatever it is that I’m doing now.
I don’t know. But I know she wants better, and I’m not that guy.
And I don’t know what I want. So it’s fair that she wanted out.
It just sucks how it happened. And I guess I didn’t see it ending this way. It kinda hurts, you know?”
“She’s not impressed with you potentially inheriting a successful car dealership?”
“The dealership I said I don’t want. But either way, no. Guess not.”
“Yeah…” He leans forward to, I guess, brush some speck of dirt off the dashboard. “I don’t really get that.”
“What’s not to get?”
“You’re getting a whole future thrown into your lap.” Ash is flippant. “No work or anything. And you’re just gonna say no?”
My cheeks burn. “Well—”
“Is there something else you wanna do?”
“I don’t know! Am I supposed to know? I’m only twenty-five.
Who the hell knows what they wanna do at twenty-five?
” But even as I say it I know it sounds abnormal, because it seems like everyone knew what they wanted to do the minute they graduated.
My sisters, for instance, and my ex-girlfriend, and all my friends, who are all off either working or at college. I really am the odd man out.
I expect Ash to insist that I should know, too, like everyone else has been insisting, but he doesn’t. “That’s fair,” he says thoughtfully. “I guess it is kinda crazy to expect people to figure it out.”
“It’s not like the dealership is a bad option,” I say.
“It’s just…a lot, I guess. A lot of expectations.
My dad is so ambitious, y’know, driven as hell.
He’s had to be. Him and my abuela fled Cuba back in the late ‘50s on a tiny fishing boat. He always fought tooth and nail for his place in the world. Both of them did.”
“Your family’s from Cuba?” There’s real interest in his voice now, a brightness in those marbled blue eyes when I steal a glance at him.
“Yeah, my dad’s side. My tía came over too, back in the ’80s. My tío’s still there. Aunt and uncle.” I brake hard as a douchebag in a dented Toyota cuts me off. “My mom’s white, born and bred in Georgia before she moved to Miami after school. Met my dad cleaning his teeth one day.”
“That’s dope.” He sounds almost admiring. “Can you imagine? Crossing an ocean in a fishing boat, not knowing what you’ll find on the other end…”
No, I really can’t. I wasn’t even prepared for what was waiting for me on the other end of the interstate.
“Do you think you’ll ever meet your uncle?” Ash goes on.
I shrug. “Doubt it. Even if they ever open up travel to Cuba, my dad would probably have a coronary. Him and Abu have some strong feelings about it all.” I suck on my lower lip contemplatively.
“It’s sort of hard to explain, I guess.” I glance at him.
“Anyway, your history lesson for the day. Wait, do they teach any of this shit in school where you’re from?
About Cuba or anything? Am I just telling you shit you already know? ”
“Oh, I dunno.” He sits back, shaking his hair out of his face. “I wasn’t the greatest student in anything other than English. I dropped out senior year.”
“Senior year? What for? You were almost done.”
“Had to work,” he says briefly.
“Oh.” I wait for him to expand on that, but he doesn’t. He lapses into a silence so long that I reach over and turn the radio back up.
It happens about six hours later, on a stretch of white highway in North Carolina, with the late-afternoon sun blazing through the windows and baking us despite the air conditioning set to full blast.
One minute Ash’s humming along to “Only Happy When It Rains” on the radio, his fingers tapping out the beat on the dashboard—he’s getting more comfortable, seatbelt off and occasionally singing a few words from the choruses here and there—and the next he’s suddenly collapsed like a puppet with the strings cut.
He falls forward, head smacking the dash.
I gasp like I’ve been slapped. “Ash?” I reach across, my gaze flicking rapidly between the road and him, and jostle him. “Ash! Hey!”
Nothing, no response at all. It’s like he’s literally fucking dead.
I flick my turn signal and, ignoring the blare of angry honks, cut abruptly across four lanes of traffic until I reach the shoulder.
The Mustang vibrates violently as it rolls over the rumble strips until I finally stop, throwing it into park.
Which is when he seems to come back to life, of course, inhaling sharply as he jerks his head up. He braces his hands against the dash as he sits up, slowly, blinking and looking around. His startled gaze lands on me. “What?” he says, confused. “What’s…what are you doing?”
“Jesus Christ, dude. You scared the absolute shit out of me.” But he’s alive, it’s okay, he didn’t just randomly expire in my car. My heart is pounding so hard I think it might burst out of my chest, cartoon style. I touch his shoulder again, gently this time. “Are you okay?”
“Who’s driving right now?”
“No one. I pulled over as soon as you—did whatever that was. Is it the—you know.” I gesture to his side. “Where you got shot?”
“What? No.” He touches his forehead where it kissed the dash. “I had a seizure. That’s all.”
“That was a seizure?” But where was all the flopping and jerking around? The shaking and stuff? I open my mouth to ask and then decide against it. Questions for later. “You just went limp, like you fainted.” Or died.
“Yeah.” He rubs his face, and I can tell he doesn’t want to talk right now. He seems a little disoriented, out of it, flinching every time the Mustang rocks in the wake of the cars speeding past us. “Sam, does this seat go back?”
“Shit, yeah. Sorry. Hold on, I’ll do it.”
I get out, narrowly missing having the driver’s side door ripped off by a speeding truck, and then round the front of the car to Ash’s side.
I lean down, fumbling for the handle until the seat reclines, and with a sigh he sprawls back and covers his face with his hands.
I get a whiff of the hotel shampoo he used, herbal and vaguely masculine, and develop an utterly insane urge to follow the scent to its source.
Because that would be a totally normal thing to do, smelling this guy’s hair.
He won’t fucking mind, right? Jesus, what is wrong with me?
Going to blame the dream and the fact that I’ve been cooped up with him all fucking day.
And Adriana. This is her fault, too. I shouldn’t even be single right now.
I wouldn’t have even met Ash if she hadn’t dumped me.
He’s struggling with the flannel, which really is too damn hot to be wearing, anyway, and when I realize he wants it taken off I help him extract his arms from the sleeves and tug it out from beneath his back.
I almost discard it in the back, but he makes grabby hands so I drape it over him like a blanket, which seems to be the right call.
Noting, as I do, the scars on the back of his upper arms—crescent shaped, old and white, though some are more purple and thus perhaps more recent. I missed those last night, in the chaos of everything. The blood and the puke and all.
“Maybe we should stop for the night,” I suggest.
His eyes flutter open as he drags his hands down his face, peering at me. “Where are we?”
“Dunno. Bumfuck, North Carolina.”
“That’s not Georgia.”
“No.” It’s nowhere near Georgia.
“Does that mean we won’t get to Miami tomorrow? If we stop?”
“We will. It’s fine.”
I retreat back to my side of the car, then carefully extract the atlas out of the glove box to try and figure out where we are, exactly.
But there are no signs nearby that tell me anything and I don’t remember the last ones I saw.
Ash is watching me—I can feel his stupid pretty eyes on me—and decisively I snap the atlas shut.
“I’ll stop at the first place I see,” I tell him.
“Are we lost?”
“No. It’s impossible to get lost on the I-95.” This much is true, anyway. If my dumb ass can navigate it.
“Are you sure it’s okay that we stop? We can keep pushing a few more hours.”
I toss the map into the backseat, not wanting to crowd him for the glove box again. “Of course it’s fine. You’re not feeling well.”
He pulls his flannel around him like he’s cold. Maybe he is, maybe that’s what happens after a seizure. I want to ask so badly—I’ve got a million questions. “Okay,” he says.
And for a second, he looks so very young and vulnerable. Every inch of those twenty-two years, his golden hair falling into his smooth, pale face. A baby.
Ten minutes later I pull off on an exit that proclaims amenities such as gas and motor lodge and I still don’t have a clue where we are, exactly, but I know it’s not terribly far over the state line and therefore not terribly close to Savannah.
But, fine, it just adds a few annoying hours to the drive tomorrow.
Man, I wish I was home.
But I’m feeling okay about my decision to stop anyway, because Ash is looking kind of awful by the time I park in front of the lodge office—bad enough that even I can tell. When he moves to get out, I tell him to stay put.
“I’ll help you up,” I say. “Just wait a sec.”
I side-step a family of three coming out of the office, one of them heavily pregnant, and open the passenger-side door to help Ash to his feet.
His head drops forward into my chest and I have a split-second shock, that free-fall feeling when someone touches you like that, before I realize it’s not that, he’s not trying to cuddle me in the middle of the parking lot.
He’s going down again like he did before, a sack of potatoes falling through my hands as the woman behind me cries out.
I just barely manage to catch him before he goes down to the pavement, full rag doll style. I sit down with him in my arms beside the Mustang before he can slip from my grasp. Seems safer this way.
“Ash,” I say, but he doesn’t respond. Well, at least I kept him from hitting his head this time. He could’ve chipped a tooth.
The bespectacled husband comes into view, bending over with hands planted on his knees. “Is something the matter?” he asks me, rather awkwardly. “Anything I can help with?”
“No,” I say, trying to exude an assurance that I absolutely do not feel, my arms tightening around Ash almost reflexively. I turn my shoulders to sort of block him from the stranger’s view. “It’s okay. He has, uh, epilepsy. He’ll wake up in a sec.”
With an air of relief that is palpable, the man retreats, hurrying his little family along the sidewalk to their own car.
I can hear the concerned note in their hushed voices and the clear, high litany of questions sung by their young daughter, but they’ve disappeared around the Mustang’s open door and out of my line of sight.
“Sorry.” Ash’s voice now, coming through a mouth that sounds full of both marbles and cotton. “I think it happened again.”
I smile a little. “Welcome back.”
“Fucking hell.” He tries to sit up and I let him wriggle out of my grasp, putting his back against the Mustang’s step bar. Blonde locks hang sort of limply around his face, like even his hair is exhausted. “I feel like shit.”
“Well, I kept you from splitting your skull on the pavement,” I say. “No harm, no foul. Right?”
He shoves his hair back. “Yeah,” he says. “Thanks. Good looking out.”
“Of course. Uh, I think you nearly sent a pregnant woman into pre-term labor, though.”
“Oops.” He does manage a smile before reaching back for the seat, pushing himself to stand, and I quickly move in to assist. Which is good, because he’s still a bit wobbly, head dropping to his chest like it did before, like he’s nodding off.
“Okay,” I say, sitting him back down on the car seat. “You stay here. I’ll check us in, and then you can rest. Yeah? Hopefully won’t take long.” Though the place is more crowded than I’d expect for whatever this podunk town is. Must be a touristy hotspot of some kind.
“Yeah. Perfect.” He lies back, eyes already shut. “Thanks, Sam. You’re a real Mother Theresa.”
“No problem. Just don’t die in the meantime.”
He throws his arm over his eyes and gives me a thumbs up. It’s good enough for me, so I turn on my heel and stride into the office—which is busy and claustrophobic as all fuck, mostly families with small kids, confirming my suspicions. The sign outside didn’t say No Vacancies, at least.
“Welcome to Millstone Gap!” the desk clerk greets me with a smile fit to split his face. He’s a little dude, short and round, with a curly mop of hair and Coke bottle glasses. “A town boasting a rich Civil War heritage.”
It’s a canned line and it sounds like he feeds this to five million people a day with equal enthusiasm, but also like he enjoys it. He’s poised to go on some kind of spiel. I almost feel bad I have zero interest in it. “Any vacancies?” I ask. “Two doubles, if you got it.”
He purses his lips and sucks his teeth, rocking back on his heels. “I’m so sorry, sir. All we’ve got left are queens.”
“Like, two queens?”
“No sir. Just one.”
Well fuck. “Any other hotels around here?”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “Another fifty miles to Fayetteville and you have your pick.”
Fifty miles? I stare at him in dismay, then glance out the window at my car. Where Ash is waiting. Can he go another fifty miles? That’s an hour, forty-five minutes if I push it, and then we have to actually find the hotel—
“Sir,” Glasses says, “there’s a line.”
“Fuck it. Yeah. I’ll take it.”
“Well,” he says primly. “There’s no need for the language.”