Chapter 7 #2
“I don’t,” I say. “What you do is your own business. And I’m really sorry I violated your privacy.
I swear I was only trying to pause the navigation, but the text came through, and the notification wound up where the pause button was, and you don’t have a passcode on your phone, which you really should—”
“It’s fine. Considering how red you’ve turned, I think you’re adequately mortified. Just be more careful next time. I can’t promise I won’t get more texts like that tonight.”
“Yeva’s got a good eye for angles,” I admit.
“Never said they’d all be from Yeva.” Before I can think too much about that, he claps his hands together. “Now, enough yapping. Let’s get back on the road. You still okay to drive?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Then I’m getting an ice cream cone.”
···
“It makes no sense,” Hollis grumbles from the passenger seat. “If you’re open twenty-four hours a day, you should have ice cream available twenty-four hours a day. You can’t just decide to arbitrarily shut down the ice cream machine.”
It’s been fifteen minutes since we got back on the highway, and he’s still moping about this. I can’t help but smile at his petulance. “I think they said it was off for cleaning. Not exactly arbitrary.”
“Don’t care. Dirty ice cream would’ve been better than no ice cream.”
“Ew,” I say. “Gross. No, it would not have been.”
Hollis runs his hands through his hair and makes a gruff sound that’s almost a growl.
It... does things to me. It probably does things to Yeva too.
Gah. I can’t get that picture of her out of my head.
It’s not like I’m a prude or anything; I’ve seen my fair share of genitalia on the internet over the years (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not).
But it’s one thing to see something intended for mass consumption, and another completely to stumble upon a photo meant for only one person’s enjoyment.
And now I’m imagining Hollis... enjoying it.
And oh god. That thought is making me feel like both the perv and the. .. pervee?
“What are you thinking about over there?” Hollis asks.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” My denial sounds way too suspicious even to my own ears, so I grasp around for a lie and find it in the highway sign up ahead. “Just, you know, Eisenhower and the interstates.”
“Oh, Eisenhower and the interstates gets you all hot and bothered, does it?”
I glance over at him, wondering for a moment if he might be a mind reader. If so, I’m in a lot of trouble. I have never had very good control over my thoughts.
“Like I said, terrible liar.” He shakes his head in mock sympathy. “You’re breathing like a caricature of a phone sex operator, and I can see you glowing pink even in the dark.”
The breathing I could’ve passed off as my asthma acting up, but I have no excuse for the blushing. Sometimes it’s a real pain being so pale I could be mistaken for a human-shaped bag of milk.
“So why aren’t you and Yeva like, together together?
” I wanted to change the subject, but that’s probably not the direction in which I should’ve taken the conversation, considering it’s basically the last thing I want to think about right now.
Oh well. I don’t have very good control over my mouth either.
I can see the force of his frown in my peripheral vision. “Because I don’t want to be.”
“Why? She seems... uh... fun.”
“She is. Yeva’s great.” Hollis shifts in his seat.
“It’s not that I don’t want to be with her, it’s that I don’t want to be with anyone.
Besides, even if I were capable of something more serious, she lives in Miami, which—as you may have noticed—is not super close to DC.
And I guarantee we’d get on each other’s nerves if we ever had to spend more than a few hours together with our clothes on. ”
“Everyone gets on your nerves, though,” I say.
He lets out a huff that might be his version of a laugh. “Yep. Which is one of the many reasons I don’t do relationships anymore.”
“You just do annually recurring sex appointments.”
That huff again—though I can’t tell if this one is more amusement or frustration. “I really wish you’d stop referring to it that way.”
“Hmm. Wait a second. You said ‘anymore.’ So you used to do relationships? And then you stopped. Oh. Is it because someone broke your heart? Is that why you’re so grumpy?”
He bangs his head against the headrest, thump thump thump .
“I’m grumpy because you refuse to mind your own business.
” But as exasperated as he sounds, I think I catch an ever-so-slight lift to the corner of his mouth.
Like maybe he’s enjoying this back and forth between us as much as I am.
“Shit,” he says, suddenly sitting up straight in his seat and staring out of the windshield to the road ahead.
And as I tear my eyes away from his profile, I see what he sees and slam on the brakes.
···
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many emergency vehicles in one place.
Their lights flash obnoxiously out of sync for what looks like miles.
We’re part of a short caravan creeping toward the scene of whatever happened.
Something massive, apparently. I don’t know what else would draw this kind of response.
“Seriously?” Hollis says.
“What?”
When I look over, his face is illuminated by his phone screen. “Found a local traffic Twitter account. Says it’s an olive oil spill.”
“Is that... something other than what it sounds like?”
“No, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Apparently, a truck was hauling a metric fuckton of olive oil and sprung a leak. The road’s covered in the stuff on and off for miles.” He shows me the picture included in the tweet, though it’s hard to make out any details since it was taken in the dark.
“Guess the road heard about the purported benefits of the Mediterranean Diet.”
“It caused two accidents, Millicent.”
Whoops. “Oh. Shit. Well, what should we do? Wait it out?”
“Checking,” he says, his fingers tapping at his phone.
“Navigation’s still telling us to go straight through.
Guess it doesn’t know about the road closure yet.
The time stamp on the tweet was only a few minutes ago.
Let me switch to no highways.” Hollis changes the settings, and his phone dings before announcing that it’s calculating the route.
“Drive up the shoulder to that exit up there, then follow the signs for 501.”
The detour leads us through an area of illuminated fast-food restaurants and not much else, then we take a turn onto US 501 and go through a town that’s mostly banks, funeral homes, and churches long since closed for the night.
The streetlights end as the buildings become more spaced out and are soon replaced by alternating tracts of fields and woods interspersed with the occasional one-level prefab home set way back from the road.
This is the sort of place people must mean when they talk about the boonies.
Hollis’s fingers play on his leg like his jeans are made of piano keys. But he has regular, boring, non-musical pants, so he’s only generating barely audible repetitive thuds that are starting to get on my nerves.
“Why are you fidgeting so much?” I ask.
“Helps distract me from how likely it is that you’re going to wreck my car on this dark country road.”
“Ah, not concerned that we’d be injured or dead. But the car! The car might get a scratch on it. I see what’s important.”
It’s hard to tell because it’s basically pitch black with the moon now hiding behind a cloud, but I’m fairly certain Hollis’s mouth has the same tight shape as a Lucky Charms marshmallow rainbow.
“Here, I’ll put on the high beams,” I say as if I’m doing it as a courtesy to him and not because I’m getting nervous without the extra light. Except as soon as I do, a car heads toward us from the other direction and I need to turn them off again. “Gah. So much for that.”
“Let’s switch,” Hollis says. “Pull over.”
“No.”
“Yes. It’s my car, and I’m more comfortable driving in areas like this at night. I say we switch.”
“And I say we don’t. You need to sleep more so you can take over in an hour or two.
Then I can sleep a bit, and we can drive through the night and get to Miami by breakfast time.
Which means you can make Yeva belated sexiversary waffles as an apology for being late, and I can still get to Key West as originally scheduled. ”
Hollis grumbles. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his hand slide from near his knee to his hair. “As if I can sleep while I’m worried about you running us into a ditch.”
“I can drive in the dark just fine, thanks.” I turn on the high beams again, but they seem to be cursed because another car comes toward us. Off they go again. “Dammit.”
“Stay right at the fork,” Hollis’s phone, now balanced on his thigh, says. Except there is no fork; it’s only the single road stretching out ahead. “Calculating route,” it announces.
“What the heck,” I say. “You’re drunk, map lady!”
He stares at the screen. “I think we lost signal.”
Not super surprising, since this is basically the middle of nowhere. “Well, am I still going the right way?”
“Yeah, I think so. It should come back soon.” Hollis glances up from his lap. “Jesus, Millicent, turn on the high beams so you can see more than a foot ahead of you.”
“I’ve been trying ,” I say. “But every time I do, a car comes from the other direction.”
“Well, there aren’t any cars coming now.”
“Yes, thank you, I can see that,” I say, flipping on the high beams again.
Just in time for the light to bounce off a large, glowing pupil.
My foot slams on the brakes, and their loud screech joins the horrifying sound of a scream and shattering glass.
Something hits my forehead with the force of a hurled rock.
Everything is dark—so, so dark. I’m dead.
I must be dead. Oh wait. No, I just have my eyes closed.
Hollis’s panicked voice fills my ears. “Mill, are you okay? Are you—”
“I’m fine,” I say, fluttering my eyes open. “I’m, I’m—” staring into the eyes of an incredibly freaked-out deer.