Chapter One

Six A.M. and Counting

Joel

He found out it was just the two of them at five forty-eight a.m., standing in his kitchen with his keys in his hand, reading a text from Marcus that said sorry man something came up, have fun and one from Priya that said ugh I'm so sorry I can't make it, take pics!! with three camera emojis.

He stood there for a moment.

Then he picked up his duffel bag, got in his car and drove to Cara Hensley's apartment because he'd said he'd be there at six and he was not the kind of person who backed out of things at five forty-eight in the morning, even things that had just become substantially different from what he'd agreed to.

He'd figure it out when he got there.

He'd met Cara properly about seven months ago at a birthday party for someone he'd gone to high school with and she apparently had too, though he didn't remember her from back then. She'd been standing by the kitchen counter eating crackers directly from the box and reading something on her phone with the focused expression of someone who had agreed to come to this party and was now fulfilling the obligation as efficiently as possible.

He'd asked what she was reading.

She'd shown him without looking up. A paper on deep sea bioluminescence with a title long enough to fill the screen.

He'd said something about the engineering behind deep sea submersibles and she'd looked up for the first time and said actually that's interesting in a tone that suggested she found very few things interesting and meant it when she said it.

They'd talked for two hours. Exchanged numbers. Texted occasionally since then. The kind of contact that doesn't quite fit a category... not close friends, not strangers, somewhere in the loose pleasant middle.

When she'd texted three weeks ago saying road trip, two weeks, me and you and Marcus and Priya, I need to get out of the city, you in? he'd said yes mostly because it sounded like exactly the kind of unplanned thing he'd been meaning to do more of.

Marcus and Priya were now apparently not coming.

He pulled up outside her building at six-o-two.

She was already outside.

That was the first thing. Standing on the pavement in the early morning half-light with two coffees and a bag that was clearly overpacked and a look on her face that suggested she'd been awake for a while. She was wearing a denim jacket over a t-shirt and her dark hair was down, and she looked like someone who had made a decision and was not going to unmake it regardless of what the universe had to say about it.

She saw him pull up and something moved across her face... something that looked like it might have been relief, which struck him as an odd thing to feel about someone showing up for a trip they'd already agreed to.

He got out of the car.

"Hey," she said, holding out one of the coffees.

"Hey." He took it. "So Marcus and Priya..."

"Yeah." She said it like she'd already processed and filed it. "I know. I'm sorry. If you want to bail that's completely..."

"I'm here, aren't I?" He looked at her bag. "Is that going to fit?"

She looked at it too, as if seeing it for the first time. "Yes."

It did fit, but only just, and only because he reorganised the trunk twice, while she stood beside him drinking her coffee and not offering help but also not pretending not to watch.

"I could have done that" she said, when he closed the trunk.

"You were busy."

"I was drinking coffee."

"Exactly."

She looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't quite read. Then she got in the passenger side.

He got in the driver's side. The car was very small. He'd forgotten how small Ford Focuses were, or maybe he'd never really clocked it before, but with two people and two weeks worth of bags and the seat adjusted for his legs there wasn't a lot of spare air.

"I'll drive first," she said.

"I'm already in the driver's seat."

"I know. Budge over."

He looked at her. She looked back, completely serious.

He got out. She slid across. He got back in the passenger side and adjusted the seat back and tried not to feel that this was an unusual start to anything.

She started the engine, found first gear with the kind of confidence that suggested she'd driven this car a thousand times, and pulled out into the empty morning street.

"There's a diner I like outside Iowa City," she said. "About four hours."

"Okay."

"I usually stop there for breakfast."

"Okay."

"Do you eat eggs?"

"Yes."

"Good." She merged onto the highway ramp. The city fell away behind them, the skyline in the rear view mirror getting smaller. "I don't really know what to talk about for four hours."

He turned to look at her. She was watching the road, completely matter of fact about it.

"We could not talk," he said.

She glanced at him. "You're not one of those people who need to fill silence?"

"No."

"Good." She reached forward and turned on the stereo. Something came through the speakers... a little uncertain, a little open. The kind of song that didn't demand anything. "Neither am I."

He settled back in the seat and watched Illinois go past and drank his coffee and let the silence be what it was.

It wasn't uncomfortable exactly. It was more like two people in adjacent rooms, aware of each other, not yet sure what to do about it.

She drove the way she did most things, he was starting to notice... with her full attention and no performance of it. One hand on the wheel, elbow on the window ledge, eyes on the road in a way that meant something rather than just pointing in the right direction.

He watched her from his peripheral vision in the way you watch someone when you're trying to figure them out without them knowing you're doing it.

He knew certain things about her from seven months of occasional contact. That she was a marine biologist who worked out of a research facility on Lake Michigan and spent a significant portion of her time either in the water or reading about what lived in it. That she was funny in a dry specific way that you had to be paying attention to catch. That she'd been in a long relationship that had ended recently and badly... not badly as in dramatic, badly as in the quiet devastating way of someone deciding without warning that they were done.

She hadn't told him that last part directly. He'd heard it from Marcus, who'd said Cara's going through it a bit, the guy just woke up one day and that was that and Joel had thought about that more than he'd expected to.

He also knew her job was precarious in the way a lot of research jobs were precarious... funding cycles and publication pressure and the particular instability of caring very much about something that the world was not yet certain was worth paying for.

Which explained, maybe, the two coffees and the overpacked bag and the look of someone who had made a decision and was not going to unmake it.

She needed out. He happened to be available.

He found he didn't mind that particularly. The bar for being someone's escape was lower than the bar for most other things, and at least it was honest.

About an hour in, somewhere in the flat middle of Illinois, she reached forward and turned the music up slightly.

"Good one," he said, without really thinking about it.

She glanced at him. "You know this song?"

"Yeah."

"Huh." She turned back to the road. Not dismissive, just recalibrating slightly. Like she'd assumed something about him and was quietly revising it.

He'd noticed she did that. Filed things. Updated her model of a person based on new information without making a thing of it.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing." A pause. "You just don't seem like the type."

"What type?"

"The type that listens to this kind of music."

"What type do I seem like?"

She considered this. Outside, Illinois kept being flat and Illinois. "The type that has very organised playlists sorted by tempo."

He looked at her.

"I do have very organised playlists," he said. "Sorted by tempo."

She didn't laugh. But the corner of her mouth moved and he found himself oddly pleased about that in a way that he didn't examine too closely.

"Advisory veto," he said.

"Sorry?"

"Collaborative playlist. I have advisory veto."

She glanced at him again, longer this time. "That's not a real thing."

"We're going to be miles from anyone who can tell us otherwise."

A beat.

"Fine," she said. "Advisory veto."

He settled back in his seat.

Outside, the highway opened up ahead of them... wide and straight and patient. The sky was doing something extraordinary at the edges, the particular bruised purple of very early morning giving way to the first tentative suggestions of a better day.

He turned back to the window.

Two weeks, he thought.

He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting exactly. But this... two people, a small car, a long road, no particular agenda... this felt like it might turn into something. 

He couldn't have said what.

Chapter Two

The Diner Outside Iowa City

Cara

The diner was called Ruthie's and it had been there since 1962 and showed absolutely no signs of caring about that or anything else. Red vinyl booths, laminate tables, a coffee urn behind the counter that looked like it had been running continuously since the Kennedy administration. The kind of place that had stopped trying to be anything other than exactly what it was and had therefore accidentally become something worth stopping for.

Cara had been coming here since she was nineteen, on a solo drive back from a conference in Des Moines, too tired to push on to Iowa City. She'd had the eggs and the coffee and sat in the booth by the window and watched the highway for an hour and felt, for reasons she couldn't entirely explain, like herself again.

She'd stopped every time she drove this way since.

She pulled into the lot and killed the engine and Joel unfolded himself from the passenger seat with the particular relief of someone who had been folded into a small space for four hours without complaining about it. She'd noticed that. He hadn't complained about anything. He'd just adjusted.

"This place," he said, looking at it.

"I know."

"It looks like it might kill us."

"The eggs are incredible."

He looked at her. She was already walking toward the door.

They slid into the booth by the window, opposite each other, and a woman in her sixties with silver hair and the name Donna on her badge appeared with a coffee pot before they'd touched the menus.

"Just the two of you today?" Donna said, filling Cara's cup without asking.

"Just us," Cara said.

Donna filled Joel's cup, looked between them with the specific assessment of someone who had been reading people across diner counters for forty years, and left without comment.

Cara wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at the menu she didn't need to read.

Across the table Joel was actually reading his. Fully, like he was going to be tested on it. She watched him over the rim of her coffee and thought: he's one of those people who actually makes decisions rather than just picking the first thing his eyes land on. She found she didn't know what to do with that information yet.

"The eggs," she said.

"I'm reading."

"The eggs are the thing. Everything else is fine. The eggs are the thing."

He kept reading. She drank her coffee and looked out at the highway.

Four hours in a car with someone you don't know very well is an interesting exercise. She'd been braced for it to be awkward or effortful, had mentally prepared a list of conversation topics the way you do when you're anxious about silence. She hadn't needed any of them. They'd talked in short bursts and not talked in longer stretches and neither one had felt like a problem.

She hadn't expected that.

She hadn't expected a lot of things about this morning. That he'd just show up when Marcus and Priya bailed. That he'd reorganise the boot of her car without being asked and not make a thing of it. That he'd know the song that came on forty minutes into Illinois and say good one like it was nothing.

She put him back in the category she'd had him in and he'd quietly stepped out of it, and she was still figuring out where to put him now.

"What's good that isn't the eggs?" he said.

She looked at him. He had the menu flat on the table, one finger holding his place, watching her with a directness that she'd noticed in the kitchen at Marcus's party seven months ago and had apparently filed and forgotten until now.

"The toast is good," she said. "The bacon is good. The coffee is good."

"What about the pancakes?"

"The pancakes are fine."

"Not good?"

"Fine is not a criticism, Joel. The pancakes are exactly what pancakes at a diner should be. Competent. Reliable."

"High praise."

"It's honest praise." She put her menu down. "Get the eggs."

He looked at her for a moment.

"Okay, I’ll get the eggs" he said and closed the menu.

“Good” 

Donna came back and they ordered, eggs for both of them, toast, the coffee kept coming, and Cara settled back against the vinyl and felt the particular unwinding of someone who has been tightly coiled for a long time and has finally found a place it's safe to loosen.

It surprised her. She'd thought the unwinding would take longer. She'd thought it might not happen at all.

"How long have you been coming here?" Joel asked.

"Five years. Since I was nineteen."

"Solo?"

"Usually." She looked out at the highway. A truck went past, heading east. Everything heading east looked like it was going back to something. "Sometimes with people."

"Who bailed this morning?"

She looked back at him. He said it simply, not making anything of it.

"Marcus mentioned you'd had a rough few months," he said. "Not details. Just... mentioned it."

She considered being annoyed at this and decided not to be. Marcus meant well. He always meant well. That was both his best quality and the thing that occasionally made her want to throw something at him.

"My ex decided he didn't love me anymore," she said. The way she'd learned to say it... clean, factual, no particular weight on any of the words. "About four months ago. Just woke up one day and that was that."

Joel said nothing for a moment. He wasn't doing the thing people did... the immediate rush to fill the space with something reassuring or outraged on her behalf. He just let it sit there for a second like it deserved to.

"That's a brutal way to end something," he said.

"Yeah." She drank her coffee. "And work is... it's complicated. Funding stuff. The kind of thing that's not a crisis yet but has that flavour."

"Marine biology funding."

"It's a small pool." She looked at him. "No pun intended."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a full smile, just the precursor to one. She'd noticed he did that, held things back slightly, like he was deciding whether something had earned the full version.

"So." She turned her mug in a slow circle. "I needed to go somewhere and here we are."

"Here we are," he agreed.

The eggs arrived. They were, as advertised, incredible, the kind of eggs that had no business being this good in a roadside diner and were anyway, because Ruthie's had been making them since 1962 and had gotten very good at it.

Cara watched as Joel took his first bite, studying his face for any signs of how he felt about the food she had pushed him to order. 

"Okay," he said.

"I know."

"These are unreasonably good eggs."

"I told you."

"You did." He ate another bite. "You were right."

She looked at him across the table. Outside the window the highway kept doing what it did, the occasional truck, the flat green of Iowa in early summer, the sky just starting to mean it.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Sure."

"Why did you come? When you found out it was just us."

He considered this with the same thoroughness he'd applied to the menu. "I said I'd be there," he said. "And I'd already packed."

"That's it?"

"Also..." he paused. Looked out at the highway briefly and then back at her. "I don't know. It seemed like the kind of thing that would be good to do."

"A road trip."

"Saying yes to things that turn out different from what you expected." He shrugged slightly. "I've been trying to do more of that."

She looked at him.

She put him in a new category. She'd figure out what to call it later.

"Good answer," she said, and went back to her eggs.

They sat at Ruthie's for an hour. The coffee kept coming, Donna kept refilling without being asked, and somewhere between the second cup and the third the conversation found its feet in the way it sometimes does... not because you've decided to talk properly but because you've run out of reasons not to.

He told her about the engineering firm he worked for, infrastructure projects, the particular satisfaction of designing something that had to actually stand up in the physical world. She told him about the research facility, the lake, the specific joy of spending time in water that was dark and cold and full of things that had no idea humans existed.

"That sounds incredible," he said.

"It is." She smiled at her coffee. "It's also very badly funded and there's a real chance half our team gets cut by October, but while it's happening it's incredible."

"Have you thought about what you'd do? If the funding goes?"

"I try not to."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer I have." She looked up at him. "Do you always ask follow-up questions?"

"When the first answer isn't really an answer."

She held his gaze for a moment.

"Yes," she said. "I've thought about it. I don't like any of the options. So I focus on the work and try not to look directly at the other thing."

"Like looking at the sun."

"Exactly like that." She tilted her head slightly. "That's a good way to put it."

He looked like he hadn't expected the compliment. Just for a second... a small recalibration, quickly smoothed.

They split the bill despite his mild protest and left Donna a tip that was larger than it needed to be and walked back out into the Iowa morning. The air had warmed while they'd been inside, the light gone from thin and tentative to something more confident.

Cara stretched her arms above her head, felt her spine decompress, looked at the highway going west.

"Your turn to drive," she said.

"You sure?"

"You've been in the passenger seat for four hours."

"I didn't mind."

"I know. It's still your turn." She held out the keys.

He took them. His fingers brushed hers for half a second and she didn't think anything of it and got in the passenger side and put her feet up on the dash and found something on her phone to put on the stereo.

He adjusted the seat, mirrors, checked over his shoulder before pulling out with the careful attention of someone for whom these things were not habits but decisions.

She watched him out of the corner of her eye.

New category, she thought again.

The highway went west. The sky was the blue of something just getting started.

Chapter Three

Nebraska

Joel

Nebraska was honest about what it was.

No pretension, no scenery trying too hard, just flat land and big sky and the occasional grain elevator standing in the distance like a punctuation mark in a very long sentence. He'd driven through it once before, years ago, and remembered thinking it was bleak. He didn't think that now. He thought it was the kind of place that demanded you be present because there was nothing else to look at.

Cara had fallen asleep somewhere around the Iowa border.

Not dramatically, she hadn't announced she was tired or made a production of it. She'd just gone quiet, and then her head had tipped back against the seat, and then she was asleep, her dark hair pushed to one side, one hand loose in her lap. He'd turned the music down without deciding to.

He drove and let her sleep and watched Nebraska.

She slept the way she seemed to do most things, without apology. Not curled away from him or pressed against the window, just... reclined, present, taking up a completely normal amount of space. He'd half expected her to be one of those people who slept bolt upright with their arms crossed, but she wasn't.

He'd been noticing things about her since five forty-eight this morning and he was aware that this was something he did with problems he was trying to solve, and he was also aware that Cara Hensley was not a problem, and he hadn't quite figured out what to do with that inconsistency yet.

He drove.

She woke up an hour later the way people wake up when they've properly slept, all at once, sitting up, looking around to locate herself.

"Nebraska," he said, before she could ask.

She looked out the window. "How long was I out?"

"Little over an hour."

"Sorry."

"Don't be. You needed it."

She pushed her hair back and looked at him with a slightly unfocused expression that lasted for about three seconds before her eyes sharpened. He'd noticed she came back to herself quickly. No extended grogginess, no slow reassembly. Just... present.

"You drove halfway through Nebraska alone."

"I had the music."

"What were you listening to?"

"Same thing you put on before you went to sleep."

She reached forward and turned the volume back up. The song was still going, or one very like it, and she settled back in her seat with her feet up on the dash, he'd realised within the first hour that this was her default passenger position and had stopped noticing it, and looked out at the landscape.

"Nebraska," she said.

"Yeah."

"I always think it's going to feel longer than it does."

"It's pretty long."

"I know. But it feels..."

"Honest," he said.

She turned to look at him. Not surprised exactly, more like something confirmed.

"Yeah," she said. "Exactly that."

He kept his eyes on the road. In his peripheral vision he saw her turn back to the window.

They stopped for gas outside a town called Grand Island, at a station that had four pumps and a small convenience store and a handwritten sign in the window that said BEST BEEF JERKY IN NEBRASKA which was either true or optimistic.

He filled the tank while she went inside.

He watched her through the window without meaning to. She moved through the two short aisles the way she moved through everything, no hesitation, direct, picking things up and making decisions. She was at the counter in under three minutes with an armful of things he couldn't identify from out here.

She came out into the sun with a paper bag and two bottles of water and something tucked under her arm that turned out to be a small plastic dinosaur, green, about six inches tall, with an expression of profound existential concern.

He looked at it. Then back at, cocking his eyebrow

"He was three dollars," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was going to ask what his name is."

She looked at the dinosaur. Looked at him. Looked at the dinosaur again.

"Gerald," she said.

"Gerald."

"He looks like a Gerald."

Joel looked at the dinosaur again. It did, inexplicably, look somewhat like a Gerald. "Okay," he said.

She put Gerald on the dashboard, adjusting him until he was facing the road with his expression of philosophical suffering pointed at the horizon.

"He's our trip mascot," she said. "He presides over things."

"What things."

"Decisions. Disputes. General oversight." She handed him a bottle of water and opened the bag. "I also got beef jerky, pretzels, and something called a Cowboy Bar that I've never heard of but the packaging was very confident about."

"What's in it?"

"Unclear. Caramel, I think. And optimism." She unwrapped it and took a bite and considered it. "Hm."

"Good?"

"Surprisingly yes." She held it out.

He took a bite. It was extremely sweet and slightly grainy and tasted like someone had tried to make a candy bar out of sheer willpower. "That's something," he said.

"Right?" She took it back, looking genuinely pleased. "Gerald, the Cowboy Bar is a success."

Gerald stared at the horizon with his existential expression and said nothing.

Joel got back in the driver's seat and pulled out of the station and merged back onto the highway, and Cara opened the pretzels and put the bag between them on the console without asking whether he wanted some, which he found he liked. No ceremony. Just the assumption that things were shared.

The thing that made her laugh was stupid.

About forty minutes outside Grand Island, a truck pulled up alongside them with a bumper sticker that said HONK IF YOU LOVE NEBRASKA and then, below it in smaller letters, NOBODY HONKS.

He didn't say anything. He just tilted his head toward it.

She looked.

And she laughed.

Not a polite laugh or a small acknowledging sound but an actual laugh, sudden and full and entirely unguarded, the kind that surprises the person it comes from. She pressed her hand over her mouth after, like she'd been caught doing something, and looked at him with bright eyes.

"That's bleak," she said.

"Or honest," he said.

"Both." She shook her head. "Both."

She was still smiling when she turned back to the window, and he kept his eyes on the road and didn't say anything about it and thought about the way her whole face had changed for that three seconds. The way the careful composed version of her had just... stepped back for a moment.

The driving fell into a rhythm after that.

They talked in the easy interrupted way of people in cars, a topic starts, runs a while, gets left somewhere when something outside catches attention, picked up again later or not. She told him about a dive she'd done last year off the coast of the Upper Peninsula, water cold enough to be genuinely dangerous and dark enough that her torch was the only light for a hundred feet in any direction, and something enormous had moved in the darkness at the edge of visibility and she'd never found out what it was.

"Weren't you afraid?" he said.

"Terrified," she said. "That's kind of the point."

He glanced at her.

"Of diving?"

"Of anything worth doing." She ate a pretzel. "You know that thing where you're doing something and you're scared and your brain is going a hundred miles an hour and everything is very sharp and present?" She paused. "I go looking for that. Deliberately."

"You're an adrenaline person."

"I'm a being alive person." She looked at him. "What's yours?"

"My what?"

"The thing that makes everything sharp and present."

He thought about it. Not performing thought, actually thinking. "Solving something I don't know how to solve yet" he said. "When a design problem has no obvious answer and then... it does."

She nodded slowly. Not dismissing it, taking it in.

"That's less likely to kill you," she said.

"Marginally."

She smiled at the road. Not the full laugh, but the warmth underneath it.

By the time the light started to get low and golden across the plains, they'd covered most of the state and made a loose plan to stop somewhere past the Wyoming border. Cara had her feet back on the dash and was half reading something on her phone and half watching the light change on the landscape, and Gerald presided over the dashboard with undiminished solemnity.

"Can I ask you something?" Joel said.

"Sure."

"Why me? Out of everyone you could have asked."

She was quiet for a moment. Not evasively, she was thinking, which was apparently what she did before most answers.

"Marcus said you were good company," she said. "And you'd been talking about doing something like this."

"Marcus said that?"

"He said you'd mentioned wanting to do a road trip. That you were the kind of person who said yes to things."

He thought about that. He wasn't sure Marcus had been right, exactly. He wasn't sure he was the kind of person who said yes to things. But he'd said yes to this.

"And?" he said, because he could tell there was something else.

She glanced at him. "You seemed like someone who wouldn't make it weird."

He turned that over.

"And?" he said again.

A pause.

"And I don't know," she said. "I just had a feeling."

He didn't push it. He looked at the road ahead, at the sun going down over Wyoming in the distance, at Gerald watching the horizon with his steady look of philosophical endurance.

A feeling, he thought.

He found he didn't need it to be more than that yet. They had two weeks. Things could be what they were going to be in their own time.

The highway kept going west.

Chapter Four

The Wanderer Inn

Cara

The motel was called The Wanderer Inn and the sign out front had two letters burnt out so it read THE W NDERER INN which felt either like a metaphor or just poor maintenance and Cara was too tired to decide which.

It sat off a two-lane highway outside of Rawlins, low and long, built in an era when motels didn't try to be anything other than a place to stop. The vacancy sign buzzed faintly. The parking lot had three other cars in it. Somewhere to the west the sky had gone a colour she didn't have a name for, bruised purple bleeding into something almost green at the edges.

"Storm coming," Joel said, looking at it through the windshield.

"I know."

"Big one."

"I know." She was already getting out. "Come on."

The man at the front desk had a white moustache and the particular stillness of someone who had worked a night desk long enough that very little surprised him anymore.

"One room or two?" he said, without looking up.

Cara opened her mouth.

"Two," Joel said, at the same moment.

She looked at him. He was looking at the man behind the desk. She wasn't sure what she'd been about to say and decided it didn't matter.

"Two singles," she said. "Or doubles. Whatever you have."

"Got a room with two doubles," the man said. "Or two separate rooms, but the singles are on the far end and we've got weather coming."

Cara thought about being on the far end of a motel in a Wyoming storm alone in a single room and weighed it against sharing a room with someone she'd known for approximately thirteen hours.

"The room with two doubles," she said.

Joel didn't comment. He took the key card the man slid across the desk and they walked down the external corridor and found room seven and he unlocked it and held the door.

She went in first.

The room smelled like cedar and old carpet and decades of recycled air. It was clean though, in the functional way of places that couldn't afford not to be. Two double beds with white coverlets, a window unit that was already running, a bathroom with a door that didn't quite sit flush in its frame.

She took the bed closer to the window. Joel dropped his bag on the other one and went to look at the sky.

"It's going to be a big one," he said.

She came to stand beside him. Not close, appropriate distance, the amount of space you maintain with someone you've known for thirteen hours. The sky to the west had gone fully dark, the kind of dark that moved. Lightning flickered somewhere far out, silent and enormous.

"Midwest storms are different," she said. "They have more intention."

He turned his head to look at her. "Intention."

"Like they mean it."

He considered this. Turned back to the window. "I believe you," he said, which was not the same as agreeing with her, and she noticed the difference.

She stepped away and started unpacking what she'd need for the night. Toiletries. Sleep shirt. The book she'd been failing to read for three weeks. She kept her back to him and thought about how strange it was to do ordinary evening things in a room with someone she didn't know very well, and how it wasn't actually as strange as she'd expected.

That was its own kind of strange.

The storm hit at ten twenty-three.

She knew the exact time because she'd been lying in bed theoretically reading and had checked her phone two minutes before and then the rain came, not gradually but all at once, the way serious weather arrives when it means it. Sheet lightning turned the curtains white every few minutes. The thunder was the kind you felt in your chest.

Joel was in the other bed. She could hear him shifting occasionally.

She stared at the same page she'd been staring at for twenty minutes.

It wasn't the storm. She didn't mind storms. It was something else, something she couldn't put a clean name to, the low-level awareness of another person in a small room and the specific quality of that person's stillness and the fact that she'd been cataloguing small things about him all day without meaning to.

The way he'd reorganised her boot this morning. The way he hadn't made the two-of-them situation into a thing. The fact that he'd driven four hours through Nebraska without complaining about any of it. The follow-up questions. Nebraska is honest. The small movement at the corner of his mouth that preceded an actual smile by about two seconds and was somehow better than the smile.

She turned a page she hadn't read.

"You okay?" he said.

She looked over. He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, looking at the ceiling. The lamp on his nightstand put him in warm light and she made herself look back at her book.

"Fine," she said. "Not scared of storms."

"I know. You told me about diving in the dark next to something enormous. I didn't think you were scared of storms."

"Then why ask?"

"Because you've turned three pages in twenty minutes and you haven't actually read any of them."

She looked at the page.

He was right. She had no idea what was on it.

"I'm thinking," she said.

"About?"

"Things."

"Specific things or general things?"

She put the book face down on the bed. "You ask a lot of questions."

"You keep not quite answering them."

She looked over at him. He was still looking at the ceiling, not at her, which made it easier somehow.

"I was just thinking about the trip," she said. "Whether it's going to be okay."

"You mean whether I'm going to be okay to travel with."

She paused. "Is that rude?"

"It's honest." He turned his head to look at her. "I'd rather you say it than not say it."

She looked at him for a moment. "Are you going to be okay to travel with?"

"I think so." He turned back to the ceiling. "Are you?"

She almost laughed. "I think so."

"Then we're probably fine."

The thunder rolled across the sky in a long slow wave and the window went white. She picked her book back up, not because she was going to read it but because it gave her something to do with her hands.

She was, she realised, more comfortable in this room than she'd expected to be. Which was either a good sign or a problem, and she wasn't sure yet which one.

He got up at some point, she heard him before she saw him, the quiet sounds of someone trying not to make noise, the creak of the bed, footsteps on old carpet, and she looked up briefly to find him heading toward the bathroom with his wash kit.

"Going to shower," he said.

"Okay," she said, in the tone of someone who was absolutely reading their book and not thinking about anything in particular.

The bathroom door clicked mostly shut. The shower came on. She stared at her page.

The page said something about marine sediment layers. She could not have told you what.

She lay there and listened to the rain outside and the shower inside and told herself she was tired, which was true, and that was why she couldn't read, which was less true, and that there was nothing unusual about sharing a room with someone on a road trip, which was completely true and somehow not the point.

The shower cut off.

She put her nose back in the book.

She heard the curtain rings, the brief silence of someone towelling off, and then the bathroom door swung open and Joel walked out in a cloud of warm steam with a towel around his waist and his hair damp and went directly to his bag without looking at her.

She kept her eyes on her page.

She was reading about sediment.

He was crouched over his bag with his back to her and the towel sat low on his hips and she was absolutely not looking at the two shallow dimples at the base of his spine or the width of his shoulders or anything else at all. She was reading about sediment layers in the lower basin of Lake Michigan which was genuinely interesting and relevant to her work.

He straightened and turned to grab something from the top of his bag.

The towel shifted.

Just for a second. Just a glimpse, the towel catching on his hip as he turned, a brief unmistakable flash of what was underneath it, and her brain registered it with the speed and clarity of something she absolutely had not been prepared for.

She snapped her eyes back to the page.

Sediment, she thought. Sediment. Lower basin. Particulate matter. You are a marine biologist. You are a professional. You are reading about...

Her face was on fire.

She stared at the page. The words on it could have been in another language. In her peripheral vision Joel, completely unbothered, pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt with the easy unselfconsciousness of someone who had forgotten other people existed, or possibly had just never developed the habit of performing getting dressed.

He got into his bed.

Turned off the lamp.

"Night," he said.

"Night," she said. Perfectly normally. Like a normal person.

She put the book face down on her chest and stared at the ceiling in the dark.

She had known this man for thirteen hours.

Thirteen hours. That was how long it had been. And she was lying in a Wyoming motel in a thunderstorm with her face still warm and her brain doing things it had no business doing about someone she'd met at a party seven months ago and texted occasionally and had spent a total of one full day with.

She was, she realised, in more than a small amount of trouble.

She closed her eyes.

It was nothing, she told herself. You're tired and you're burnt out and you haven't been touched by another person in four months and your brain is being stupid. It is nothing.

Outside, Wyoming made good on every promise it had made.

She didn't sleep for a while.

Chapter Twelve

Reno

Cara

She woke up in stages.

First: warmth. More than usual, more than the blanket accounted for. Then: the specific weight of an arm across her waist. Then: the memory of last night arriving in the way good memories arrived, all at once, with the quality of something that had actually happened rather than something she'd constructed in the hopeful part of sleep, they hadn’t gone all the way yet but it was enough for now. 

She lay still and let herself have a moment with it.

Joel was asleep behind her. She could tell by his breathing, that even, settled rhythm she'd been cataloguing since Wyoming, now considerably closer than it had been through any of the previous nights. His arm was around her waist and his hand was loose, relaxed, the hand of someone completely at ease with where it was.

She looked at it.

Engineer's hands. She'd thought this before, from across tables and car consoles, in the abstract noticing-without-looking way she'd developed as a defensive measure. Up close, in this context, the abstract had become very specific. The particular quality of hands that knew how to do things.

She was going to need to stop thinking about his hands if she was going to have a functional morning.

She turned carefully, trying not to wake him, and ended up facing him, close enough that she could see the small scar at the edge of his jaw she hadn't noticed before and the way his lashes were darker than his hair and the complete slack of his face in sleep, all the deliberateness gone.

He looked younger asleep. Not in an unsettling way. In the way of someone who spent most of their waking hours engaged and this was what disengaged looked like.

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then she pressed a very small, very quiet kiss to his jaw and got up before he woke.

She made coffee in the small machine on the bathroom counter and stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself and thought: okay. This is a thing that's happening.

She thought about all the reasons she'd had to be careful. The ex, the four years, the judgment she didn't trust. The road trip context, the not-knowing-him-long-enough. All of the very reasonable things she'd said to herself and to him.

She looked at her reflection and asked: do you actually believe any of those reasons right now?

Her reflection said: not particularly, no.

She drank her coffee.

She felt good. That was the simple truth of it. She felt present and warm and good in a way that had nothing to do with circumstances and everything to do with the particular person asleep in the next room, and she had enough self-awareness to know that this was not a small thing and enough honesty to stop pretending it was one.

She went back into the room.

He was awake. Lying on his back with one arm behind his head, looking at the ceiling, and he turned his head when she came in and the expression on his face when he saw her was the one she'd been cataloguing and hadn't been able to categorise and now, finally, she could: it was simply glad.

He was simply glad she was there.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning." He watched her cross the room. "How long have you been up?"

"Twenty minutes." She sat on the edge of the bed. "You sleep deeply."

"I slept well." He said it with the simple directness he brought to true statements. His hand found hers on the coverlet, not reaching for it, just landing there, like the proximity made it natural.

She looked at their hands.

"I kissed your jaw," she said. "When I got up. You were asleep."

He turned his head to look at her. "Yeah?"

"I thought you should know. In the interest of saying things."

He looked at her for a moment with that expression. Then he sat up, and his hand moved from hers to the side of her face, and he kissed her, morning, unhurried, the kind of kiss that had nowhere it needed to be, and she leaned into it and thought: yes. This. Exactly this.

They were back on the road by nine, Nevada doing its Nevada thing, Gerald reassuming his position of oversight on the dashboard. The texture of the car was different. Not dramatically, they were still two people in a Ford Focus with too much luggage and a plastic dinosaur,  but the specific quality of the silence had changed again. It had weight to it now. Warmth. The particular ease of people who have stopped maintaining distance.

He drove. She had her feet up and was looking at the map on her phone.

"We could make the California border today," she said.

"How far is that?"

"Four hours. Maybe five." She looked up. "Or we stop in Reno."

"What's in Reno?"

"Reno." She considered. "It's not nothing. It's also not everything. But there's a place I read about, a converted railway building, they turned it into a hotel. Supposed to be good."

He glanced at her. "You want to stop in Reno."

"I want to stop somewhere that isn't a roadside motel with a five-foot sofa." She looked at him steadily. "Is that a statement of intent? Yes. Am I embarrassed about it? No."

The corner of his mouth. "Reno," he said.

"Reno," she agreed.

She called ahead and booked it while he drove and when she confirmed the room, one room, one king, she didn't hesitate for half a second, she felt him glance at her and she looked back at the map on her phone and said nothing and let the statement stand.

They pulled into Reno at two in the afternoon.

The hotel was everything the website had promised, a converted 1910 railway depot with high ceilings and arched windows and the bones of something that had mattered once and still knew it. Their room was on the second floor with a window that looked out at the mountains and a bed that was, objectively, the best bed she'd seen in four days of motels, wide and clean with the kind of pillows that suggested someone had thought about them.

She stood in the middle of the room and looked at it.

Joel set his bag down and looked at her.

"We got here early," she said.

"We did."

"We could go and see Reno."

"We could."

She turned to face him. He was watching her with that steady, aimed quality she'd been feeling since this morning, patient but not passive. Like a man who'd already decided what he wanted and was just waiting for her to catch up.

"Or," she said.

"Or," he agreed, his voice dropping an octave.

She crossed the room. He didn't move, but his chest rose and fell faster, his fingers flexing at his sides like he was fighting the urge to reach for her.

She kissed him first as his hands found her waist, yanking her against him so hard she gasped. This kiss had an intention behind it that the previous ones had been building toward. Not rushed. Joel didn't rush. But desperate. And going somewhere very, very specific.

She pulled back, her lips wet from his mouth, her body thrumming.

"I should tell you something," she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

He waited, his breath hot against her ear.

"It's been a while," she said. "A long while. Since... you know." She held his gaze. "I'm not... I don't want you to expect me to..."

"Hey." His hand slid from her waist to her throat, his thumb tilting her chin up, forcing her to meet his eyes. "I'm not expecting anything. Except this. Except you."

She looked at him. At the way his pupils had blown wide, at the way his cock pressed against his jeans, at the way his fingers twitched against her skin like he was already imagining all the ways he was going to touch her.

"Okay," she said, her voice shaking.

"Okay?" His thumb traced her lower lip. "You sure?"

"Okay." She fisted her hands in his shirt and yanked him down, crushing her mouth to his. 

"Stop being reasonable and fuck me."

She'd thought, briefly, that it might be awkward, the geography of new people, the uncertainty of it. But there was nothing awkward about the way he kissed her, like he already knew everything about her. Nothing awkward about the way his hands roamed her body, learning her, here, the dip of her waist, here, the way her breath hitched when he palmed her breast, here, the wet heat between her thighs when he finally, finally slid his hand there.

It wasn't awkward. It was perfect. He was too deliberate for awkward, too attentive, the same quality of full attention he brought to everything turned toward this in a way that was overwhelming in the best possible sense.

He kissed her throat and she tipped her head back, a moan spilling from her lips, and his hands moved over her with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who had decided this was worth doing properly.

"Joel," she gasped, her nails digging into his shoulders.

"Yeah." His mouth was at her collarbone, his teeth grazing her skin.

"You're very…" she lost the word. Lost her mind.

"I'm very what."

"Fucking insufferable," she managed, laughing breathlessly as his fingers found the zipper of her jeans and tugged. "Because you're too good at this."

He chuckled against her skin, the vibration sending a shiver down her spine. Then his mouth was on hers again and she stopped laughing. Stopped thinking. Stopped everything but the way his tongue moved against hers, the way his hands owned her, the way her body burned for him.

They moved to the bed in the particular way of people who are paying attention to each other, checking in, yes, but also pushing, demanding, the specific conversation that didn't require words. She shoved his shirt up, her hands flat against the hard planes of his stomach, and he groaned, a rough needy sound that made her clench around nothing. She pulled his shirt off and he unzipped her jacket, his fingers rough with urgency now, like he'd run out of patience.

They negotiated the rest of it with the kind of practical honesty she'd always preferred to the performed version of things, both of them clear about what they wanted and direct about taking it.

She pushed him back against the pillows and looked at him. At the way his chest rose and fell, at the way his cock strained against his boxers, at the way his eyes burned into hers like he was memorising the sight of her above him.

He looked up at her, glad, focused, entirely here, and she thought: four days. We've known each other four days. And then she thought: so the fuck what. She looked at it clearly and this was what she saw. A man who wanted her as badly as she wanted him. A man who was hers, at least for now. And God, was that enough.

"Tell me what you want," he said quietly, his voice rough, his breath hot against her lips.

She didn't hesitate. "I want you inside me." Her voice was steady but her body betrayed her, hips rolling instinctively, seeking friction, seeking him. "I want you to fuck me, Joel. Slow at first. Then hard. Then however the hell you want, as long as it's you."

She reached between them, her fingers fumbling with the hem of his boxers, her breath hitching as she finally freed him. Hard and thick in her hand, she stroked him once, just to feel him twitch against her palm.

Then she was sinking onto him, slowly, so slowly, her body stretching to accommodate him.

She gasped, her head falling back, her nails digging into his chest as she took him all the way in.

"Jesus, Cara," he groaned, his hands gripping her thighs, his thumbs pressing into the sensitive skin near her hips. "You feel..."

"Good?" she breathed, already starting to move, her body taking over.

"Incredible," he gritted out.

She laughed, breathless and wild, and then she was riding him in earnest, her hips rolling, her body finding a rhythm that had them both gasping. He met her thrust for thrust, his hands guiding her, his eyes never leaving hers. And when she leaned forward, her breasts brushing his chest, her hair falling around them like a curtain, he caught her mouth in a kiss that was all teeth and tongue and need.

She could feel it building, that tight coiling sensation low in her belly, the way her muscles clenched around him, the way her breath came in short sharp gasps. She was close. So close. And when his hand slid between them, his thumb finding her clit and circling it with just the right amount of pressure, she shattered.

She came with a cry, her body tightening around him, her nails raking down his chest as the pleasure crashed over her in waves. And he followed her over the edge with a groan, his hips lifting off the bed, his release spilling into her as he buried his face in her neck, his teeth grazing her shoulder.

For a long moment there was nothing but the sound of their ragged breathing, the thud of their hearts slowly returning to normal, the way their skin stuck together with sweat. She collapsed onto his chest, her body boneless, her mind blissfully empty. He wrapped his arms around her, his hands stroking her back, his lips pressing soft kisses to her hair.

"Okay?" he murmured, his voice rough but tender.

She hummed against his skin, too sated to form words. She nodded, her fingers tracing idle patterns on his chest.

He chuckled, the sound rumbling through her, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "Good," he said. "Because I'm not done with you yet."

She smiled, her body already responding to the promise in his voice.

She rolled off him, her limbs heavy, her skin still buzzing, and he immediately pulled her back against his side, his arm a warm possessive weight across her waist. She could feel his heartbeat against her back, steady and strong, like the rhythm of the road outside.

"Give me ten minutes," he said, his voice a low rumble in her ear.

She laughed, her body still humming from the first round. "You're optimistic."

"Five, then," he bargained, his hand sliding up to cup her breast, his thumb brushing over her nipple.

She arched into his touch, a shiver running through her. She turned her head to look at him, her eyes heavy with satisfaction but already flickering with renewed desire. "What is it about you?" she wondered, her fingers tracing the scar on his jaw.

He caught her hand and kissed her palm. "Same thing that's got you hooked," he said. "We fit."

She considered that, her body still thrumming from the aftershocks. It was more than just physical. It was the way he listened. The way he saw her. The way he made her feel like the only thing in the world worth his attention. And God, was that a dangerous thing to realise.

She rolled back onto him, her thigh sliding between his, her mouth finding his in a slow deep kiss.

"Five minutes," she agreed, her hand already sliding down to wrap around him again.

And he groaned, his body responding instantly to her touch, his cock hardening under her fingers. But this time his hand covered hers, not to stop her but to guide her, his fingers lacing through hers as they both stroked him together. "Let me," he murmured, his voice soft but sure, his eyes locked on hers.

She melted into him, her body relaxing into the warmth of his touch, the quiet certainty of his request. He shifted them until she was on her back, his body hovering over hers, his weight supported on his forearms as he gazed down at her like she was something precious. His free hand slid up to cup her face, his thumb brushing her cheekbone, his touch almost reverent.

"You're beautiful," 

She swallowed, her heart pounding, her body already aching with need. No one had ever looked at her like this... like she was something to be savoured, not just desired. She nodded, her fingers tightening around his.

He kissed her then, slow and deep, his lips moving against hers like a promise. Then he began to move down her body, his mouth trailing hot open-mouthed kisses along her throat, her collarbone, the valley between her breasts. She arched into him, her breath hitching as his tongue circled her nipple before he took it into his mouth, sucking gently.

"Joel," she gasped, her fingers tangling in his hair.

He hummed against her skin, the vibration sending a shiver through her. "Shh. Let me."

And then he was lower, his hands sliding under her thighs, lifting her slightly off the bed as his mouth found her centre. She cried out, her back arching, her body trembling as his tongue parted her, slow and deliberate. He took his time, exploring her like he was memorising every inch of her, his fingers digging into her thighs as he held her open for him.

"Oh... God..." she gasped, her hips lifting off the bed, seeking more of his mouth, more of his touch. He groaned against her, the sound vibrating through her, and she came apart with a cry, her body clenching around nothing as the pleasure crashed over her in waves.

He didn't stop. He kissed her through it, his tongue softening as her body trembled, his lips pressing gentle kisses to her inner thighs as she came down. And when she was finally still, her breath ragged, he crawled back up to her, his cock pressing against her entrance.

"Joel," she whispered, her voice trembling.

"Shh," he murmured against her lips, his touch gentle but insistent. "I've got you."

And he did. He always did.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, her heels digging into his hips, pulling him closer. He entered her slowly, inch by inch, his eyes never leaving hers, his breath mingling with hers. She gasped, her back arching, her body stretching to take him in.

"Okay?" he asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.

She nodded, her fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him down for a kiss. "More than okay."

And then he began to move, slow and deliberate, his hips rolling in deep measured strokes that had her sighing. It wasn't about speed or force, it was about connection, about the way their bodies fit together, about the way he filled her so completely it felt like coming home. She moved her hips in unison with his, her hands sliding down to grip his ass, urging him deeper.

He groaned, his forehead pressing to hers. "Cara," he breathed, his voice thick with emotion. "I .. God… I can't.."

She kissed him, her lips soft against his. "Then don't."

And he didn't. He let go, his rhythm stuttering, his body trembling as he buried himself inside her, his release spilling into her with a groan.

For a long moment they stayed like that, him buried inside her, their bodies still connected, their breaths slowly returning to normal. He pressed a kiss to her shoulder, his lips lingering against her skin. "I love the way you feel," he murmured, his voice rough with emotion. "Like you were made for me."

She smiled, her eyes stinging with unshed tears. "I was," she whispered.

He pulled out of her, rolling onto his side and gathering her into his arms, her head tucked under his chin, her leg slung over his hip. She could feel him softening, the warmth of him spilling out of her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, savouring the intimacy of it.

"You okay?" he murmured, his voice rough but tender.

She nodded against his chest, her fingers drawing idle patterns on his skin. "More than okay."

He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "Good."

She tilted her head up to look at him, her eyes heavy with satisfaction but already flickering with something softer, something sweeter. "Joel?"

"Yeah?"

She bit her lip, suddenly shy. "This… us… it's not just the road trip, is it?"

He was quiet for a moment, his fingers stilling on her back. Then he cupped her face, his thumb brushing her cheekbone. "No," he said, his voice low. "It's not."

She exhaled, a shaky breath. "Good."

He smiled, a slow lazy thing. "Yeah. Good."

The thing about Joel, she discovered over the course of the afternoon, and the afternoon was long and warm and had the particular quality of time that expanded when you were paying full attention to it, was that he was thorough.

She'd suspected this. Every other thing he did had this quality. The way he'd read the menu. The way he'd reorganised her boot. The way he'd listened in the car and asked the follow-up question that showed he'd heard the thing underneath the thing she'd actually said.

It applied here in ways that left her looking at the ceiling afterward with the specific thoughtlessness of someone whose brain had briefly stopped filing things entirely.

She lay and looked at the ceiling.

He lay beside her, one arm behind his head, not talking, which was exactly right.

The mountains were visible through the window, the afternoon sun on them, and the room was warm and the bed was the best bed they'd encountered and she was, she thought, going to have to update several of her working assumptions about this trip.

"Insufferable," she said.

He turned his head. "What?"

"You. Still."

A pause. The corner of his mouth.

She laughed, the real one, helpless, startled out of her,and turned her head and found him watching it happen with that look, the glad one, and she shook her head and looked back at the ceiling.

"We have ten days left," she said.

"Nine and a half."

"Nine and a half." She considered this. "That's a lot of road."

"And a lot of motels."

"Some of which will presumably have two beds."

"Some of which," he agreed. "Though the Ford Focus could break down again."

She turned her head. He was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone making a neutral observation.

"Are you suggesting Gerald might engineer further mechanical failures?"

"Gerald has opinions about the trip."

"Gerald," she said, "is a three-dollar plastic dinosaur."

"Gerald," he said, "has been right about everything so far."

She looked at the ceiling.

She thought about nine and a half more days and the California coast still ahead and the particular way the air in the car felt different now and the way he'd said where else would I be and the way he was thorough and present and listened to the thing underneath the thing.

"Joel," she said.

"Yeah."

"I'm glad you came."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Me too," he said.

She rolled onto her side and he put his arm around her and she lay with her face against his shoulder and the Reno afternoon went on outside the window and the mountains held their position on the horizon and the bed continued to be the best bed of the trip.

She was, she thought, in it. Fully in it.

Finally.

The Desert

Cara

She woke before him again.

This had become, apparently, her pattern. She lay in the grey morning light with the neon sign outside doing its slow pink pulse through the curtain gap and listened to him breathe and thought about the night before and the car and everything that had been said and everything that had happened after it, which was nothing, technically, except that nothing had never felt like quite so much of something before.

He'd said he hadn't decided when.

She didn't believe that for a second.

She knew a person who had made a decision when she saw one. He'd gone to sleep faster than usual, she'd noticed because she'd been awake listening and his breathing had changed within ten minutes, even, steady, the breathing of someone whose mind had resolved something. She, on the other hand, had lain awake for approximately an hour cataloguing everything and landing nowhere useful.

She was a marine biologist. She understood currents. You didn't fight them, you read them, you figured out where they were taking you and you decided whether to go.

She looked at the ceiling.

She had decided.

She was going.

The question was what that looked like in a motel room in Ely Nevada at six-twenty in the morning and the answer was: probably not this, probably not right now, probably coffee first.

She got up quietly, pulled on jeans and a jacket, and went to find coffee.

The motel's lobby had a machine that produced something in the approximate family of coffee and she stood in front of it in the early morning quiet and pressed buttons and thought about the Nevada desert and the way the conversation in the car had settled something in her that had been unsettled since she'd started packing for this trip.

She didn't know what she was doing. That was true. She was twenty-four and her last relationship had ended without warning and her job was precarious and she was on a road trip with someone she'd known for four days and she had absolutely no idea what any of it was going to look like in two weeks.

She also knew, with the specific clarity she got about things when she stopped arguing with them, that Joel was the most interesting person she'd been in a room with in a very long time. That the last four days had been the first four days in months where she'd woken up and the first thing she thought about wasn't the situation she was in. That she found herself wanting to tell him things before she'd decided to tell them, which had never happened with her ex, not once, not even at the beginning.

She took her coffee and sat in the one lobby chair and stared at the parking lot and thought: okay. Okay. This is what it is.

She felt, having admitted that, considerably calmer.

She finished her coffee and went back to the room and the door opened quietly and he was still asleep, one arm across the coverlet, hair a disaster, face completely slack in the way it was when he slept, and she stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at him and thought: yes. That's what I thought.

She went to shower.

He was awake when she came out, sitting on the edge of his bed looking at his phone with the focused expression that meant he was reading something properly rather than scrolling. He looked up when she appeared.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning." She went to her bag. "There's something called coffee in the lobby. I use that term loosely."

"I'll risk it." He stood, ran a hand through his hair, which did nothing to improve the situation, and picked up his wash kit.

She watched him cross the room.

He stopped at the bathroom door and looked back at her.

"You look like you slept," he said.

"I slept fine."

"Good." Something in his expression was different this morning, not quite settled, more like aimed. Like he had a vector. "Give me ten minutes."

He went in. The door clicked.

She sat on her bed and looked at the wall and told her heart rate to be reasonable about this.

They were on the road by eight.

She drove first, Nevada opening up ahead of them in the particular inhospitable way it had, scrub and salt and mountains in the distance that never seemed to get closer. Gerald surveyed the dashboard. The fixed Ford Focus ran cleanly and without opinion, which felt like a personal affront after yesterday's drama.

Joel had his coffee, he'd gotten two from the lobby machine, appearing in the doorway with both held out without comment, and was in the passenger seat with his elbow on the window and the early sun in his face and the expression of a man who had decided something and was in no hurry.

It was, she found, slightly maddening.

She drove and watched the road and was aware of him in the specific heightened way she'd been aware of him since Wyoming, except that now it had a direction. Everything was the same and entirely different. The particular quality of him sitting beside her in the small car. The way he occasionally glanced at her and didn't immediately look away. The fact that they'd said things to each other last night and neither of them had taken them back.

"Tell me something," she said.

"We keep doing that."

"It keeps working." She glanced at him. "Something I don't know."

He thought about it. "I've driven across the country once before," he said. "Two years ago. Solo."

"How was it?"

"Quiet." He looked out the window. "Good kind of quiet. I like driving alone. But the quiet is different with someone else in the car."

"Better or worse?"

He looked at her. "Better."

She kept her eyes on the road.

"Your turn," he said.

She considered the easy ones and discarded them. "My ex," she said. "I knew it was over before he said it. I'd known for probably six months." She paused. "I just didn't say anything because saying it would have meant dealing with it."

"Why are you telling me that?"

"Because you said something true last night and I want to say something true back." She glanced at him. "I'm not as bad at seeing things clearly as I said. I just get scared of what I'll have to do once I've seen them."

He was quiet for a moment.

"What do you have to do now?" he said. "Having seen things clearly."

She looked at the road ahead. Empty and straight and going west.

"Something about it," she said. "Apparently."

"Apparently."

"I'm working up to it."

She felt him look at her. Long, steady, the particular quality of his attention that she'd stopped being able to ignore sometime around the state line.

"Take your time," he said.

She gripped the wheel.

She was, she decided, done taking her time.

Twenty minutes later she pulled over.

Not at a town, not at a gas station. Just a gravel shoulder on a Nevada highway with scrub on both sides and the mountains still doing their distant thing and the road completely empty in both directions.

She put the handbrake on.

Joel looked at the absence of anything around them and then at her. "Everything okay with the car?"

"The car's fine." She turned in her seat to face him. "I'm done working up to it."

He looked at her.

"Okay," he said.

"I like you," she said. "I said that last night and I meant it and I've been thinking about it since approximately midnight and I'm still thinking it, which tells me it's not going anywhere." She held his gaze. "And I'm aware we've known each other for four days and I'm aware my judgment has been questionable recently and I'm aware this is a road trip and not a normal situation but I'm looking at it clearly and that's what I see and I don't know what to do with that except say it."

He didn't say anything.

"That's all," she said. "That was the thing."

He reached across and tucked a strand of hair back from her face.

Slowly. Deliberately. The way he did things when he'd decided to do them.

His hand stayed at her jaw, warm, and she held very still, and he looked at her with that direct attention she'd been cataloguing and mapping and thinking about for four days and said, quietly:

"I know."

Then he kissed her.

Not tentative. Not questioning. He'd said he was going to do something about it and he had and this was what that looked like,his hand at her jaw and his mouth on hers and the particular certainty of someone who had thought it through and was sure.

She kissed him back.

For a moment the Nevada desert, the empty road, Gerald, all of it ceased to be particularly relevant. There was just his mouth and her hands finding the front of his shirt and the warm dry air coming through the windows and the specific feeling of something that had been building for four days finally having somewhere to go.

He pulled back slightly and looked at her.

She looked at him.

"Four days," she said.

"Four days," he agreed.

"That's not very long."

"No."

"We have ten more."

Something in his expression shifted into something warmer and more focused. "I know," he said.

She looked at him for a moment longer. At the face she'd been cataloguing since Nebraska, that she now apparently got to look at like this, which was different from looking at it from the passenger seat in ways she was only starting to understand.

She reached up and kissed him again.

This one was less careful.

His hand moved from her jaw to the back of her neck and she had both hands in his shirt and the gearstick was inconveniently between them in the way of all gearsticks in small cars in moments like this, and she laughed against his mouth and he made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh but was adjacent to one and they separated and looked at each other.

"We're on the side of a highway," he said.

"I know."

"In Nevada."

"I know." She was still smiling. She could feel it, uncontrolled, the full version of a smile she hadn't had much cause for in months. "Your point?"

"No point." He was smiling too. The real one, the full geography of his face changing with it. She'd been waiting to see that from across a table and up close it was substantially more devastating. "Just noting the location."

"Gerald is judging us."

They both looked at Gerald.

Gerald stared at the Nevada scrubland with his existential expression and reserved comment.

"He's fine with it," Joel said.

"He's always fine with everything."

"Gerald is very well adjusted."

She laughed. The real one, helpless, surprised out of her, and he watched it happen with an expression that she was going to need some time to fully process.

She turned back to the wheel. Put the car in gear.

"Ten days," she said.

"Ten days," he said.

She pulled back onto the highway and they went west and the Nevada desert went on being Nevada and neither of them said much for a while, but the silence had completely changed again, lighter and warmer and full of something that was no longer waiting to happen.

Chapter Eleven

One Bed

Joel

The motel was called The Desert Rose and it had fourteen rooms and one of them was available.

One.

The woman at the desk, her name tag said Phyllis and she had the energy of someone who had been managing expectations at this particular desk for twenty years, told them this with the particular calm of someone delivering information rather than an apology.

"Spring festival in town," she said. "Whole county comes in. Been booked for months."

"One room," Cara said.

"One room." Phyllis looked between them. "It's a king. Clean. Good water pressure. Fifty-two dollars."

Joel looked at Cara.

Cara looked at Joel.

"We'll take it," he said.

Phyllis took his card with the expression of someone who had seen this exact conversation play out in front of this exact desk many times before and found it neither interesting nor surprising.

Room nine. End of the row. She handed over the key card and went back to whatever she'd been doing.

They walked to room nine without discussing it.

He unlocked the door and held it and she went in and he followed and yes, one bed, a king, white coverlet, two pillows on each side, a window looking out at the parking lot and beyond it the Nevada scrubland going purple in the early evening light.

Also: a small sofa against the far wall. He noted this immediately with the part of his brain that was still doing due diligence.

Cara dropped her bag on the floor and looked at the bed and then at him.

"I'll take the sofa," he said.

"You're six feet tall."

"I've slept on worse."

She looked at the sofa, which was approximately five feet long and had the optimistic cushioning of motel furniture that had never quite committed to a purpose. Then she looked at the bed.

"It's a king," she said.

"It is."

"That's a large bed."

"Objectively yes."

She looked at him. He looked at her. The room was very quiet.

"We kissed on the side of a Nevada highway this morning," she said.

"We did."

"So the bed is probably not the complicated part."

"Probably not," he agreed.

She turned and went to the bathroom and closed the door, and he stood in the middle of room nine at The Desert Rose and looked at the king bed and the five-foot sofa and thought: the universe has opinions.

He put his bag on the luggage rack and sat on the edge of the bed.

The mattress was good. Considerably better than the last three motels. He noted this with the detachment of a man trying to focus on objective facts.

She came out of the bathroom in her sleep shirt with her face clean and her hair down and sat cross-legged on the other side of the bed with the matter-of-fact quality of someone who had made a decision and was not going to perform uncertainty about it.

He found this, as he found most things she did, extremely difficult to be rational around.

He'd showered after her, good water pressure, Phyllis had not been wrong, and was in a t-shirt and shorts and had run out of reasons to be on the other side of the room.

He got into the bed.

She was reading her book, or holding it open at a page with the studied focus of someone who was very aware of the four feet of mattress between them. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. The room was dim, her bedside lamp on, the orange Nevada dusk coming through the curtain gap.

"How's the book?" he said.

"I have no idea. I've been on the same page for ten minutes."

"What's it about?"

"I genuinely couldn't tell you." She put it face down. Turned slightly toward him. "We kissed and then drove for six hours and listened to music and stopped for tacos and didn't talk about it."

"I know."

"Is that normal for you?"

He turned his head to look at her. "Is what normal for me?"

"Not talking about things. Letting them sit."

"I talked about it this morning."

"In the car. Before." She looked at him steadily. "I mean after. We kissed and then you put your seatbelt on and said nice taco stand and I said yeah and that was it."

"I thought you needed time."

She looked at the ceiling briefly. "I spent four years with someone who always thought I needed more time than I did." She looked back at him. "I don't need time. I need people to say the thing."

He turned onto his side to face her.

"Okay," he said. "Here's the thing."

She waited.

"I've been thinking about you since we left Chicago," he said. "It's gotten worse every day. In the diner in Salina I almost said something and then you said the pie was better than the eggs and I let you have the exit because you seemed like you needed it." He held her gaze. "I'm not giving you exits anymore."

She looked at him for a moment.

"Good," she said.

He reached across the four feet of mattress and tucked her hair back from her face, the same way he had on the side of the highway, and this time he didn't stop there. His hand stayed at her jaw and he felt her lean into it slightly, the smallest movement, barely there.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," she said.

He kissed her.

This was different from the car, no gearstick, no gravel shoulder, no Gerald as witness. Just the dim room and the orange light and her hand finding his arm as he moved closer, and the specific unhurried quality of a kiss between two people who have stopped pretending they don't want to be doing exactly this.

She made a small sound against his mouth and pulled him closer and he went, and the four feet of mattress between them became no feet of mattress between them and that was better, considerably better, the warm length of her against him and her hands in his hair and his at her waist.

He pulled back slightly.

She looked up at him. Her hair was a disaster, which he had done, and she looked completely unbothered by this.

"Still thinking about the eggs?" he said.

She laughed, the real one, helpless, her head tipping back, and he watched it happen from approximately six inches away and thought: there it is. That's the one.

"No," she said. "I am not thinking about the eggs."

"Good." He kissed her jaw, her throat, felt her breath change. "What are you thinking about?"

"You." She said it simply, directly, the way she said things she'd decided to say. "Specifically about how long this has been building and how annoying it is that we're only halfway through the trip."

He pulled back to look at her. "Annoying?"

"We've wasted four days."

"We haven't wasted them."

"We could have been doing this in Wyoming."

He looked at her. "We weren't ready in Wyoming."

She considered this. "Nebraska?"

"Definitely not Nebraska."

"Iowa?"

"Cara."

"Fine." She pulled him back down. "Nevada."

"Nevada," he agreed.

She kissed him and he kissed her back and the conversation ended in the way conversations ended when better things were happening, and the Nevada night settled around The Desert Rose and its fourteen rooms, one of which contained two people who had been on the side of a highway this morning and had arrived here by the particular logic of things that were always going to happen eventually.

Later, the lamp off, the room dark, the orange of the neon sign from the parking lot doing its slow pulse through the curtain, she was lying with her head on his chest and his arm around her and the specific quiet of aftermath.

He could feel her thinking.

"Say the thing," he said.

She laughed, soft. "I was just thinking that this is the first time in months I've felt like myself."

He looked at the ceiling.

"Not because of this specifically," she said. "Although." A pause. "But just. The trip. Getting out. Being somewhere that isn't the thing that went wrong." She was quiet for a moment. "I forgot I could feel like this."

"Like what."

"Present." She pressed her hand flat against his chest. "Like I'm actually in the thing that's happening instead of standing next to it watching it go wrong."

He thought about that.

"You've been standing next to your own life," he said.

"For a while, yeah."

"Are you in it now?"

She was quiet for a moment.

"Yeah," she said. "I think so."

He pressed his mouth to the top of her head.

Outside, Nevada did what Nevada did, vast and inhospitable and indifferent to all of it. The neon pulsed. Gerald sat on the dashboard of the Ford Focus in the parking lot, staring at the scrubland with his philosophical expression, presiding over things.

She fell asleep before he did.

He lay in the dark and listened to her breathe and thought about how four days ago he'd been in his kitchen at five forty-eight in the morning reading a text from Marcus and deciding whether to back out of something that had just become substantially different from what he'd agreed to.

He was glad he hadn't.

He closed his eyes

Chapter Eight

The Noise

Cara

She heard it first at around ten in the morning, somewhere in the stretch of Utah that had stopped being canyon and become desert, flat, pale, shimmering at the edges in the heat. A low rhythmic sound from somewhere under the car, not loud, not urgent, but present. The kind of sound that a car makes when it is beginning to have an opinion about something.

She knew what it was.

She'd owned the Ford Focus for three years and it had developed a relationship with her that was, she felt, somewhat adversarial. It ran fine ninety percent of the time and then periodically expressed its dissatisfaction with the world through sounds exactly like this one. The front left wheel bearing, probably. It had made this noise before, eighteen months ago, and she'd had it looked at and the mechanic had said it was fine for now and she'd believed him with the particular faith of someone who didn't want to spend seven hundred dollars.

She should say something.

She looked at Joel.

He was driving with one hand on the wheel, his elbow on the window ledge, the morning sun coming in from the east and catching the side of his face. He'd been talking about a project he'd worked on last year, a water treatment facility in Indiana, and she'd been listening, or she'd been doing the thing that had started happening where she was in the same conversation as him but also slightly outside it, watching him talk with a portion of her attention that she hadn't authorised for that purpose.

The noise continued.

She should definitely say something.

He made a point about load distribution and she said "mm" in a way that she hoped sounded like engagement rather than like someone who was thinking about the angle of his jaw in the morning light.

She was a marine biologist. She had a master's degree. She had published two peer-reviewed papers and survived an abort dive in the dark at sixty feet. She was a competent, functional adult and she had been noticing the angle of a man's jaw for three days and it was becoming a problem.

The noise got slightly louder.

"There's a noise," she said.

He stopped mid-sentence. "What kind of noise."

"Coming from the front left. Rhythmic. Increases with speed."

He listened. They were doing about sixty and the noise was clearly audible now that she'd named it, a low rumbling rotation that didn't belong there.

"Wheel bearing?" he said.

She looked at him. "Probably."

"How long has it been doing that?"

"About twenty minutes."

He glanced at her. "You waited twenty minutes to say something?"

"I was listening to you talk about load distribution."

He looked at the road. The corner of his mouth did the thing.

"Pull over," he said.

"You're driving."

"Then I'll pull over." He did, easing onto the gravel shoulder with the kind of smooth deceleration that suggested he'd actually thought about where to put the weight. She noticed this. She was noticing everything. It was exhausting.

They got out into the heat, which was substantial, eleven in the morning in the Utah desert and the air was already doing that thing where it pressed back against you. The road was empty in both directions. Red rock and pale scrub and the shimmering horizon and exactly nothing else.

Joel crouched by the front left wheel and put his hand on it and then looked up at her.

"Did you drive through anything recently? Rough road, pothole, anything?"

"The road outside Moab was pretty bad yesterday."

"That would do it." He stood, dusted his hands on his jeans. "It's not critical right now. But it's going to get worse if we drive on it without getting it looked at."

"I know."

"There's a town about twenty miles ahead. Should be fine to get there at reduced speed." He looked at her. "Did you know about this before the trip?"

She said nothing.

"Cara."

"The mechanic said it was fine eighteen months ago."

"Eighteen months ago."

"He said for now."

Joel looked at her with an expression that was caught somewhere between exasperated and something that might have been trying not to laugh. "The mechanic said for now eighteen months ago and you took that as clearance for a two thousand mile road trip."

"I chose to be optimistic."

"That's one word for it."

“I’m just a girl”

She crossed her arms. "Can you fix it?"

"I'm a structural engineer, not a mechanic."

"But you understand the principle."

"I understand the principle. The principle says we need a garage." He looked at the empty road in both directions. "Twenty miles. Slow. Gerald agrees."

She looked at the windshield. Gerald stared back with his philosophical expression.

"Gerald always agrees with you," she said.

"Gerald has good judgment."

She got back in the car.

They drove the twenty miles at forty-five, the noise now comfortably present in every moment of the journey, and found the town which was called Salina and had a population of around two thousand and, crucially, a garage with a pickup truck out front and a sign that said T. MURROW AUTO  OPEN in handwritten letters.

The mechanic was a woman in her fifties named Terry who came out wiping her hands on a rag and crouched by the wheel for approximately four seconds before standing back up with the expression of someone confirming something they already knew.

"Front left bearing's going," she said.

"How bad?" Cara said.

"Bad enough. You're looking at two, three hours and" she named a figure that was, Cara noted, slightly less than the seven hundred she'd been fearing. "Got the part. Can start now if you want."

"Please," Cara said.

Terry took the car around back. Joel stood in the gravel lot with his hands in his pockets and looked at Cara.

"Two hours," he said.

"At least."

"In Salina, Utah."

"In Salina, Utah." She looked around. The main street was visible from here, a diner, a hardware store, a place that sold what appeared to be turquoise jewellery. "Could be worse."

"Could it?"

"There's a diner."

"There's always a diner."

She looked at him. He was looking at the main street with the particular equanimity she'd noticed was his default setting when things went sideways, not stressed, not performing calm, just actually fine with it. It struck her, not for the first time, that he was the easiest person she'd ever been in an unplanned situation with.

"You're not annoyed," she said.

"Why would I be annoyed?"

"We're stuck in Salina for two hours because I ignored a noise for eighteen months."

He shrugged. "We're in Utah. It's warm. There's a diner." He glanced at her. "Also it's your car. I'm a passenger. If anything this is less my problem than usual."

She stared at him.

"That's very reasonable," she said. "It's irritating how reasonable that is."

The corner of his mouth. "Diner?"

"Diner," she said.

The diner in Salina was called Carol's and had the best pie Cara had ever eaten, which she said out loud and immediately regretted because Joel said "better than the eggs at Ruthie's?" and she had to think about it seriously for a moment.

"Different category," she decided. "Ruthie's eggs are the best eggs. This pie is the best pie. They don't compete."

"Gerald would like that answer."

"Gerald understands nuance."

She ate her pie and he ate his and they sat in a booth by the window and watched Salina go about its late morning, which involved very little but involved it thoroughly.

"Tell me something else," she said. "Something I don't know."

He looked at her over his coffee. "We've been doing that for two days."

"And?"

"And I'm running out of the easy ones."

"Good," she said. "Give me a harder one."

He was quiet for a moment. She'd learned to wait these out, he wasn't stalling, he was actually deciding what to say, which was rare enough that she'd started finding it interesting.

"I almost didn't come," he said.

She looked at him. "On the trip?"

"When I found out it was just the two of us." He turned his coffee cup in a slow circle. "I sat in my kitchen for about three minutes thinking about backing out."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I couldn't think of a good reason that wasn't really just being afraid of something I hadn't identified yet." He glanced up. "So I came."

She looked at him steadily. "Have you identified it yet?"

A pause. Long enough to be something.

"Getting there," he said.

The word landed somewhere in her chest and stayed there.

She looked back at her pie. It was excellent pie. She focused on that for a moment with more attention than it required.

"Your turn," he said.

She thought about the easy ones and discarded them.

"I almost cancelled the trip," she said.

"After Marcus and Priya bailed?"

"Before. The night before." She turned her fork over in her hand. "I was packing and I thought... what am I doing. I don't really know this person. What if it's two weeks of being stuck in a car with someone and it's awful." She paused. "What if it's fine and nothing happens and I come back exactly the same."

"Which were you more afraid of?"

She looked at him. He was watching her with that direct attention she'd stopped being surprised by and started looking forward to in a way she hadn't sanctioned.

"The second one," she said.

He held her gaze.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Me too."

Outside the diner window, Salina went about its business. Unhurried, unconcerned. Two people sitting in Carol's with unfinished coffee and an admission hanging in the warm air between them that neither of them had quite planned to make.

She looked at the table.

He looked at his coffee.

Neither of them said anything for a moment and the moment had a weight to it that was new, not uncomfortable, not pressured, just real in the way things got real when you stopped being careful about them.

"I think the pie might actually be better than the eggs," she said.

He looked up. Something in his expression settled, not disappointment, just a choice accepted.

"Different category," he said.

"Exactly."

She finished her pie. He finished his coffee. They sat in the warm diner in Salina Utah and waited for a wheel bearing to be replaced and the conversation moved to other things, lighter things, and neither of them mentioned what had just happened.

But it had happened. She could feel the shape of it, specific and new, sitting somewhere just beneath the surface of the rest of the afternoon.

She was going to have to do something about it eventually.

The question was when.

Terry had the car done in two and a half hours. She walked them through what she'd done with the thoroughness of someone who assumed her customers were interested, which Cara was and Joel demonstrably also was, asking two questions that Terry answered with visible approval.

"She's good for another fifty thousand on that bearing," Terry said, patting the roof. "Assuming you're not ignoring any more noises."

"She won't be," Joel said.

Cara looked at him.

He looked at the car.

She got in the driver's side. He got in the passenger side. Gerald surveyed the garage forecourt and found it acceptable.

She pulled out onto the main road and the car was immediately, noticeably different, the noise gone, the wheel tracking cleanly, the whole thing running the way it was supposed to run.

"Better," Joel said.

"Much better." She merged onto the highway, Nevada in the distance, the afternoon still warm and long. "Thank you."

"For what? I didn't fix it."

"For not making it a thing."

He looked at her. "It's a wheel bearing."

"I know. Some people would have made it a thing."

He said nothing to that, just turned back to the window, and she drove and thought about getting there and me too and the weight of the moment in Carol's diner, and decided that she would figure out what to do with all of it in her own time.

She put her foot down and they went west.

Nevada

Joel

Nevada was a different kind of empty from Nebraska.

Nebraska was flat and agricultural and honest about what it was. Nevada was flat and vast and slightly hostile, the kind of landscape that didn't particularly want you in it and made no effort to conceal this. Scrub and salt flat and the occasional mountain range appearing on the horizon like a rumour, and the road going straight through all of it with the particular indifference of a road that had stopped caring whether you found it interesting.

He found it interesting. He found most things interesting if he looked at them properly, which was either a character strength or the reason he got less sleep than he should.

Cara was driving. She'd been driving since they left Salina, taking the wheel back after Terry had finished with the car with the decisiveness of someone reclaiming something, and he'd gotten in the passenger side without comment. He was in the passenger seat a lot. He didn't mind. It gave him somewhere to look.

The afternoon had deepened into early evening, the light going from sharp to golden, and she had her window down and her elbow on the ledge and her hair moving in the warm air and the expression she got when she was thinking about several things at once and had decided not to rank them.

He watched the road.

He was, he'd concluded sometime around Salina, running out of reasons to be patient.

Not because anything had happened. Because of the specific quality of everything that hadn't happened, the accumulation of small things, the weight of the afternoon in Carol's diner, the two and a half hours in Salina that had been easy in the way things were easy when they fit, the moment where they'd both admitted something and neither of them had done anything about it.

He was a patient person. He'd always been a patient person. It was useful professionally and occasionally frustrating personally and right now it was losing ground to something else that he was having increasing difficulty calling by a name that wasn't what it actually was.

She broke the silence first.

"Okay," she said. To no one in particular. Like she was concluding an internal argument.

"Okay what," he said.

"Nothing." She glanced at him. "I'm thinking out loud."

"About?"

"Things."

"You keep saying things."

"Because the things keep being difficult to say." She looked at the road. The Nevada highway went ahead of them, straight and empty and lit amber by the evening. "I'm working up to them."

He turned to look at her properly. She was watching the road, face set, the particular expression of someone who has made a decision and is in the process of following through on it.

He waited.

"In the diner," she said. "When you said getting there."

"Yeah."

"What are you getting there about."

It wasn't quite a question. The inflection was flat, not demanding, just direct, the way she was about most things when she'd decided to be.

He looked at the road.

He could be oblique about this. He was good at oblique when he needed to be. He could say something measured and give them both more time and be patient for another day or another few days and let it develop at whatever pace it was going to develop at.

He looked at the road for another three seconds and decided he didn't want to do that.

"You," he said. "I'm getting there about you."

The car was very quiet for a moment.

Nevada went past. A salt flat opened up to the left, white and enormous, reflecting the sky. She drove and didn't look at him and he watched her profile and waited.

"Okay," she said. Carefully.

"Okay as in okay, or okay as in you need me to keep going."

"Keep going."

He turned slightly in his seat. "I've been paying more attention to you than the situation requires since around, Nebraska. I've been telling myself to stop since approximately Nebraska. I haven't stopped." He paused. "I don't think I'm going to stop."

She was quiet.

"That's the thing I was afraid of," he said. "On the morning I almost didn't come. Not that it would be awful. That it would be this."

She glanced at him and then back at the road. Her hands shifted slightly on the wheel, not nervousness, just adjustment.

"This," she said.

"This." He held her gaze when she looked at him again. "Whatever this is."

She looked back at the road.

He waited.

Outside Nevada shimmered and went on and the light kept getting lower and warmer and Gerald presided over the dashboard with his usual equanimity.

"I heard the noise at ten," she said.

He blinked. "What?"

"The wheel bearing. I heard it at ten. I didn't say anything until ten twenty." She glanced at him briefly. "I was watching you talk about Indiana."

He sat with that for a moment.

"Okay," he said.

"I've been doing that. Watching you. Since Nebraska probably as well." She exhaled slowly. "I keep telling myself it's nothing and it keeps being something and I don't entirely know what to do with that."

"Why not?"

She turned to look at him, just for a second, and the expression on her face was one he hadn't seen before, not the careful managed version, not the genuine-interest face, something more exposed than either.

"Because the last time I was in something I didn't look at it properly," she said. "I just... went along. And it cost me four years."

"This isn't that."

"I know it's not that." She looked frustrated, not at him, at herself. "That's not what I mean. I mean I don't trust my own judgment right now. I got very good at not seeing things clearly and I don't know yet if I've fixed that."

He thought about this.

"What would looking at it properly look like?" he said.

She glanced at him. "Saying what's actually true instead of the comfortable version."

"Okay." He turned to face the road. "Then say what's actually true."

A long pause.

The highway went west. The salt flat gave way to scrub. A mountain range appeared on the horizon, blue and distant.

"I like you," she said. Simply. "More than I expected to. More than makes sense for the mere days we’ve had together." She paused. "And I'm simultaneously very sure about that and very unsure what to do about it."

He looked at her.

She was looking at the road, jaw set, having said the thing.

"I like you too," he said. "That's not complicated."

"The rest of it might be."

"It might be." He turned back to the window. "I don't think that's a reason not to start."

She didn't say anything for a while. He let it sit, not because he was being patient exactly, more because he'd said what was true and there was nothing to add to it and he'd learned that adding things to true statements usually made them less true.

The evening light did something particular to the Nevada landscape, turned the scrub silver and the mountains purple and the road ahead luminous in a way that had nothing to do with the actual quality of the asphalt.

"I haven't done this in a while," she said eventually.

"Done what."

"Said something like that. To someone I wasn't already certain about."

"Are you certain about anything?"

She glanced at him. "I'm certain I haven't been able to stop noticing things about you since we left. That's certain."

"That's enough," he said. "For now that's enough."

She looked at him again, longer this time, and whatever she found seemed to satisfy something because she looked back at the road and her shoulders dropped a fraction and the set of her jaw eased.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he said.

Nevada kept going. The light kept dropping. Gerald watched the horizon with his philosophical face.

Neither of them said anything else for a while, and the silence had changed again, not the absence of things, not comfortable nothing, but the presence of something acknowledged, warm and new and slightly terrifying in the best possible way.

He turned to the window.

He was, he noted, no longer being patient.

They stopped for the night in a town called Ely, which had more to it than Salina but less than anywhere that would call itself a city, and found a motel called The Silver State that had a neon sign and a pool that had been closed for reasons the sign next to it declined to specify.

The woman at the desk had reading glasses on a beaded chain and gave them a key before Cara had finished her sentence. One room. Two beds. No discussion.

They'd graduated, apparently, to not discussing it.

Room fourteen. Ground floor, facing the parking lot, clean in the functional way that motels in small Nevada towns were clean. Two doubles. Carpet that had seen better decades. A bathroom with good water pressure, which Cara reported from the shower with the satisfied tone of someone whose standards had been recalibrated by three days of variable motel infrastructure.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed when she came out, her hair damp, wearing her sleep shirt, towelling her hair dry with the unselfconsciousness she'd had from the first night. She'd stopped being careful about sharing space with him somewhere around Wyoming and he had stopped noticing the specific moments when she wasn't being careful, which was its own kind of shift.

She sat on her bed and looked at him.

He looked at her.

"So," she said.

"So," he said.

The room was quiet. The neon sign outside sent pink light through the gap in the curtains in a slow pulse. She had her legs crossed and her hands in her lap and the damp-hair, no-makeup, end-of-day version of her face that he'd been seeing every night and that he found, without qualification, the most interesting version.

"We said things," she said.

"We did."

"In the car."

"In the car."

She looked at him steadily. "Are we going to do something about them?"

He held her gaze.

"Yes," he said. "I just haven't decided when."

She raised an eyebrow. "You haven't decided when."

"I'm being deliberate about it." He looked at her. "You said you liked it when I was deliberate."

She stared at him. Something moved across her face, surprise, then the thing that came after surprise when it turned out to be welcome, then the warm version of exasperated.

"That's annoying," she said.

"Probably."

She looked at him for another moment, then shook her head slowly and got under her covers and turned off her lamp.

"Night, Joel," she said.

"Night, Cara."

He turned off his lamp. Lay in the dark with the pink neon pulsing through the curtain.

He'd said he hadn't decided when.

He had absolutely decided when.

Tomorrow. He'd decided tomorrow.

Chapter Three
The Morning After
JOEL

He hadn’t slept for a long time.

He’d listened to the storm move east, the rain thinning, the thunder getting farther away, the window going from white to dark and staying dark.

He’d listened to Cara’s breathing slow and even out, the exact moment she went under, and he’d stared at the ceiling and had a very honest conversation with himself that he’d been avoiding for months.

It didn’t resolve anything. It rarely did. But it had the particular quality of honesty that comes at midnight in a strange room with nowhere left to be evasive, and by the time he finally slept he felt something he couldn’t quite name. Not lighter exactly. More like something had been set down.

* * *

He woke at six-fifteen to grey light and birds chirping the only songs they knew.

The storm had left the world scrubbed clean, he could smell it even through the window unit, that particular post-rain clarity that made everything feel provisional and new. He lay still for a moment, orientating.

Strange ceiling. Strange room. The soft ambient hum of the air conditioner.

Then he turned his head.

Cara was still asleep.

She was on her side facing him, one hand tucked under her cheek, her dark hair loose across the pillow.

The early light came through the gap in the curtains in a single pale stripe that fell just short of her face, and she looked, he let himself look, just for a moment, the way you let yourself do things in the early morning that you’d apply more discipline to later, she looked completely unguarded.

All the careful management she moved through the world with, the selective quiet, the measured way she chose what to say and what to hold back, all of it was just gone.

She looked like the girl he’d known in high school before either of them had learned to be strategic about themselves.

He looked at the ceiling.

You’re in trouble, he told himself. Not for the first time. But this morning it landed differently,  less like a warning and more like a statement of fact that he was finally done arguing with.

Part of him wished he’d said no to this road trip. He’d known, when she asked, that the feelings he’d spent years managing would surface again out here. Too much proximity. Too little distraction. Too many hours with nowhere to look except at her.

And once again, she wouldn’t feel the same way.
He was almost certain of that. Almost.

* * *

He got up quietly and dressed in the grey light and slipped out to find coffee.

The motel had a small breakfast room, folding tables, a waffle iron, a coffee urn that looked like it had been there since the building was constructed. He filled two cups and carried them back down the external walkway, the morning air cool and damp and smelling of wet asphalt and something flowering nearby that he couldn’t identify.

He stopped outside their door.

Through the thin wall he could hear movement, the creak of the bed, the sound of her shifting. He waited, both cups in hand, watching a sparrow investigate the parking lot.

He thought about the night before. The lamp he’d kept on too long. The moment he’d almost said something and hadn’t, watching her pretend to read a book she wasn’t reading, both of them performing a version of fine for an audience of each other.

He thought about what she’d said in the diner.

When did we stop talking about real things.

He thought about the fact that he had an answer to that question, a real one, not the careful non-answer he’d given, and that the answer was: around the time I realised that what I wanted from you wasn’t something I knew how to want safely.

The sparrow found something and left.

He knocked twice and opened the door.

* * *

She was sitting up in bed, hair in a knot she’d put up sometime in the last few minutes, pulling her jacket on over her sleep shirt. She looked up when he came in and something moved across her face, surprise, or something adjacent to it, before she settled back into herself.

“You went out,” she said.

“Coffee.” He held out her cup.

She took it with both hands the way she always did, wrapping her fingers around the warmth of it, and looked up at him over the rim.

Her eyes were still soft with sleep and the morning light was doing something to her face that he was not going to examine in detail.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me. It’s bad coffee.”

She took a sip and made a face. “That’s really bad.”

“Yeah.”

“Still.” She wrapped her hands tighter around it. “Thank you.”

He sat on the edge of his bed, facing her, and drank his own terrible coffee and looked out the window at the washed-clean morning.

The sky was the pale blue of something just beginning. The road was visible from here, wet and gleaming, going west.

“Sleep okay?” he asked.

“Eventually.” She looked at him over her cup. “You?”

“Eventually,” he said.

A beat.

She nodded slowly, like this confirmed something she’d suspected.

He wondered what she’d heard through the dark.

Whether she’d been as awake as he thought.

He wanted to ask.

He looked at the road instead.

“Good driving day,” he said. “After the rain.”

“Yeah,” she said softly.

Neither of them moved to pack.

They just sat there in the grey-blue morning with their bad coffee, the door still slightly open, the cool damp air coming in, the road waiting.

A feeling rose deep in his stomach, almost like his intestines had wrapped and tied themselves together. How easy it would be to just vomit it all out. Let the words become part of reality instead of letting them keep bouncing around inside his skull.

But there was always a reason not to.

Not the right time. What if she doesn’t feel the same way. What if it ruins everything.

Wouldn’t it be easier if I could just read her mind.

“You good?” Cara’s soft voice pulled him out of it.

“Oh,  yeah, sorry.” He shot to his feet and zipped up his duffel.

“Okay, weirdo.”

“Shut up. Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

As they made their way to the reception desk to drop off the keys, Cara stopped and grabbed his forearm, pulling him to a halt.

He looked down at her hand first. Then at what she was looking at.

The sunrise had broken over the tree line to the east, deep amber bleeding into pink, the wet road catching it in long gold reflections, the whole landscape still and gleaming and enormous.

“Look at that,” she said quietly. “Isn’t it beautiful. This is what it’s all about, Joel.”

He looked at the sunrise. He looked at her looking at the sunrise, the way it lit the side of her face, the small private smile, the complete unselfconsciousness of someone who forgets to perform when something genuinely moves her.

“Yeah,” he said. “The sun rising.”

She turned and smacked his shoulder. “Smartass.”

He smiled and they kept walking.

* * *

He took the driver’s seat without discussing it, fired up the engine, and let it idle. Cara was in the passenger seat with her feet up on the dash, the last of the bad coffee in her hand.

“We’ll need to stop for gas soon,” he said.

“Okay.” She didn’t look up from her phone. “Driver pays.”

“Said who?”

“Said me.”

He looked at her.

She looked back, completely unbothered, and took a sip of her coffee.

He pushed in the clutch, found first gear, and pulled out of the lot.

The road was wide and clean and went all the way to the horizon without interruption. The morning sat over everything like something held carefully in two hands.

He drove west and didn’t say any of the things he was thinking, and told himself that was fine.

It was fine.

For now, it was fine.

Chapter Four
Nothing to Hide Behind
CARA

“Hey Joel, why’d you say yes to this trip? I thought you’d call me crazy or something, talk me out of it”

“It sounded like you needed an escape and that’s what friends are for right?” The words left his mouth as if it was rehearsed.

“Yeah I guess so”. Cara looked down at her palms then back to the window again.

Those words replayed over and over again in her head. Trying to find something in them that wasn’t there. Trying to hear it differently, turn it over, hold it up to the light and find an angle where it meant something other than what it plainly said.

That’s what friends are for.

Right. Of course. That’s what this was. That’s what they were.

She watched the Nebraska landscape unspool outside the window, flat and wide and relentless, the kind of scenery that gave you nowhere to hide from your own thoughts. Just sky and road and the occasional cluster of grain silos standing in the distance like punctuation in a sentence that never ended.

She’d been so close.

The volume knob, the soft voice, the question she’d half-rehearsed since Iowa. She’d watched his hands tighten on the wheel when she turned the music down and told herself that meant something, and then he’d answered and the answer had been perfectly, cleanly, devastatingly reasonable.

That’s what friends are for.

She pressed her temple against the cool glass of the window.

The worst part wasn’t the answer.

The worst part was that she couldn’t even be angry about it.
He hadn’t done anything wrong.

He’d given her an honest answer to a question she’d dressed up as casual when it was anything but, and he’d been kind about it, and that was Joel, he was always kind, always steady, always exactly what she needed him to be except for the one thing she actually wanted him to be, which was hers.

“You’ve gone quiet again,” Joel said.

“I’m fine.”

“I know.” A pause. “I didn’t say you weren’t.”

She opened her eyes and looked at the road ahead.

Miles and miles of it, straight as a ruled line, going west toward something neither of them had named yet.

“Nebraska is bleak,” she said.

“Nebraska is honest,” he said. “Nothing to hide behind.”

She turned back to the window.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Nothing to hide behind.”

She reached forward and turned the volume back up. The music filled the car and she let it cover whatever was on her face, and she watched Nebraska go past in all its flat, honest, merciless expanse and told herself this was fine.

That she was fine.

That eleven days was enough time to get herself properly sorted before they drove back into their real lives and she never had to sit this close to him for this long again.
She almost believed it.

* * *

Deciding to pick up the mood again, she pulled out her phone and scrolled through the playlist she’d curated specifically for this road trip.

“Perfect,” she whispered to herself.

She placed her phone back down in her lap and turned the volume knob up until the numbers on the radio display stopped ticking upwards.

The intro to Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey started making its way out of the car’s speakers.

Cara turned to Joel with a massive grin on her face, the kind that reaches from ear to ear, but holds something sinister behind it.

Joel looked back at her, she could almost taste the nervousness radiating from his face as he anticipated what was about to happen.

“Drop the windows,” Cara demanded.

The wind cut its way into the car, pushing her dark hair across her face.

She moved her hips in time with the music, sticking one hand out the window and waving it in unison. She used her other hand to brush the hair out of her face and turned to Joel.

“COME ON, GET INTO IT,” she tried to shout above the sounds of music and wind clashing together.

She noticed Joel tapping his finger on the steering wheel, then his head bobbing along while the wind pushed his hair around.

“READY JOEL?”

“READY.”

They both turned to each other and locked eyes.

Cara grabbed Joel’s free hand and raised it to the roof.

“DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’!”

“HOLD ONTO THAT FEELIN’!”

Their voices clashed and blended and neither of them could carry the note but neither of them cared, and Cara felt something loosen in her chest that had been wound tight since the diner, since the motel, since that’s what friends are for, all of it briefly irrelevant, burned off by sixty miles an hour and Joel’s hand raised above the centre console still tangled loosely with hers.

She didn’t let go.

He didn’t either.

The chorus crashed through the car and she tipped her head back and sang at the ceiling with everything she had, completely unselfconscious, completely present, the wind pulling her hair sideways and the late afternoon light coming gold and flat across the dashboard. She could feel Joel beside her, the warmth of his arm, the movement of him getting properly into it now, and she turned to look at him and found him already looking at her.

Not at the road.

At her.

Grinning, the real one, the rare one, the one that changed the whole geography of his face, and singing, badly, with his whole chest, and she felt her own smile go so wide it almost hurt.

This. This was why she’d asked him.

A truck passed them going the other way and laid on its horn and Cara dissolved completely, laughing so hard she couldn’t finish the line, doubling forward with her hand over her mouth while Joel kept going alone, gesturing grandly at the road ahead like he was performing to an arena.

“You can’t just stop,” he said, above the music.

“I can’t, the truck….” She was still laughing, wiping her
eyes with the back of her wrist.

“Unprofessional,” he said gravely. “Complete breakdown under pressure.”

“Oh, shut up”

When the song ended they both exhaled at the same time and the car settled back into itself.

His hand was still in hers.

She became aware of it gradually, the way you become aware of something that’s been there long enough to feel natural.
His thumb was resting against her knuckle. Neither of them had moved.

She didn’t move now.

“We needed that,” she said, quietly.

“Yeah,” he said. Just as quiet.

His thumb moved, barely, just a small shift against her hand, and she felt it everywhere.

She didn’t look at him.

She looked at the road and the sky and kept her hand exactly where it was.

Don’t make it a thing, she told herself.

But she was smiling, and she couldn’t stop, and the road kept going west and the light kept getting softer and his hand stayed in hers all the way to the Wyoming border.

“We should probably stop in this town for the night,” Joel’s words cut through the silence.

“Sounds good. I feel like a drink, can we find a bar after we check in?”

“I like your thinking.”

Joel

He was in her driveway by five-thirty.

Old habit, he was always early, she was always exactly on time, and the fifteen minutes in between were just his. He used them to finish his coffee in the car, watching the sky go from black to the particular bruised purple that preceded sunrise in early June. The neighborhood was still. A sprinkler somewhere. A dog that hadn't decided if it was worth barking at him.

He was halfway through his second mental rehearsal of this is just a road trip when her front door opened.

Cara came down the porch steps in an oversized jacket and bare ankles above her sneakers, two coffees balanced in a cardboard tray, her dark hair pulled back in a way that meant she hadn't looked in a mirror yet. She looked like herself. She looked the way she always looked at this hour, before the day got its hands on her.

He got out of the car and opened the trunk and started rearranging things so his duffel would fit, mostly so he'd have something to do with his hands.

"You packed half your apartment," she said, appearing beside him.

"I packed efficiently." He got the bag in, shut the trunk, and turned to take the coffee she was holding out. Their fingers didn't touch. He noted this with the particular, practiced neutrality he'd developed over, he didn't want to count how many months. "Morning."

"Morning." She turned away.

He drank his coffee and watched the sky.

Two weeks, he told himself. Friends take road trips. This is a thing friends do.

They'd been friends for six years.

He knew what that meant. He knew all the arguments, that it worked, that it was good, that the thing he'd been quietly carrying around for the last however-long was a complication nobody needed. She was the person he called when things went sideways. She was the throughline of the last half-decade of his life, the constant in every version of circumstances he'd found himself in.

He was not going to detonate that.

He was going to sit in the car seat for two thousand miles and listen to music and eat diner food and be her friend at a time when she needed it, and by the time they got back to Chicago he was going to have gotten a handle on himself.

He paired his phone to the bluetooth before Cara even had a chance to sit her coffee down in the cup holder.

"You always do that," she said.

"Do what?"

"Take control of the music before we've even discussed it."

He looked over at her. She was watching the road, jaw set in the particular way that meant she was more amused than she was letting on. He'd learned her tells the way you learn a language, slowly, then all at once, until you couldn't remember not knowing them.

"You want to make the decisions?" he asked.

"I want input."

"You have input." He held the phone toward her. "Tell me what you want."

"I don't want to negotiate. I want collaboration."

"That's a very polished way to say you want control."

"That's a very cheap deflection."

He laughed before he could stop himself. She didn't look at him, but something in her shoulders shifted, relaxed a half-degree. He'd noticed that too, over the years. That she loosened slightly when he laughed. He tried not to think about what that meant.

"Fine," he said. "Collaborative playlist. But I have an advisory veto."

"That's not a real thing."

"We're going to be miles away from anyone who can tell us otherwise."

She glanced at him, fast, sideways, and then back to the road. "Fine. Advisory veto."

He put something on. Something that felt like the morning felt: a little uncertain, a little open. The kind of song that didn't demand anything.

Neither of them spoke for a while. Illinois fell away behind them in long flat increments and he watched the landscape through the window and tried to be a person who was simply on a road trip with his friend.

He was mostly successful.

The diner outside Iowa City smelled like coffee and bacon grease and something sweetly burnt, and the booths were the deep red of old vinyl and he slid into one across from Cara and picked up the laminated menu and read it the way he always did, fully, because he had learned early that decisions made in haste compounded poorly.

He was still reading when she spoke.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You're going to regardless."

"When did we stop talking about real things?"

He set the menu down.

He looked at her, at the way she was turning her mug in slow circles, not meeting his eyes, the small crease between her brows that appeared when she was working up to something. She'd been working up to something for months. He'd watched it build the way you watch weather build, tracking it from a careful distance, waiting to see which way it would break.

He'd told himself he was imagining it. He'd been less and less convinced.

"What do you mean?" he said, because he needed to hear what she meant.

She explained, reporting instead of saying things, giving updates instead of actually talking, and he listened and understood what she was really asking, the thing underneath the thing, and his chest did what it had been doing in her vicinity for a long time now: tightened around something with no clean name.

"Maybe around the time things got complicated," he said.

"What things?"

He held her gaze. "You know what things."

A beat. Her fingers stilled on the mug.

She did know. He could see it, the slight shift in her expression, the recognition she was working to keep neutral. She'd always been good at neutral. So had he. They'd both gotten very good at it, which was either a testament to their friendship or an indictment of it, and he hadn't decided which.

"I thought the whole point of this trip," she said, her voice careful, "was to stop doing that."

"Stop doing what?"

"Not saying things."

He held her gaze for a moment that went on long enough to be something. The thing he'd been not-saying for months pressed up against the back of his teeth, and he was about to, he didn't know what he was about to do, actually. Something.

Then the waitress materialized with a coffee refill and a pen and the moment passed through his fingers like water.

"Eggs," he said. "I'll have the eggs."

"Coward," Cara said quietly.

"Absolutely."

He looked back down at the menu he didn't need to read. Heard her exhale. Felt the word she hadn't said sitting in the space between them, patient and warm and not going anywhere.

He knew what he was doing. He was waiting for the right moment the way he always waited for the right moment, which was both his best quality and his worst one, depending on who you asked.

But two weeks. Two thousand miles.

He'd been carrying this thing carefully for long enough that he'd almost convinced himself it was manageable. Something about being in her car with her, watching the same sky, sharing the same bad diner coffee, it made careful feel like a word that was running out of road.

Outside the window, the highway stretched west in a long flat line.

Something is going to give, he thought.

He wasn't afraid of that anymore. That was what surprised him.

He picked up his coffee and didn't say anything, and across the table Cara ordered eggs too, and they ate breakfast in the particularly comfortable silence of two people who knew each other very well and were perhaps, finally, running out of reasons not to say so.

As they finished their sub par breakfast and coffee, they paid the bill and headed back to the old ford focus. Seat belts clicked, engine roaring to life, and the music agreed on, they left the diner behind.

Sitting in the passenger seat, Joel turned his head slightly so Cara was sitting in his peripheral vision. It had been a while since they were this close, and he used this opportunity to rediscover the person who was a part of his everyday life a few years ago, when they were in high school.

She tapped her fingers on the top of the steering wheel along with the tempo of the music, her shoulders dancing ever so slightly. Her brown eyes scanning the road, as if she was waiting for something to jump out.

Why did you do this to yourself, he thought.

Because he knew the answer, which was the problem. He'd said yes to two weeks in a car with Cara Hensley because she'd asked and he was constitutionally incapable of saying no to her, had been since the eleventh grade when she'd turned around in AP English and borrowed his pen and handed it back at the end of class without a word, like it was the most natural transaction in the world. He'd been off-balance around her ever since. Twenty-three years old now and apparently no better at it.

He continued to watch her from the corner of his eye. The way she drove was the way she did most things, unhurried, attentive, quietly in command. One hand on the wheel, elbow resting on the window ledge, the warm air coming in lifting a few loose strands of hair around her face. She didn't push them back. She let them be.

He used to know this face the way he knew his own. In high school they'd spent so many hours in each other's orbits that he'd sometimes caught himself unconsciously mapping her, the angle she tilted her head when she was thinking, the small movement of her mouth before she said something she actually meant rather than something polite. Then college happened and geography happened and life happened, and then a mutual friend's birthday brought them back into the same room three years ago, and she'd looked at him across a kitchen full of people and said Joel the way you say someone's name when you're surprised to find you still know exactly how it feels in your mouth.

They'd rebuilt it, the friendship, the ease, the daily-ness of each other. What he hadn't anticipated was that rebuilding it would mean building something slightly different on the same foundation. Something that fit differently than before. Something he couldn't quite call just friendship without feeling like a person telling a small, careful lie.

The song changed. She made a quiet sound of approval.

"Good one," she said.

"Advisory veto goes both ways," he said. "I can also approve things."

She smiled at the road. Not the polished smile she deployed socially, the one that was warm but managed, this was the other one, the smaller one, the one she didn't seem to know she was making. He'd spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the difference between those two smiles.

Why did you do this to yourself.

Because the honest answer was that six years of friendship and three of almost-daily contact had not made the wanting smaller. If anything, knowing her better had made it worse, had given him more material, more texture, more of her to carry around in his chest at low-level frequency. And somewhere in the grey fog of February, when she'd called him from her apartment and said I need to go somewhere, I need to move, I need two weeks of nothing that looks like regular life, he'd heard something underneath the words. Something that might have just been longing for open road. Something that might have been more.

He'd said yes before she finished the sentence.

Now here he was, ninety miles west of the city, watching her shoulders keep time with a song they'd both agreed on, and telling himself he had two weeks to figure out whether the thing underneath the words had been real or invented.

The highway opened up ahead of them , wide and straight and patient.

He turned back to the window.

Two weeks.

Cara

The motel was called The Wanderer Inn, which was either charming or ominous depending on your mood, and Cara's mood at eight-thirty in the evening after seven hours of driving was somewhere in between.

It sat off a two-lane highway outside of Des Moines, low and long, the kind of place built in the seventies and maintained just enough to keep the lights on. The vacancy sign buzzed faintly in the purple dusk. The parking lot was half-empty. Somewhere to the west, the sky had gone the colour of a bruise.

"Storm's coming," Joel said, looking at it through the windshield.

"I know."

"We could push on. There's probably something better in forty miles."

"I'm not driving forty miles in that." She nodded at the sky. "We're stopping here."

He didn't argue. He never argued about practical things, only ideas. She'd always liked that about him, the ability to distinguish between a hill worth dying on and one that wasn't. She liked a lot of things about him that she spent considerable energy trying to categorise as ordinary.

The man at the front desk had a white moustache and the energy of someone who had seen everything and found most of it acceptable.

"One room or two?" he asked.

Cara opened her mouth.

"One's fine," Joel said, at the same moment.

She closed her mouth. Felt something happen in her chest that she immediately classified as practical, one room is cheaper, this is not a thing.

"One queen or one king, one queen and a double, or two doubles?" the man said, without looking up.

"Two doubles," Cara said.

"Queen and a double's bigger room," the man offered.

"Two doubles," she said again.

Joel said nothing. She didn't look at him.

The room smelled like cedar and old carpet and the particular staleness of air conditioning that had been running since the Clinton administration. It was clean, though, in the spartan way of places that didn't bother with aesthetics and therefore accidentally achieved them. Two beds with white coverlets. A window unit humming steadily. A bathroom with a door that didn't quite close all the way and a showerhead that Cara could already tell was going to be either scalding or freezing with nothing in between.

Joel dropped his bag on the far bed and went to the window.

"It's going to be a big one," he said.

She looked past him. The sky to the west had gone from bruised to black, the kind of black that moved. Lightning flickered in the distance, still too far for thunder, just light, silent and enormous.

"Storms in the midwest are different," she said, moving to stand beside him. Not close. Appropriate distance. "They have more intention than east coast storms."

"More intention."

"Like they mean it."

He turned his head slightly to look at her, and she kept her eyes on the sky. She was very aware of the six inches of air between them. She was very aware that she was aware of it, which was the more embarrassing part.

"You always anthropomorphize weather," he said.

"Weather deserves it."

"I'm not disagreeing." He turned back to the window. "I'm just noting the pattern."

She made herself step away, back into the room, and started unpacking the things she'd need for the night. Toiletries. The oversized t-shirt she slept in. She kept her back to him and tried to remember how to be a normal person in a normal room with her normal friend.

One room, said a small treacherous voice in the back of her mind. You didn't even hesitate.

She had not hesitated. She'd been prepared to, had her mouth open to say two rooms, separate rooms, rooms with a wall between them and ideally a small ocean, and then he'd said one's fine and her body had made the decision before her brain could weigh in.

That happened with him sometimes. Had been happening more lately.

The storm hit at ten-fifteen.

Not gently. There was a distant rumble that escalated in the space of about ninety seconds into something that shook the window in its frame, and then the rain came, not gradually but all at once, the way midwest storms delivered on their intentions. Sheet lightning turned the curtains white every few minutes. The thunder was the kind you felt in your back teeth.

Cara was in bed, on top of the covers in her t-shirt, theoretically reading. She was on the same paragraph she'd been on for twenty minutes.

Joel was in the other bed. She could hear him shifting occasionally. The lamp between them was on. Neither of them had suggested turning it off.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I'm not afraid of storms."

"I know. I was asking in general."

She looked up from her book. He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, looking at the ceiling. The lamp put him in warm light and soft shadow and she made herself look back at her page.

"I'm fine," she said. "In general."

"You've been quiet since the diner."

"I'm often quiet."

"You're often selectively quiet," he said. "There's a difference."

She turned a page she hadn't read. "What's the difference?"

"When you're just quiet, you seem settled. When you're selectively quiet, you seem like you're solving something."

She stared at the page. Outside, thunder rolled across the sky in a long slow wave and the window turned white.

"Maybe I'm solving something," she said.

"Want to talk about it?"

No, she thought. The thing I'm solving is you and I don't know how to say that without detonating six years of something I'm not willing to lose.

"Not particularly," she said.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "okay”

Cara watched as Joel pushed himself up of the bed and trod towards his duffle bag, pulling out a fresh pair of boxers and his wash kit.

“I’m jumping in the shower quickly, don’t get top scared while I’m gone” he said with a sly smirk.

“Oh fuck off” was all Cara could muster after hours on the road.

She buried her nose back into the book she was using as an excuse to let her mind wonder without disruption. Listening to the sound of the water of the shower smashing against the floor, imagining what it would be like to be in their with Joel.

“Jesus Christ, get it together, he doesn’t see you like that” she muttered to herself.

Slamming the book down between her legs, she reefed the pillow from under her head and used it to cover her face.

“This was so STUPID” Cara screamed into the pillow.

The sound of the shower cuts out.

Cara scrambles back into position and pulls the book back into her face. After a couple of minutes she hears the door unlock and swing open.

Joel walks out with a towel around his waist.

Cara continues pretending to read her book, acting as if she hasn’t noticed Joel appear in the room again.

She lowers her book slightly, peeking over the top of the paper pages.

He had his back to her, crouched over his duffel, and the towel hung low enough that she could see the two shallow dimples at the base of his spine. He was broader than she remembered, or maybe she'd just been successfully not-looking for long enough that she'd let herself forget. The kind of build that came from actually using your body rather than performing fitness, solid through the shoulders and chest, tapering to a waist that the towel clung to with very little encouragement.

She was looking. She knew she was looking. She told herself she was simply observing, in a detached and anthropological sense, and that this was completely fine.

Then he straightened and turned to toss something onto his bed and the towel shifted and she saw, briefly, unmistakably, the shape of him beneath the fabric, and her brain went completely white.

She snapped the book up to her face.

Page forty-seven. She was reading page forty-seven. She was a person who was reading a book, in a bed, minding her own business, and whatever she had just seen was not something she was going to think about. At all. Ever.

Her face was on fire.

She heard him move to his bed. The creak of the mattress. The quiet sounds of him settling, shifting, getting comfortable, and she stared at page forty-seven with the intensity of someone defusing something.

The lamp clicked off on his side.

She lowered the book by degrees, the way you lower yourself into cold water.

He was on his back, one arm folded behind his head, eyes on the ceiling. The storm light moved across the room in slow pulses, white, dark, white, dark, and in it she could see the rise and fall of his chest, the line of his throat, the jaw she had been carefully not-studying all day in the car.

He looked completely unbothered.

She hated that. She hated how well he wore stillness, how he could just lie there looking like that while she was over here internally combusting over a towel.

Get it together, she told herself. He is your friend. He does not think about you like that. You have two weeks in a car together and you are not going to make it weird.

Two weeks.

She looked at the ceiling.

Outside, the storm kept every promise it had made.

The morning air was crisp. As they travelled closer towards the Antarctic, the coldness started to bite more with each passing day. Noa was sitting at the saloon table reading through her notes, ensuring she knew exactly what was required on this expedition — however she was quietly hoping Sable would make an appearance.

He was resting, after spending most of the night ensuring the ship continued on the correct course.

The night of the aurora continued to be the only thing swirling around Noa's mind. What would have happened if the alarm hadn't pulled him away from her? Would they have gently made love in her cabin, or would he be the type to absolutely destroy her? She hoped for the latter.

Her mind drifted even further from her work. She pictured Sable taking her to the bow of the ship, bending her over the railing and fucking her. His hard cock pushing deep inside her, the sound of his grunts every time he thrust, his strong arms pinning hers against the railing. The feeling of excitement she'd get from risky sex while everyone else was asleep.

"Fuck me," she whispered under her breath, then glanced instinctively toward the companionway. Empty. She exhaled.

She tried to get back to reading.

This wasn't what she'd planned for when she organised this expedition. But six weeks at sea with an attractive man who knew how to take charge, she supposed it made a certain kind of sense.

She lasted another ten minutes with her notes before she gave up entirely.

The words had stopped meaning anything. She'd read the same paragraph about acoustic survey methodology four times and retained nothing. She closed the folder, pushed back from the table, and made her way below.

Her cabin was small enough that two steps got her to the bunk. She sat on the edge of it for a moment, listening, Priya moving around in the galley above, the low hum of the engine, the creak of the hull. Everyone accounted for. Sable's cabin was two doors down and quiet.

She lay back and let her eyes close and let her mind go exactly where it had been trying to go all morning.

She pictured his hands first, she knew his hands well by now, had been cataloguing them without meaning to. The way they moved on the wheel. The way they'd felt over hers in the storm, steadying without correcting. She pictured them on her instead, unhurried, deliberate, the same quality of attention he brought to everything.

Her own hand moved.

Slowly at first, down her stomach, to the lining of her pants, she undid the button on her pants pulled them down.

Then her underwear.

She stuck her two fingers in her mouth, then they found their way to her pussy. She felt the wetness as she made a slow circular motion around her clit. Before sliding down and pushing them into herself.

“Fuck” she moaned softly as she slid them in and out.

She kept it quiet, kept her breathing controlled, one ear still half-tracking the sounds of the boat. The fantasy unspooled easily, too much accumulated material not to. The bow of the ship, the cold air, his weight against her back. His voice low at her ear the way it had been in the storm, except saying something entirely different.

She was close, her breath coming shorter, when the knock came at her cabin door.

She froze.

Two knocks. Unhurried. Familiar.

"Noa." Sable's voice, low through the door. "You left your research folder on the table."

She stared at the ceiling. Her heart was doing something unreasonable.

"One second," she managed.

She sat up, straightened herself, ran a hand through her hair. Took a breath. Then another. Before pulling up her pants and doing up the button again.

She opened the door.

He was leaning against the corridor wall, folder in one hand, expression neutral, but his eyes moved over her face in that way he had, reading something there, and something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression.

"You alright?" he said.

"Fine," she said. "Just resting."

A beat. He held out the folder.

She took it, their fingers overlapping briefly on the cover, and neither of them moved to end the contact immediately.

He looked at her for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then he pushed off the wall and turned back toward his own cabin.

"Sable," she said.

He stopped.

She hesitated, one beat, two, and then said, "Thank you. For the folder."

He glanced back. That expression again, the one that wasn't quite a smile.

"Sure," he said, and went.

Noa closed the door and leaned her back against it and looked at the ceiling.

She was silently hoping Sable would knock on the door again, this time, coming in and ripping her clothes off.

She sat down on the end of the bed again. Trying to control the mood she was in, being so close to coming, then seeing Sable had only frustrated her even more. She knew she had to fuck him tonight, that was her only misson at this point.

*****

It had reached evening, Sable was getting ready for his shift at the wheel.

Noa, was eagerly standing at her door, waiting. She heard the door of Sables squeal open, then slam closed again, she followed the creak of the floor boards as he walked past her cabin. She waited. She didn’t want to seem to eager.

After a few minutes, she opened her door and headed towards the cockpit.

“Hi Sable”

“Noa” he gave her a little nod

She made her way next to him, looking out into the vast ocean, acting like this is what she came todo, she relised it seemed silly because she couldn’t actually see anything through the pitch black darkness.

“I want to drive the ship again” Noa demanded

“Getting confident now are we?”

“Maybe I am”

“Come on then, I’ll sit back and watch you”

Sable stepped back from the wheel and gestured her to take his place. Noa, grabbed the wheel with both hands and acted like she knew what she was doing.

After a few minutes she turned to Sable “It feels weird, can you come make sure I’m doing it properly”

Sable sighed and heaved himself from where he was sitting.

Noa turned back to face the front, with both hands on the wheel. Sable positioned himself behind her and placed his hands on top of hers.

“It feels normal to me”

“I don’t know, something's not right, just stay with me for a minute”

Noa took in the moment, feeling his hands on hers, his masculine presence standing behind her. She felt like she could explode at any moment. She pushed her hips back ever so slightly.

Her ass now firmly pressed against his crotch, she moved in unison with the waves as they met with the bow of the ship. With each grind, she could feel his cock getting firmer through his jeans.

She felt his hands slide away and move to her hips.

His lips, on her neck. She tilted her head back and let out a soft moan.

She turned her face back to look at him as he moved his hands to her breasts, she waves still causing her to grind against him.

She reached up to kiss him, he pried her mouth open and slipped his tongue in while they made out. His hands moved from her breasts back down to her hips, gripping them firmly, pulling her harder against him. She could feel exactly what she'd been doing to him through the thin fabric and it sent a wave of heat through her entire body.

"Sable," she breathed against his mouth.

"I know," he said. The same two words from the aurora. Different weight now.

He turned her around to face him, lifted her onto the instrument panel and stepped between her legs. She wrapped them around him and pulled him in and kissed him again, harder this time, her fingers gripping the back of his neck.

He pulled back just enough to look at her. That same direct, unhurried attention. Even now.

"You've been doing this on purpose," he said. It wasn't a question.

"The ship handling lesson was a little transparent," she admitted.

Something that might have been a laugh. Then his mouth was on her throat and she stopped being able to form sentences.

He worked the buttons of her jacket open, then the layer underneath, his hands warm against her cold skin, deliberate and unhurried in a way that was going to drive her completely out of her mind.

"Sable." More urgent this time.

"I've got you," he said against her collarbone. "We've got time."

"We are extremely exposed right now."

He lifted his head. Glanced around the empty deck, the black ocean in every direction, not another light anywhere on earth. Then back at her.

"Lars is asleep," he said. "Priya too. Captain doesn't come up until four."

"You checked."

"I've been thinking about this since the aurora."

She stared at him. "That was four days ago."

"Yes," he said simply, and kissed her again as he followed the contour of her body down to the button of her pants, he pried the button open with his fingers. He pulled her pants down, as she moved herself to help him. Then, he underwear.

He placed two fingers in her mouth, she sucked on them for a moment. Then her moved them down to her pussy. Slowly, he ran them up and down. Then they found their way to the opening, Noa felt his long fingers slowly slip inside her, in then out in then out as she softly moaned in his ear.

“Fuck me” she whispered into his ear.

Noa reached down and unclasped his belt buckle, pulling his jeans down. Then brushed her hands over his hard dick through the fabric of his underwear, before putting her hands down them and pulling his cock out.

She wrapped her hands around it, slowly moving them up and down his shaft while kissing him. He moaned into her mouth every time their mouths moved positions

She moved herself closer to the edge of the dashboard, and guided his dick inside of her. They both moaned.

Sable started slowly thrusting, pushing his cock deeper inside her with every stroke. The boat moved beneath them, the rhythm of the ocean working with him.

"Quickly, someone might wake up" she demanded.

"Not yet," he said quietly.

He kept the pace slow and deliberate, the same infuriating patience he brought to everything. She could feel every movement, the cold air on her skin and his warmth everywhere he touched her, his breath against her neck.

"Sable." A warning.

"I heard you."

He didn't change pace. His hands moved from her hips, one sliding up under her jacket, splaying flat against her lower back, pulling her closer. The other moved between them, his thumb finding her clit, slow circles, and she bit down on his shoulder to keep quiet.

"You've been driving me insane," she breathed. "For weeks."

"Good," he said into her hair.

"That's all you have to say?"

He pulled back to look at her, still moving, still that same unhurried rhythm that was dismantling her completely. His eyes were dark and completely focused on her face.

"You feel so good" he said simply. Like it was a fact he'd established long ago and saw no need to elaborate on.

She didn't have an answer for that. She kissed him instead, hard, her fingers gripping the back of his neck.

The boat crested a swell and dropped, and the movement pushed him deeper and she gasped against his mouth.

"There," he said quietly. Like he'd been looking for exactly that.

He shifted his angle slightly and kept it, his thrusts deeper and harder now, his thumb still moving, and she felt the tension building low and inevitable and she dug her fingers into his shoulders and pressed her face against his neck.

"Don't stop," she managed. "Don't you dare stop."

"I've got you," he said. Low and certain and right at her ear.

The ocean moved beneath them. The stars turned overhead. Every nerve ending she had was concentrated in the small space between them and the world had reduced to his hands and his voice.

"Oh fuck, Sable… "

"I know"

“I’m going to.. Don’t stop” she moaned

She shattered quietly, her whole body shaking, biting down on his shoulder to keep the sound in. He held her through it, steady, one hand firm at her back, and kept moving until the last of it had worked through her and she went loose against him.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

The boat creaked. The engine hummed. Somewhere below, completely undisturbed, the rest of the crew slept on.

"Your turn," she said, when she had breath for words.

She felt him exhale, something between a laugh and a groan.

Noa placed her hand, on his stomach and pushed him back slightly. She hopped of the dashboard, and fell to her knees.

With one hand, she grabbed the base of his cock, the other placed on his outer thigh to help balance herself.

She licked the precum of the tip of his dick, looked up at him and giggled, then placed her lips around the end. Slowly she started pushing his dick deeper into her mouth. Sable let out a soft moan.

BANG

They both jumped, as they heard the sound of floor boards creaking underneath someones feet.

“Fuck, where’s my pants” Noa demanded as she rushed to her feet in a whisper.

Before they could get themselves together, Lars walked into the cockpit.

“Jesus christ” Lars whispered

His eyes instantly darted towards Noa’s exposed breasts, she used her hands to try cover them.

By this time, Sable had pulled up his pants again.

“Sorry mate, we didn’t expect anyone to be awake”

Noa expected feel embarrassed, but she wasn’t

Almost automatically, like she was no longer in control of her own hands. She lowered them, showing herself to Lars.

Lars stood frozen in the cockpit doorway, eyes wide, not quite managing to look away.

Noa held his gaze for a moment, this young, stunned, genuinely attractive man, and felt something reckless move through her. The same instinct that had lowered her hands in the first place. She was aware of Sable beside her, very still, watching her with an expression she couldn't fully read.

Sable was, in fact, doing several things at once. Managing his own expression. Cataloguing the situation. And watching Noa with the focused attention he'd been trying and failing to turn off for weeks, trying to read what was moving behind her eyes.

He'd seen that look before. Not on her, on himself, in the mirror, approximately four days ago standing outside her cabin with a folder he'd retrieved from the saloon table and held onto for twenty minutes before finally knocking.

Oh, he thought. Interesting.

Her mind ran ahead of her, the way it had been doing all week.

Sable waited to feel something territorial. Possessive. The thing he probably should have felt.

What he actually felt was more complicated and more interesting than that, and he filed it away for later examination, because Lars was still standing in the doorway looking stunned and this was not the moment.

He was aware of his hand at the small of Noa's back. He kept it there.

Lars opened his mouth.

Then promptly turned green.

"Oh no," Noa said.

He made it to the stern rail just in time. The sounds that followed were deeply, thoroughly unromantic.

Sable moved past her with the automatic efficiency of someone who had managed seasick crew before, one hand on Lars's back, the other reaching for the water bottle clipped to the rail.

"Easy," he said. "You're alright."

Behind him he heard Noa pull her jacket closed. He didn't need to look to know the expression on her face, he could feel her trying not to laugh from three feet away.

"I'll get him some water," Noa said. "From below."

"Good idea," Sable said. Very neutrally.

She went. He heard her on the companionway steps and then a pause, the corridor, probably, where she'd finally let herself laugh, and he kept his face composed and his hand on Lars's back and thought about the way she'd looked at him over Lars's head, working it out in real time, that quick unselfconscious mind he'd been watching all month.

By the time she came back up Lars was sitting against the mast looking pale and apologetic.

"Sorry," he managed. "I don't know what…. the swell changed and I just… "

"Don't worry about it," Noa said, and handed him the water, and meant it completely.

Sable caught her eye over Lars's head.

He let himself look at her for just a moment, properly, the way he usually kept carefully rationed, and nodded almost imperceptibly toward the companionway.

Later, it meant. We have time. We have five weeks.

She gave him the smallest nod back.

Something settled in his chest. Quiet and certain, the way the ocean went quiet between swells, the way a course felt right under his hands.

He'd been doing dead reckoning on this since week one. He knew where he was.

She stayed on deck until Lars had recovered enough to be embarrassed, helped him below, said goodnight to Sable with complete professionalism that made him want to smile, and disappeared down the companionway.

Sable turned back to the wheel.

The Vaðlaheiðarvegavinnuverkfærageymsluskúraútidyralyklakippuhringurinn, called the Vadla by everyone who sailed her, out of simple necessity, left Cape Town on a Tuesday in late April, when the autumn light on Table Mountain was the colour of old brass and the wind was coming off the Atlantic with purpose.

Noa stood at the stern and watched the harbour shrink and felt the particular loneliness of departure, which was different from other kinds of loneliness because it was chosen.

"First deep-water crossing?"

She turned. The first mate was coiling a line nearby with the automatic efficiency of someone whose hands knew work the way other people's hands knew sleep. Sable. Just Sable, the captain had said when he'd made introductions, and no one had elaborated.

"That obvious?"

"You're watching the land." Sable didn't look up from the rope. "Experienced sailors watch the water."

"What do you watch?"

Now he looked up. His eyes were dark and direct and slightly amused. "Both," he said, and went back to the line.

*****

The Valda was a sixty-two foot research vessel, and you could tell it was built for endurance rather than elegance. The smell of diesel and coffee filled the tightly knit quarters permanently. The bunks were narrow. The heads were shared. The saloon table seated five if no one needed elbow room, which everyone always did. 

It being her expedition, Noa had the privilege of her own sleeping quarters which was about the size of a generous wardrobe. A small porthole admitted a circle of the night sky above her bunk, the stars of distant galaxies flickered like tiny candles. 

Noa stripped off her day clothes and placed them on the tiny bedside table, before flopping herself down on the single person bunk. Her gaze returned to the porthole, she watched the stars as she listened to the language of the ship. Creaks and groans of old wood, the hum of the diesel engine as it pushed them further away from civilization. 

After tossing and turning for what felt like hours, Noa admitted defeat, sleep wasn’t something she was getting on the first night.

She sat up from the bed, threw on a silk gown and made her way to the top deck. 

“Can’t sleep” came a voice from behind her. It was Sable, steering the ship. 

“Nope, the sounds, the nerves, all of it is getting to me” Noa replied 

“The first few days are the hardest, then your mind kind of settles into it” 

“I hope so, I can’t go 6 weeks without any sleep” 

Noa looked up at Sable, it was hard to see him through the darkness but the lights from the cockpit dashboard illuminated his face ever so slightly. Noa could see he had a smile on his face, his usual bright blue eyes seemed a darker but calming shade of blue now. 

Noa moved further into the cockpit and found a small chair to sit on, next to where Sable was standing at the wheel. 

“How’d you know that this is what you wanted to do?” 

Sable looked down at Noa “My father owned a fishing vessel, we went out on a 2 week trip once. The first night, I slept like a stone, better than in my own bed. I loved the freedom, watching the horizon disappear, the sounds of the sea, everything about it just seemed to make me feel at peace” 

"What's it like," she said, "knowing where you are without being able to see anything fixed?"

Sable considered this. He had a way of actually considering questions rather than just answering them, which Noa would come to recognize as one of his more disarming qualities.

"You're always moving," he said finally. "So the question isn't really where you are. It's where you've been, and how fast, and in what direction. You do the math and trust it."

"Dead reckoning."

"Dead reckoning." he glanced over, briefly. "You know the term."

"I looked things up. Before the trip."

Something that might have been a smile. "What else did you look up?"

"Everything," Noa admitted. "I'm a marine biologist who doesn't sail. I compensated by reading."

"And?"

"None of it prepared me for how big it is."

Sable looked at the water. "No," he agreed. "Nothing does."

They stayed like that for a while, not talking, which was easy in a way that Noa didn't expect and didn't examine.

****

The weather came in the second week, announced first by the barometric pressure dropping in a way that made the captain quiet over dinner, and then by a change in the colour of the water  from blue-grey to a green so dark it was almost black, and then by the swell building slowly through the night until by morning they were climbing ten-metre waves and sliding down the other side in a way that rearranged Noa's understanding of what boats were.

She was not, it turned out, seriously seasick. This was a relief and a surprise.

"You have a good inner ear," Sable said, during a brief flat moment between squalls, when they were both clipped to the jackline on the foredeck.

"I had no idea until right now."

"It's the best kind of talent. Completely useless everywhere except here."

The storm lasted three days. Noa learned things she hadn't expected to learn: how to move through a lurching boat without falling, how to time a trip from the cabin to the cockpit between waves, how cold your hands could get before they stopped being useful.

Watching Sable work was instructive. He moved on a boat the way certain people moved through a crowded room, always exactly where he needed to be, never rushed, never wasted. He read the sails and the wind and the water simultaneously, made constant small adjustments, talked to the boat in a low voice when the gusts came through that Noa wasn't sure she was meant to hear.

On the second night of the storm, with the watch rotation disrupted by the weather and everyone exhausted and the wind screaming through the rigging in a register that Noa felt in her sternum, Sable found her in the cockpit and said, "I'll show you the wheel."

"I shouldn't…. "

"You should know how." He stepped behind Noa and placed his hands over hers on the spokes. "Feel that? That's the rudder talking. The boat tells you what she needs, you just have to listen."

The boat surged up a wave and Noa tightened her grip instinctively, and Sable's hands tightened over hers, not correcting, just steadying, and he said, low, close to Noa's ear to be heard over the wind, "Let her move. You're fighting it. You can't win a fight with the ocean."

"Useful life advice," Noa said.

She felt Sable laugh rather than heard it, a quick exhalation, warm against the side of her face.

She let the wheel move. The boat found her line.

"There," Sable said.

They stayed that way for twenty minutes, through two squalls and a confused sea that threw the bow sideways twice, Sable's hands always there and sometimes necessary and eventually just present, and neither of them said anything about it afterward.

Noa headed back down to her quarters and flopped down on her bed, her mind racing. She couldn’t tell if it was the closeness of being with Sable that made her feel something or if it was because Sable was the only genuine human contact she had out at sea. 

All she knew was she wanted more. 

She hoped Sable felt the same. 

Noa, started drifting off to sleep. 

The ships hand, Lars, shouted from the deck, not alarm, something else, and she came up pulling a jacket over her shoulders and stopped.

The aurora australis filled the southern sky. Not the faint shimmer she'd seen in photographs but something enormous and moving, green-white curtains folding and unfolding across the stars, deliberate and slow and utterly indifferent to the small boat and its five passengers watching from the middle of the ocean.

Lars had his watercolours out and was already failing to capture it. Priya stood at the stern with her hands clasped.

Noa walked to the bow without thinking about it.

Sable was already there.

He stood with his hands on the rail, face tilted up, and in the aurora light he looked like a different version of himself, the professional composure stripped back, something quieter underneath. Noa came to stand beside him, shoulders touching because the bow was narrow and the rail was cold and it was the most natural arrangement in the world.

They watched the lights move in silence for a long time.

"I've seen it before," he said finally, quietly. "The Drake. Once in the Norwegian Sea." A pause. "It never stops."

"Stops what?"

"Being the thing you're watching instead of anything else."

Noa turned to look at him. He was already looking at her, that direct, unhurried attention that had been dismantling her composure for the past few days, and the aurora moved green and slow across the sky behind him and she thought, with some distant and practical part of her brain, oh, we're doing this.

"Noa," he said. Just that.

"I know," she said.

She wasn't sure afterward which of them moved first. His hands found her face, cold at the fingertips, warm at the palm, and he kissed her with the same quality he brought to everything deliberate, unhurried, paying close attention and she felt four weeks of careful composure simply leave her body.

When they broke apart the aurora was still there, indifferent and extraordinary.

"Below," she said.

He nodded, and took her hand, and they moved together toward the companionway, and then the alarm screamed from the cockpit. Sharp, insistent, impossible to ignore.

Sable was already moving, the professional snapping back into place with a speed that would have been impressive if Noa weren't so frustrated by it. He took the companionway steps in two strides and was at the instruments before she'd fully processed what had happened.

She stood at the top of the steps in the cold green light, her lips still warm, and listened to him silence the alarm and radio the captain and begin reading out coordinates in a calm, even voice.

He glanced back at her once. Something in his expression that wasn't quite an apology and wasn't quite a promise but was somewhere between the two.

Noa pulled her jacket tighter and looked up at the aurora.

5 more weeks, she thought.

I need him.

ONE DRINK

—

A Story

CHAPTER ONE

Amy stumbled her way out of the bar, heading towards the Uber meetup point pinned out on the app. The chill nighttime breeze almost brought tears to her bright hazel eyes as it cut across her face, and lifted through her wavy blonde hair.

5 minutes away.

She leaned up against a street pole, watching fellow humans walk up and down as they made their way in and out of bars. An average Friday night in the small town of Darwin.

4 minutes away.

She looked up from her phone again.

Less than a metre away stood a man. She scanned him up and down. A white button-up, tucked into blue jeans held up by a brown belt. Curly black hair in a curtain style, a little stubble across his face. He was waiting to cross the road.

He caught Amy looking at him and held her stare for a few seconds before returning to scanning the road for a gap.

He wasn’t conventionally attractive, but just enough to warrant a double take if you were passing him on the street.

He looked back at Amy and caught her gaze again.

“Bit chilly out tonight, isn’t it,” he said in a husky voice.

“Just a bit,” Amy replied.

3 minutes away.

“What are you doing standing out here anyway?” he asked, still scanning the road.

“Waiting for an Uber.”

“Wow, heading off already? It’s only 9:30.”

“I only came out for some after-work drinks. I’m getting too old for the nightlife.”

2 minutes away.

The man stepped away from the road and studied her face under the dim street light.

“You don’t look old to me, you’re very, umm…” he stumbled over his words, trying to find the right ones.

“Are you trying to flirt with me?”

“Is it that obvious?”

Your Uber is arriving soon.

Amy looked down the street to see her ride arriving.

“How about you ditch the Uber and come get one drink with me?”

Amy was the spontaneous adventure type. Something about this man made her feel safe enough to let her guard down for one night.

She looked down at her phone and hovered her finger over the cancel button for a second before pressing down.

“Only one drink, okay?”

“Only one drink.”

“I’m Marcus, by the way.”

“Amy.”

“Okay, Amy, where do you want to go?”

“It was your proposal, so you lead the way.”

Marcus grabbed her by the hand, checked the road for cars and started running across, pulling Amy along with him.

After the crossing, he slowed back down to a walk.

Amy looked down at this stranger’s hand holding hers. It was bigger than hers. She could feel the roughness of his palm pressed against hers. She moved her gaze up to his forearm, slightly covered by the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt, but she could tell it was toned.

They arrived at a small corner bar. It was quieter than the other places but still had people flowing in and out. They walked in and found a quiet couch booth towards the back. It was dimly lit, and a small LED candle sat on the table in front of them, trying its best to flicker like a real one.

“What’s your drink?” Marcus asked as he pulled out his wallet.

“A gin and tonic, please,” she replied.

Marcus gave her a smile and walked over to the bar.

Amy took the time to study him once more. He was definitely a blue-collar man — a little rough, but he also knew how to take care of himself. She wasn’t sure if he went to the gym, or if it was just his work that gave him his toned figure. Large arms, legs that could hold up anything, and his arse was almost bigger than hers. She chuckled to herself.

Marcus turned from the bar and headed towards her with two drinks in hand — her gin and tonic, and some sort of whisky on ice.

He sat down right next to her, leaving little to no space between them, then placed the drinks on the table before crossing his legs, stretching his arm across the back of the couch and turning towards Amy.

“I like this place. It’s quiet — a good place to get to know someone,” he said.

“I’ve never been here before. My friends and I usually go to the busier places.”

They continued to chat throughout the next couple of drinks. Amy knew that it was never going to be just one drink. There was something about Marcus that made her feel a certain kind of way — a longing for his touch — and she felt that he knew it too. He held her gaze far longer than anyone else had. He would brush his fingers against her arm ever so slightly when the opportunity presented itself.

One drink turned into many more, and it was now 1am.

The bar was closing. They had to finish their last drink and leave. But Amy wasn’t ready to end the night there.

She hooked Marcus’ arm with hers and pulled him along.

They stumbled their way to a nightclub.

“I wanna dance with you!” Amy said with a huge smile on her face.

“I can’t dance, Amy. I’ll embarrass myself in front of you,” Marcus replied.

“Come onnn, it’ll be fun and I won’t judge,” Amy said, pouting her lips and looking up at him.

“Fine, but I will need a couple of shots first.”

Amy decided to head to the place she used to frequent when she first started going out.

They found their way into the nightclub and made a beeline straight to the bar. They both ordered two vodka shots each and downed them one after the other. Then it was time to hit the dance floor.

Amy grabbed Marcus’ hand and pulled him onto the dance floor. They found a nice spot that wasn’t too crowded, though you were still bumping into people every now and again.

Amy twirled herself around as she moved her hips from side to side. Then Marcus pulled her in, her back against his chest. She continued to sway her hips, brushing against his body ever so slightly as he moved in sync with her. They sang the songs at the top of their voices, even though no one could hear because the music drowned out everything else.

“Let’s get another shot,” Amy suggested.

Marcus looked down at her from behind and nodded.

They went to the bar and made their way back to the dance floor.

Marcus had his hands on her hips, and she had her hands on his, her back against him.

She looked back up at him, and he looked down at her. Their eyes held for what felt like hours. Then Marcus bent slightly to kiss her on the lips — a small peck to start with — but Amy wanted more.

She tiptoed up to meet his lips with hers, this time holding it, before he used his mouth to prise hers open. They continued to make out while Amy moved her hips backwards and forwards. She could feel him pressing hard against her.

Marcus moved his hand up over her breast and to her throat — not squeezing, just resting his hand there — while they continued moving together.

Amy pulled away, turned towards him and reached her lips up to his ear.

“I want you so fucking bad.”

Marcus gave her a smug grin.

“You’ll have to wait.”

She slid her hand down to his crotch and looked up at him.

“I can tell it’ll be worth the wait.”

They continued to dance, make out, do shots and tease each other until the nightclub closed at 3am on the dot.

CHAPTER TWO

Amy and Marcus stumbled out onto the street together, their hands intertwined. They continued up the footpath until they found a quiet spot.

Amy looked up at Marcus.

“Come back to mine.”

Marcus looked into her eyes before grinning.

“Hmm, should I?” he said teasingly.

“Please, it’ll be worth it.” She gave him a little wink.

“Let’s go then.”

Amy pulled out her phone and opened the Uber app, squinting as she tried to navigate her way through requesting a ride.

There was one nearby that took a couple of minutes to arrive. They hopped into the back seat, sitting right next to each other. Marcus placed his hand on her thigh and she placed hers on his as they settled in for the ten-minute ride.

Amy gently intertwined her fingers into his, then slowly pulled his hand up her short skirt. She looked up into his eyes as she moved his hand onto the outside of her underwear. Marcus used two fingers to slowly run up and down. He then hooked her underwear and pulled it to the side before slowly pushing his fingers into her. She let out a soft sigh.

He continued to slowly move his long fingers deeper, holding her gaze.

Amy couldn’t tell if it was because she hadn’t felt this way in a while, or if it was something about Marcus, but she wanted more.

“And here we are.”

They had been so lost in the moment they had forgotten about the driver. Marcus pulled his hand back to her thigh, and she smoothed her skirt back down.

“Thank you, man. Have a good night,” Marcus said as he opened the door and stepped out.

He turned around and offered Amy his hand to help her out.

After making their way to the front door, Amy turned to Marcus.

“Tonight has been fun. I’ll see you around sometime,” she said with a grin.

“It has been fun. I’ll see you later, Amy.”

Marcus turned and started walking down her driveway.

Amy chased after him.

“No! I was kidding. Come back!”

Marcus turned back around and chased her up the driveway.

Amy ran to the door and fumbled her key into the lock, pushed it open and walked in with Marcus following close behind. She walked over to the kitchen light switch and flicked it on. A soft white light filled the room. She placed her bag down on the black stone bench before turning towards Marcus and resting against it.

She placed her hands on the bench and pushed herself up onto it, leaving her legs hanging off the edge.

She raised her arm and used her index finger to beckon Marcus towards her. He complied and made his way over. Standing between her legs, Marcus stared into her eyes as she raised her arms, placed them around the back of his neck and pulled him in.

“You smell good,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“So, are you just going to stand here awkwardly, or are you going to fuck me?”

Marcus moved his face into her neck and kissed it gently before making his way back to her lips.

He placed his hands on her hips and pulled her waist into his.

Amy slowly rolled her hips, rubbing herself against the bulge beneath his jeans.

Marcus grabbed the hem of her shirt and pulled it up, taking it off and dropping it to the floor. He then reached behind her back and undid her bra. The straps fell down her arms. He pulled it all the way off and set it on the bench beside her.

He leaned forward and kissed her breast before slipping her left nipple into his mouth and sucking gently. He then licked from her breast all the way up to her neck and gently bit down, while moving his hands down from her hips to the waistband of her skirt.

Amy could once again feel the roughness of his hands on her skin. Every touch made her want him even more.

Marcus slipped the skirt off her waist and down her legs. Her underwear followed soon after. He kissed down her chest, gently brushed his lips against her and kissed her softly.

Amy moaned. The feeling of his lips drove her crazy. She couldn’t take the teasing anymore, but she was fully aware she wasn’t in control. She knew Marcus was playing games with her. She wanted him inside her — she wanted to give him everything — but for now, she had to wait.

He pushed her legs apart, got down on his knees, placed his hands on her hips and pulled her forward slightly. He used his tongue to make slow circular motions, gradually speeding up. Every now and again he would break away and slide his tongue down and back up again.

He slowly moved a finger towards her, adding pressure until it gently slid inside, all while his mouth stayed on her.

He looked up at her.

“Does this feel good?”

“Fuck, yes. Please don’t stop.”

He obliged.

Marcus added another finger, sliding them in and out quickly now.

Time had stopped for Amy. She was fully focused on the feeling Marcus was giving her. Breathing heavily, moaning louder and louder, legs shaking. She was completely at his mercy.

“Fuck, I’m going to come. Keep going — yes, yes, yes.”

“Holy shit. Fuck.”

Marcus slowed right down to let her enjoy the moment.

She grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him up.

“Come to my bedroom. Now.”

Marcus picked her up from the bench and carried her to the bedroom.

CHAPTER THREE

Marcus threw Amy onto the bed and stood at the edge.

Amy quickly scrambled to her knees and started unbuttoning his white shirt, pulling it off and throwing it to the floor. She pulled him in by his belt and unbuckled it. Marcus pulled his jeans off, then Amy pulled down his underwear.

Amy wrapped her hand around him and started moving it slowly, looking up into his eyes.

“You’re so big.”

All she got in return was a low, “Fuck.”

She leaned down and licked the tip, then took him into her mouth. Slowly she moved her head back and forth, still looking up at him.

Marcus placed his hand on her head, gently pulling her hair back, moving in the same rhythm.

Then he pulled her head back, grabbed her by the waist and flipped her onto all fours.

Finally.

This was the moment Amy had been waiting for all night. She was ready for him.

Marcus placed one hand on her back, then guided himself into her with the other. He pushed in slowly, careful not to hurt her. Then he grabbed her hips and started thrusting, getting faster and faster with each movement.

Amy moaned loudly while Marcus groaned.

Marcus pulled out, then flipped her onto her back. Looking deep into her eyes, he pushed inside her again.

He put his hand around her throat, squeezing gently.

“Fuck me harder.”

Marcus pushed deeper and more forcefully.

“Yes, that’s it. Fuck. Keep going.”

“Faster.”

“Faster.”

“Yesss.”

Marcus was giving everything he had.

Amy sat up slightly and watched, and he was doing the same. Her eyes rolled back and she flopped down again.

Then she started shaking uncontrollably, moaning louder than she had all night. Marcus slowed down.

Amy sat up with him still inside her and put her arms around his neck. Marcus placed his hands on her and lifted her up. He walked over to the nearest wall and pressed her back against it.

Then started fucking her hard again.

Amy could feel her back against the wall with every thrust.

“Fuck, I’m going to come,” Marcus groaned.

“Don’t come in me.”

Marcus placed Amy down in front of him. She got onto her knees and took him into her mouth, pushing forward, taking him all the way.

“Oh, fuck.”

Amy kept going until he was completely done.

Marcus let out a long groan.

Amy looked up at him and smiled.

“That was so fucking good, Amy.”

“You’re welcome.”