They're driving east on a freeway out of Los Angeles. He meant to go by the loft, but he drove past it and kept right on going. She wrapped her hand around his and seemed to settle in.

Somewhere east of the city, she falls asleep. She falls asleep on his shoulder and he can feel every breath she draws in and the silk of the sari she's still wearing, and he thinks, in that fuzzy-hazy way he has when he's driving through the night with no destination marked out, this is nice.

It's always been his drive to go west. He went west to college, he moved west to be inspired by the openness, the wideness (to get away. far away. as fast as he could. don't ever look back, it'll all be okay, ma). He went west to change his stripes. So. He turns east. Maybe there's some piece of him still missing out here. Maybe there's something to be discovered on the roads he abandoned.

The cynical part of his brain that sounds like day-driving Nick Miller, frustrated by traffic, says also if you drive too far west in California, you drive into the ocean, so. There's that.

He's always kind of thought that guy is a dick.

She stirs, for a moment, and he holds his breath, because the thing is, he's enjoying this time. Her there but not really there, the sound of her terrible old tires on the road, headlights, the way his voice has gone kind of noir in his head. And he thinks maybe it's good that he's taking a minute to just... absorb this. To think about this (not in the way he was thinking about it before when he let daytime Nick take the mic and that dick fucked it up like he fucks everything up), and maybe just... adjust his worldview. Ever so slightly.

She's like nobody he's ever met, like nobody he's ever lo...liked before. Certainly no one he's ever slept with before.

It's fun to be with her. It's fun to argue with her. It's fun to watch her, and be watched by her. It's fun to fuck her. It's fun after he fucks her. She's surprising and intriguing but he thinks he's just starting to get to know her, starting to figure her out. He might, if he gives himself some time, might even be good at being with her. He's never been good at much - smart, sure, but not really motivated. He's good at bartending because he likes it. He liked, in the beginning, that it got him girls, and then he liked that it paid the bills, and then he liked that his grumpy disposition somehow worked as a schtick and … the point is, he might be good at being Nick-and-Jess if he could just shut off daytime Nick and let nighttime Nick - the guy who lifts her on top tables and kisses her without thinking of the consequences - let that guy take control for a little bit.

"Let's drive forever, okay?" her voice startles him out of his head and he jumps, but he also grins.

"I think that's a great idea."

"Except, you know, eventually I'm going to have to pee." She shifts. "And by eventually, I mean, probably literally any second. Can you find a rest area or something?"

He'd forgotten about this little thing about roadtrips with girls. No into-Mountain-Dew-bottle-peeing. They'll have to stop for more than just gas and food. She'll want to get out and stretch her legs. She might want to shop. His eyes widen.

"Oh look. A Super Eight! Hey Nick, how do you feel about motel sex?"

He swallows down a laugh, tells daytime Nick to shut the fuck up and rubs the back of his neck. "Um... good. I feel good about motel sex. I'm generally favor of motel sex. Actually, just so you know. Most forms of sex."

She laughs. "Good. So... Super Eight?"

"Yeah." He tries not to appear too eager as he maneuvers her piece-of-crap car into a crumbling parking lot. He doesn't know why he's bothering. She already knows he's not cool. Some habits are hard to break.

It says something about the level of class of this particular establishment that their outfits don't even get a blink. In fact, the night desk clerk doesn't even raise an eyebrow over her square-glasses. She takes the pencil out of her long hair and marks something on the paper, taking Jess's credit card without batting an eye, until Jess, who sometimes just can't help being awkward, clears her throat and catches the attention of the clerk, who is doodling on a piece of paper while she waits for the computer to do whatever it is it's supposed to be doing.

"Do you know, um... where I might find some clothes? You know, for, uh... after?"

"You want me to get you clothes for when you're done having sex?" The level of sarcasm in her voice nearly makes Nick envious.

"No! No! I mean, I'd go get them, just... is there a thrift shop or a ….?"

"Some place that takes cash and won't ask a lot of questions?" She laughs. "Take a look around. There's a Walmart that way and a consignment store that way. Room 22B is your room. Don't destroy it with your Indian roleplay... thing."

"Excuse..."

"No offense. We get a lot of people with particular... habits. Around here. $47.30 is your total. Sign on the dotted line."

Jess signs her name with a flourish, and the desk clerk can't help but chuckle as she says, "Have a great night."

"See, I feel almost obligated to have kinky slightly racist Indian roleplay sex now."

Jess laughs at him. "I'm just trying to imagine the walk of shame in this get-up. I'm going to have to put it back on, you know, to go get other clothes."

"We, uh... we don't have to do this, Jess. We can go back to the loft and sleep in your bed, if you want."

I'm not that guy, Jess. I don't do something if I don't know exactly what's going to happen... I'm the guy standing on the beach, holding the wallets.

"No. I think we should do this. I think we should have kinky sex at a cheap motel. I think we should go buy clothes at the thrift shop tomorrow, put a full tank of gas in the station wagon and see where the road takes us. I think we should just... be, for a little bit, Nick. Don't you?" She looks at him from underneath her lashes, the way she does sometimes, and it just about kills him.

He's fascinated by the way her skin moves under all that silk. He wonders how he's going to unwrap it. He likes the way her voice sounds at this hour of the night, like it's having to travel over sandpaper to get to him, and he likes what he's feeling right in this moment. Sort of electric. Alive. He could breathe her in, her spontaneity and her joy and...

He reaches for her. Electricity touching metal. Shock, right to the bottom of his toes when she meets him half-way and they kiss. He can't get enough of her. Can't taste enough of her. It's the oddest thing. It's like he wants to crawl inside of her.

And while he's touching her, she's touching him, just underneath of his shirt, like she can't be bothered to take it off. She touches the flesh there and lets her hand descend down, play with the zipper of his pants and she's such a fucking tease but he loves it. He loves when it hurts this way, when it's so hard and so fast it takes his breath away, how he can go from soft to hard in the blink of her wide blue eyes.

"Off, off, off," he mutters. "Take your damn clothes off. Jesus, Jessica. Look at you in this fucking thing, it's just... Christ. It's more than I can handle right now."

She undoes his belt, unzips his pants and caresses him through his boxers. "I want to make you feel good, though. I like to do things... with my mouth."

His eyes nearly cross as she sinks to her knees, pulls his pants down, and takes him inside of her mouth.

He wakes up first, and talks himself out of staring at her like a creeper. He rolls out of the hotel sheets and pads his way over to the bathroom.

He's no Schmidt, but he is a bit of a homebody and he misses, just for a minute, the comfort of home, of knowing exactly how to fiddle with the faucet to get the exact water temperature he likes, or where exactly his towel will be.

But that sensation fades when he wraps the low-thread-count, dubiously clean hotel towel around his waist and walks out into the bedroom and sees Jess, naked and sprawled across the bed with the morning sun angling over her, highlighting her fair skin, a moment out of the novel he's always trying to write, a scene in a screenplay, when the hero looks at the heroine and suddenly all of the pieces of his life he's been struggling with make sense.

Daytime Nick shrugs his shoulders. At its heart, really, it's just a pretty picture.

Jess needs his help getting back into the sari - an adventure which nearly causes them to miss their check-out time - and they get a number of odd looks when they hit the thrift shop with the ten dollars they've managed to scrounge up between the two of them. He helps her pick out a dress which, by all rights, should be worn by someone's grandmother, and a cardigan, because it could be a hundred and one degrees in Los Angeles and she'd still wear a cardigan. They both find some sunglasses, straight from the '70s, and it takes nearly every penny they have, but they're finally dressed in clothes they could be seen wearing in public.

He really wishes he could, just for a moment, hear the soundtrack he's sure is playing in the background of his life. In all of the moments of Jess darting in and out of the curtained fitting room, he's certain there's a John-Hughes-style montage somewhere...

It's good. It's a good start.

They drive a little further down the highway. He's staying off the interstate, wants to take the backroads. Jess doesn't object. She rides in the passenger passenger seat with her feet out of the window, singing along with the radio when they can get a station. He wasn't aware actual people did this.

"I don't think you break everything, you know."

He lo- likes Jess, he really does, but he can't get used to the way she starts conversations sometimes without a prelude. It's like sex without foreplay.

"What?"

"I don't think you break everything. Like, I know sometimes you don't think very highly of yourself, and I think that's crap. I think that's crap, Nick Miller, because I was broken when you guys took me in and you're a big part of the reason why I'm not anymore. So. I just wanted to say that."

He can't help it. He chuckles disbelievingly. "Are you drunk right now?"

She gives him a Look, mastered by middle school teachers everywhere. It's the kind of look that says, 'I am mildly disappointed in you at this moment'.

He clears his throat. "I guess what I should have said is, uh... thank you."

"I think you're wonderful sometimes, is all. I wish you could see that."

Words are hard. Words get stuck in his throat and in his gut and he can't ever make them come out right. Sentences - verbs, nouns... order. It's all too much, so he grabs her hand, and he hangs on for the next twenty miles while America flies by.

"I want like, the biggest hamburger on planet Earth right now."

At some point, they cross into Arizona. The part of Arizona where there is nothing. No gas. No restaurants. No bathrooms. He's been admirably restrained, really, in expressing his level of starvation, but you wouldn't guess that by the way Jess responds.

"I know, Nicholas."

"Fries, can you imagine? Like, right out of the oil where they're still burn-your-fingers hot, and you can do that thing where you break it in half and there's that little trail of happy steam?"

"I'm going to flat out murder you right now."

"Don't you think that's an extreme reaction?"

"No. Not in the slightest."

When they stop for the night, at a hotel a step down from a Super Eight, which honestly wasn't in their budget to begin with, it's the kind with a blinking vacancy sign, and TVs with antennas on them, and ancient covers, and night desk clerk sits behind a set of bars.

"Do you want pay-by-the-hour or nightly?" she asks, chomping her gum.

Nick turns off the Schmidt voice inside of him that is somehow screaming incoherently gonorrhea gonorrhea syphillus oh my god what are you DOING right now? and pays the twenty-five bucks to stay the night.

He wraps himself around Jess that night, after... holding her far longer than he has before.

"Are you okay?" she asks, rubbing a hand over his back.

"Yeah. I'm just... this is good, right?"

"Yeah. This is good."

"Good."

But even nighttime Nick starts to panic a little at that because he knows, right down deep to his core, that good doesn't last long. Good lasts three months, then you break up for five, and then you fall back into the habit of sleeping with each other and the next thing you know, she wants kids and marriage and a house and oh my god.

Less than a week in is a bad time to be freaking out about the future but he knows, he knows Jess is the kind of girl who is going to want her two-point-five kids and her one-point-five dogs in a house in the 'burbs with a white picket fence. And he's never going to be able to afford that on a bartender's non-existent salary, and she can't afford it right now on her teacher's salary... but she deserves it, she does.

Is this what loving someone is always going to be for him? Realizing, in the end, they're much too good to be stuck with him.

He gets food poisoning the third day on the road. He says, "I feel like Mexican" and she says "I think that place looks a little dodgy" and he says "who even says that word, Jesus, Jessica"... and they eat Mexican. And then he throws up. A lot.

"Are you going to be okay?" she asks him, standing a safe distance away while he crouches over the toilet. She'd been rubbing his back, before, but he doesn't like people to be too touchy when he's sick. He's been that way since he was a little boy. At least the throwing-up part. After he's done, he likes to be cuddled. And no, he's not high maintenance.

"No, I'm going to die. I want to die. Just … get a gun and shoot me, Jess. This is awful."

He wakes up the next morning, feeling better. Jess, however, looks exhausted. She's doing the open-mouthed snoring thing she always does when she's drunk or sick, and he feels a stirring... somewhere in his... heart, maybe? He might call that place his heart, if he was that kind of person. Somewhere north of his dick, where his emotions lie.

He sits up and moves a piece of hair back from her face. She really is pale.

"Are you going to throw up again?" Jess asks, without moving her eyelids.

"No, I think I feel better."

"Good. Because I feel terrible."

"Are you going to throw up?"

"No. But I might sleep for seventeen hours."

Before he can stop himself, before he can tell himself that what he's about to do is something only saps in romantic comedies do, he bends down and kisses her forehead.

"Did you just... kiss my forehead?"

"I, uh... I did? As sort of like, a thank you? Benediction, thing?"

She laughs. "Go take a walk, Nick. I'm going to sleep. I was up all night with this bastard who couldn't keep his cheap Mexican food down."

"Okay."

He pulls on the t-shirt he's been wearing for the last few days, locks the hotel room door behind him, and goes for a walk.

It's the kind of little town he thinks a lot of America romanticizes. There's not much in the entirety of its 10-block radius. A little pharmacy which also sells milk, (bizarrely) a tanning leather shop, a town museum, celebrating its Spanish and Native American history (and he's wondering just how they managed to navigate that PR disaster of an idea), a dry cleaners, countless houses. All of them old. Some of them in better shape than others. Some of them have gardens in the yard, children running and shouting in the summer early morning - did he ever have energy like that?

He's able to find the school yard, and it's still got a merry-go-round. He thought everyone got rid of those, but apparently this school upholds the fine tradition of breaking limbs by flying off of playground equipment. It's easy to find the old rhythm, to push off the ground and jump on and let himself fly.

In hindsight, perhaps not the best move after food poisoning, but... It was worth it. When he stops the equipment and gets off, he feels ever-so-slightly drunk.

Remembers taking his first sip of alcohol in a hotel room with a hooker that his dad had bought for him. Wishes that he had maybe spent a little more time on playgrounds, and less time trying to be the man his father was not capable of being.

He sits there for a long time, on the edge of the merry-go-round, until he hears footsteps coming up behind him. It's Jess, in her old lady dress, and her cardigan, and her glasses, and he kind of wants to catch her up in his arms and make her ride the merry-go-round with him. But he also kind of wants to kiss her. And he also wants to eat.

There's a lot going on in his head, okay?

"Merry-go-rounds, really?" Jess is laughing at him. Not really, but he can hear the laugh in her voice. "If you throw up again, I'm not holding back your hair."

"I just couldn't resist." He catches her up in his arms and he kisses her. "Do you wanna know something, Jessica Day?"

"Sure... Nicholas Miller."

"I kind of want to swing on the swingset with you."

She throws her head back and laughs. "You know, if we manage to get our legs perfectly in sync that means we're sleeping together."

"Okay, but we can't let the teacher see. Because I want to do naughty things with you behind the bleachers."

"What kind of naughty things?"

"X-rated, porn... outdoorsy things!"

She laughs at his panic.

"I'm no good with words, Jess. I'm a man of action." And then... he proves that he is.

They're gone a week when they decide it's time to turn back. They've seen most of Arizona and part of New Mexico. He's almost memorized the location of all of the imperfections in her skin, and he's pretty sure he's kissed them all. If he wants to have a job in L.A. at the bar he needs to be back soon. It's time to go back.

They're not anywhere near L.A. when they hit L.A. traffic, and it's like he can feel reality crashing down in on him. He's got to go be real Nick now. He can't let nighttime Nick have the wheel all the time or he'll never show up to work, and Jess will never leave the apartment. But daytime Nick is no good at making this... goodness in relationships last. Daytime Nick is the one who panics, who overthinks things.

"Don't start freaking out on me now, Miller," Jessica says, and he swears to God, sometimes he thinks she's psychic.

"I'm not. I'm not freaking out. It's just... are you sure you want to do this, Jess?"

"Nick, do you respect me?"

"What?" He blinks. "Yeah, of course."

"Then respect my decision, okay? I want to be with you. I like your stupid face and I like your stupid hands. I like your stupid voice. I like your stupid hair, okay? I like you. And I think I have clearly demonstrated that I love jumping your bones."

"That you have." He can't keep the note of smugness out of his voice.

"So. There you have it. I, Jessica Day, do hereby consent to a sexual relationship of indeterminate length with one, Nicholas Miller, who is looking devastatingly sexy in his three-day stubble, I might add..."

"Why... thank you, thank you very much." He curls his lip in a bad Elvis imitation. "It's just, Jess... I want to be... better. For you."

She wrinkles her nose. "Don't be. If you want to be better for yourself, then be better for yourself. Do I wish that you would... care, sometimes? That you would try? Yeah, of course. But... you're doing that now, Nick. I... I like you. Just the same, okay?"

"It uh... it goes without saying that I like you too, right?"

She blinks her eyes at him, slowly. Like a cat. Patiently waiting for him to break.

"Aw, hell. I have to say it?"

"You have to say it. If you want to."

"I like your hair. And your eyes. And your voice. I like that you sing to yourself. I like that you have a shaving-your-legs schedule. I like your style. I like your mouth. I especially like your mouth. And I... I like you."

"Good." She settles back into the seat. "I'm glad. It'll be so much easier to go back to the real world, knowing how you feel."

Nick sets his shoulders. "Yeah... it will, won't it?"