Chapter Seven
Seven
He took a while to get into whatever his rules were.
Probably because he had thought her laugh meant she wasn’t seriously interested in hearing.
Or maybe just because he actually did need a bathroom stop.
He abruptly took the off-ramp to some gaggle of restaurants and gas stations, somewhere just past a town called Benford.
Parked on the forecourt of a place that advertised free hot dogs with every fifty-dollar purchase of gas.
It had a giant bottle of mustard attached to the roof.
At one point, she thought, it must have turned in circles.
But now it was slightly flaccid and stained and all it seemed to do was creak back and forth.
The kind of thing he hated, she knew. She even remembered a line from one of his books, his fourth one out of the eight total he’d ever written, while gazing at it out of her window.
The abandoned gods of gaudy consumerism surrounded her on all sides.
Though it was the heroine of that story she wound up thinking about, as he strode across the tarmac to the entrance. Clara Bendrick, bright and brilliant as a star amidst the tawdry drabness of the grocery store she worked at. Caught reading round the back next to the bins by a guy up to no good.
Though of course he hadn’t really been up to no good.
The narrative had just insisted on it, so strongly she had never really known if Miller truly thought Jake Tulliver was rotten.
In fact, she had never known if he thought all his heroes were rotten and irredeemable, or not.
He’d always judged them so harshly on the page that readers had sometimes wondered if they really did deserve the heroine—a remarkable feat, really, given how sympathetic people usually were to the sexy dude love interest in a romance novel.
But it was also probably part of the reason for the slowly declining belief in his happy endings.
Sometimes she shouldn’t love him, she thought she remembered reading.
She shouldn’t, because he cannot change.
Then she suddenly felt the deepest urge to double-check it had really been that way.
She opened the app on her iPad and flicked to the book, and somehow found it bookmarked on something even worse.
Their eyes locked through the pool of light behind the diner, and held.
He held her gaze, despite knowing how unworthy he was of it.
She was as soft and fragile looking as a wisp of cotton on the breeze, and he knew how easily he could crush such a thing.
Those large and luminous eyes, that startled look in them.
She had looked the same that day in the store, but at least then she’d had the armor of her uniform, the counter in front of her.
The name badge he hadn’t looked at, for fear of knowing her name and liking it a little too much.
Now she was in a simple dress, tennis shoes.
Too much sweetly rounded leg visible beneath the hem.
He turned his face away the moment he wanted to look.
He was good at that. Resisting temptation.
He had to be, because what good could it ever come to?
He would never be good for anyone, let alone someone like her.
Standing there reading her little book, probably understanding it better than he ever would.
Probably understanding a lot of things that he never could.
He thought in grays and blacks and whites.
Long practice had seen to that; now it was second nature.
Whereas she, he could tell, was in full color. Underneath the air of sadness, the signs of neglect, the fear of something he was afraid of her sharing, was a rainbow, a supernova. Something that would shame him and his pitiful, paltry life if he ever broke free.
But man, did he want to do it anyway, she read, so engrossed she almost didn’t see him coming back. She had to scramble to swipe the book away and stuff her iPad back into her bag, then pretend to be fiddling with one of the air vents.
Though that came with its own issues.
He saw what she was doing, and sighed heavily. “Right. So number one: no touching anything in my truck, at any time, for any reason whatsoever,” he said.
Then just like that, they were back to whatever passed for normal, for them.
“You think I’m gonna agree with that.”
“Well, I don’t see why you wouldn’t.”
“Because the car could blow up and I wouldn’t be allowed to get out.”
She knew the look he shot her without even turning his way. Eyelids lowered over his eyes, fluttering almost closed. A tightening around his lips. Breath let out in a thin stream between. Exasperation, plain and simple. “That is a completely ridiculous hypothetical extreme and you know it.”
“All right, so I’ll make it less extreme. I can’t leave to use the bathroom.”
“You’re allowed to touch the goddamn door handle, Emmett.”
“So I’ll just die in a crash because I couldn’t wear a seat belt.
Unless maybe you’re planning on putting my seat belt on me.
At the start of every journey, and after every bathroom break or food stop, always brushing your hand against my arm or catching your watch on a button of mine or accidentally touching—” she started, and was relieved when he cut her off.
She hadn’t meant to go that far in her taunting.
It felt like she was sweating by the time he stepped in.
But if she was, he was doing it harder. “Stop it, stop it, stop, stop, stop. Enough, all right, I get it. You can touch things in here. Just don’t change any settings, or move things around.
Or press buttons on my radio. I have it all the way I want, I have the stations programmed.
Leave it alone,” he said, in a way that suggested he didn’t mean it at all.
He meant me.
Sadly for him, however, she couldn’t do that while trapped in a truck together.
“But I don’t think I can take hours of podcasts about being sensible.”
“I don’t even know what a podcast is. Is that like a TokTik?”
She put her face in her hands. “Oh god, help me.”
“He’s too busy helping me deal with you probably wanting to play love songs all the way to these godforsaken events. Ones about people swooning and smooching and riding giant motorcycles through windows in order to get to some beautiful woman,” he grumbled, and she went to grumble back.
Then realized how oddly specific that was.
Specific, and very familiar.
“Like in the Meat Loaf video?” she asked.
Much to his very obvious discomfort.
“No. What. No.”
“Because it sounded like—”
“I don’t care what it sounded like, that’s not what I meant. I have no idea who Meat Loaf even is. Probably because I’m too young and too disdainful of power ballads. Now I’m gonna put on my favorite station, and you’re gonna deal with it.”
He didn’t wait for her to protest. He got in there quick, and snapped the radio on. And it was a snap, too. His truck was so ancient the radio had swizzly knobs that you clicked toward on and off and everything in between.
And dear lord, the thing that came out of it.
“Is this the shipping forecast,” she said, in so deadpan a tone it didn’t even sound like a question anymore.
And it was definitely the deadpan that made him bristle.
He shifted in his seat, loudly enough that she turned to see it.
Pointedly, she thought. As if to suggest, Well, now you’re going to hear just how wrong you are.
And then he said the following:
“It’s a station for people who like to hear about boats.”
Honestly it was all she could do not to throw her hands up.
“You’re just describing the exact thing I said a different way.”
“And I’m gonna keep doing it as long as you’re a jerk about it.”
“Miller, you were just a jerk about me liking love songs. Even though they rule far more than strange boat announcements. And I do not exclusively like them. I also enjoy angsty stuff. Complicated stuff. Weird stuff. In fact, my fave at the moment is always warbling about heartbreak.”
“There’s no way she’s as heartbreaking as my current favorite.”
“Probably not. Though I bet yours is nowhere near as cool. Or modern.”
“Think you’ll find she’s both. She is very young, and wears blue eyeshadow.”
He said the word blue like anyone else would say wearing a live llama on your head as a hat. Much to the delight of the teasing side of her tongue. “Oh my god, someone call the weird-youths police.”
“You would say that. Instead of proving yours is better.”
“I don’t need to,” she said, half laughing. “If being young and wearing blue eyeshadow is the standard of coolness according to you, then she meets it. In fact, she leaps right over it. Her eyeshadow is so blue that if you stare at it for too long you can’t see any other color.”
“Yeah, but does she do a technique with her voice that nobody else can?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say nobody else but—” she started to stay, then had to stop dead in the middle of her sentence.
Because it was dawning on her now. Slow at first, but then faster and faster until finally it felt like a jolt to the heart.
She had to pause and take a breath and even try to deny it for a moment.
But the evidence was all there.
“Are we actually somehow talking about the same singer,” she said.
That got him denying it in the worst possible way anyone could.
“Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Just absurd. And impossible.”
“Yeah, but we have liked the same things before. We both love zombies.”
“That was just one thing. One odd obsession. There aren’t any others.”
“But there was also the book we tried to check out at the same time,” she said without thinking, too eager to prove him wrong. And now he was wrong, and everything went abruptly quiet. Quiet, and much more tense.
Like the squabbling wasn’t the stressful part.
Something else was. Something like the eye contact in the diner. And the eye contact a few hours ago. And the laughing thing, when he had gone back to talking about rules and her whole body had sagged with relief. Now it was rigid again, before he’d even restarted the goddamn car.
In fact, it was worse than that.
He seemed rigid, too. She could see him out of the corner of her eye, ramrod straight in his seat, like he’d been superglued to it.
And god, you couldn’t have cut the atmosphere with a fucking chainsaw.
It pressed against her, all heavy and weird—not to mention bizarrely hot.
She almost asked him to put the air conditioning on.
Her cheeks felt as if they were suddenly bright red.
And it wasn’t just in her head, either.
The windows were actually steaming up.
Like when people had heated sex in a car in a movie.
She tried to close her eyes just so she didn’t have to see it happening, but of course when she did she just went right back to the thing she shouldn’t have mentioned.
His hand going for the spine of a book, hers going for it at the same time.
Their fingers brushing in a way that had felt strangely electrifying, until she’d looked up and realized who it was.
Just a little static, she told herself, in the here and now.
And wondered if he was telling himself the same thing, too.
Kind of sounded like it, when he finally punctured the silence.
His voice was low, a little hoarse. “It was just a coincidence.”
But she couldn’t let that stand. Maybe because even the urge to squabble had now turned against her. Maybe because of that hollow little laugh she’d done, when talk of rules to limit themselves had restarted.
“And then the other three books. The ones we both reserved.”
“I told you that wasn’t me. They had the name wrong.”
“Your name isn’t ordinary enough for that to happen.”
“Well, we had the same classes. Maybe we just needed them.”
“Do we also need to like the same singer, completely independently?”
“But we don’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You will when I go—” she started to say, and he tried to cut her off.
He told her not to, but it was already too late.
She clumsily tried to make that sound, that ululating sound that Chappell Roan made—or at least, it felt like she was clumsily trying.
And it felt like she’d done it just to prove him wrong.
But it came out of her differently somehow.
Heartfelt, in a way she couldn’t explain.
Like someone calling out for help—and so dead-on it sort of shocked her.
She hadn’t known she could do it at all, and now she had, and the car was full of strange, yearning music.
It rang out, strongly enough that she cut it off before she got to the last note, and laughed.
She even thought she’d sold it as funny.
It was what she turned to him expecting—chagrin, an eye roll.
And instead found him holding his breath. He had to scramble to disguise it with a cough and a quick look away, but she had caught it. She caught something even more unnerving, in fact—his eyes, before they flicked to something else. Wide, they had been. Wide, and almost haunted seeming.
He saw the ghost of emotions past, she thought.
Or maybe the ghost of feelings from the future that he never wants to have.
Then before she could tell herself she was wrong, he started the engine.
He drove like the hounds of hell were on his heels.