A/N: thanks for all the follows/favourites etc! The story does have a plot although it was cobbled together in about five minutes so each chapter is kinda off the cuff. I should be uploading at about the same time as this every night (for me) from now on. Anyway, let's get on with the next prompt which is the title of this chapter.
And if you don't know the song the ladies sing first in this chapter, YouTube "Yazoo Only You" (Or watch Season 5A of Once Upon A Time).
"Are you sure you don't want me to drive?" Emma asked for what felt like the thousandth time since they set off from Boston over three hours earlier.
"I'm fine," Regina assured her, taking another sip of the coffee they had just stopped at the service station to buy. "And please put your feet down."
Emma wiggled her toes which were resting on the dashboard and shrugged. "Why? My shoes are off and my feet are squeaky clean."
Regina just looked sideways at her friend until Emma's feet slipped to the floor. She smiled cheekily at her friend and reached for the iPod which had just changed to an old Beatles track she wasn't in the mood for. Scrolling through her expansive road trip playlist, Emma's eyes lit up as she spotted one of her favourite songs.
Regina's eyebrows rose as the familiar twangs sounded from the stereo and she smiled. Emma knew how much the brunette loved Yazoo. It was one of the few songs they both agreed was awesome.
"Looking from a window above," Emma sang slightly out of tune, "it's like a story of love. Can you hear me?"
"Came back only yesterday, I'm moving farther away," Regina joined in.
"Want you near me," they harmonised.
Well, perhaps harmony was quite the word to describe the sound of the two young women's voices together but it didn't matter. Emma grinned widely at Regina as the song continued.
"All I needed was the love you gave," they sang. "All I needed for another day. And all I ever knew, only you."
Emma reached for the volume control and turned it up. Regina didn't protest. She began tapping out the song's rhythm on the steering wheel and allowed Emma to take the next verse.
"Sometimes when I think of her name, when it's only a game, and I need you," the blonde sang. "Listen to the words that you say, it's getting harder to stay, when I see you."
Regina briefly wondered whether her friend was thinking about the three year relationship she had just ended. It might have been Emma's decision but that didn't make it any easier really. She was distracted however when Emma thrust her water bottle into Regina's face as a makeshift microphone and she automatically picked up the lyrics for her own solo.
"All I needed was the love you gave. All I needed for another day. And all I ever knew, only you."
Regina looked sideways at Emma as the blonde began playing an air guitar. She burst out laughing as she saw her friend rock out to the instrumental part until they both joined in for the repeated chorus, singing at the top of their lungs.
"All I needed was the love you gave. All I needed for another day. And all I ever knew, only you."
Regina had forgotten how much fun it was to go on a road trip with her best friend. She couldn't remember the last time the two of them had traveled together and hadn't realised how much she missed it.
"This is going to take a long time, and I wonder what's mine. Can't take no more," Emma sang.
"Wonder if you'll understand, it's just the touch of your hand," she said, leaning over and grasping Emma's guitar playing fingers and squeezing with a wink, "behind a closed door."
Both put their all into the final chorus of the song, their voices spilling out from the open car windows and getting lost in the air speeding past.
"All I needed was the love you gave. All I needed for another day. And all I ever knew, only you," the two friends sang together.
Emma saw them out with another spectacular air guitar performance and Regina tapped along on the steering wheel once more until the melody faded.
"God I love that song!" Emma said. "Music used to be so much better back in the day. Not the crap that comes out nowadays."
"Oh it's not all crap," Regina protested. "Even you admitted to me you liked that new Justin Bieber song."
Emma mock-gasped and clasped her hand to her chest. "You said you'd take that secret to the grave, Regina Mills! I confessed that weakness to you in drunken confidence. How dare you ever speak of it!"
Regina just laughed and reached over to pull Emma's iPod from her hand. With one eye on the road, she scrolled through Emma's playlist until she found what she was looking for. Emma groaned as the familiar beginning echoed from the speakers. Regina just laughed and handed the iPod back. Emma didn't change the song. She was the one who had loaded it into the device, after all.
"Is it too late now to say sorreee," Emma sang pointedly in Regina's face as the chorus began.
"What for?" Regina asked.
"This," Emma said, placing her feet stubbornly back up on the dashboard and sliding down in her seat.
"Isn't the whole point of saying sorry that you know you've done something wrong and you're not going to do it again?"
"But if Bieber can make mistakes a couple of hundred times," Emma pointed out, quoting her guilty pleasure.
"Do I need to remind you again that you're not Justin Bieber?" Regina asked. "Emma, maybe we need to take you to the therapist again if the delusions are coming back."
"Har har," Emma deadpanned.
Regina just laughed as she took the exit off the freeway and turned onto the smaller road which led to the town where the two women grew up. Storybrooke was too small to be signposted so far out but she and Emma felt the sense of coming home already.
"Sure you don't want me to drive?" Emma asked.
Regina didn't bother answering this time. She was less than two hours away from home and she didn't feel tired at all. She also didn't trust her friend behind the wheel. It was less than six months since she had rushed into the hospital after a call from Killian informed her Emma had flipped her old bug into a ditch on her way back to the city. She had miraculously walked away from the wreckage with only a fractured wrist but Regina had never been more scared in her life.
"Stop thinking about it."
"What?" Regina asked, snapping back to the present and refocusing on the road ahead of her.
"The crash," Emma said. "I know you were thinking about that night. I told you it was the ice and the fog. And I'm fine, remember?"
She held up her wrist and circled it pointedly. Regina's eyes remained firmly on the road ahead.
"Regina, I'm fine," Emma said, her voice softer.
"I know," Regina murmured.
They drove without speaking for a while, Emma choosing more mellow songs and watching as the countryside sped past. It wasn't until a message came through on Emma's phone and interrupted the music that the verbal silence was broken.
"Killian's pissed," Emma said, locking her phone without replying to the text she had just received from her ex.
"About the breakup?"
"About the fact that I left town half an hour later, I think," Emma said. "He messaged me earlier asking to talk and apparently my excuse that I'm heading to Storybrooke for the fourth of July isn't good enough. He thinks I'm running away from our problems."
"Are you?"
"No," Emma replied. "There are no problems, per se. I've just fallen out of love with him. That's not a problem we can fix so why bother trying?"
"Was he surprised by the breakup this morning?" Regina asked.
She tried not to spend too much time with Emma and Killian alone, although since she and the blonde lived together that was difficult. But she hated feeling like a third wheel so avoided it as much as possible. Which also meant she didn't know whether Killian had picked up on any changes within their relationship. She herself knew Emma had been having doubts for months but men seemed to be much less attuned to picking things up like that than women.
"I think so," Emma nodded. "He didn't seem to think there was anything wrong between us. He hadn't even realised how much I freaked out when he mentioned getting married a few weeks ago."
Regina remembered that day. Emma had come home and the two of them had spent most of the evening talking about how the blonde wasn't anywhere close to settling down and drinking copious amounts of wine. Emma and Killian had met in the final year of college and been together ever since but that didn't mean Emma wanted to marry him. Far from it, in fact.
"Do you think you did the right thing this morning?" Regina asked.
"Yes," Emma said at once. "I know he's not who I want to spend the rest of my life with so I'd just be wasting both our time if I stayed with him any longer. He'll find someone else soon enough. He's a great guy. Just … not the one I want."
Regina nodded her understanding. Well, maybe not understanding. It was hard for Regina to comprehend being with someone you didn't want to spend the rest of your life with because the only boyfriend Regina had ever had had been just that. Her soul mate. The one.
"Play something fun," she said to Emma, needing to distract herself from thoughts of Daniel.
Emma didn't need to ask why Regina wanted an upbeat song on. The two of them had been friends for a long time and the blonde had comforted the distraught woman through her boyfriend's death and the grieving afterwards. She was still grieving, Emma supposed and didn't want to be dragged down by her lost love for their trip back home. She scrolled through her iPod quickly and found The Weekend.
"Have you ever not been able to feel your face because of alcohol?" Regina asked as the song started up.
"Yup," Emma nodded, sounding proud. "Remember that night when we went to that tequila bar for Ruby's birthday a couple of years ago. I couldn't feel any body part by the end of the night. Killian and I gave up having sex because I was just completely unable to feel when he -,"
"Ok! Too much information!" Regina cried out, laughing as she did so.
Emma grinned too, pleased she had been able to distract her friend from thoughts of Daniel but also slightly annoyed that she had made herself think about Killian once more. She really didn't want this trip to be overshadowed by her own breakup.
Regina indicated and pulled off into a rest stop.
"Need me to drive?" Emma offered again.
Regina shook her head. "I need to pee," she said. "This coffee is running right through me."
Emma snorted and got out of the car, followed by Regina. The two of them made their way into the small cafe where Emma ordered two bear claws and another couple of coffees and Regina disappeared to use the facilities. Her friend looked reproachfully at the sugar covered snack when she reappeared but took it anyway, telling herself it was rude not to eat something bought for her by a friend. She only ever ate bad food when Emma offered it to her. It was a guilty pleasure, she supposed.
"Come on," Emma said, turning to find Regina with her eyes closed in the middle of the parking lot, a blissful smile on her face. "You can have an orgasm over the deliciousness of the food in the car."
Regina cracked an eye open and glowered at Emma who just grinned sweetly back at her.
"I wasn't having a food orgasm," Regina huffed, falling into step beside her friend.
"Looked that way to me," Emma shrugged.
"Well you've never seen me come so -," Regina stopped abruptly, deciding it was too weird to finish that sentence. Emma didn't seem to notice that it was incomplete and just got into the car once more.
Buckled safely in, Regina glanced at the clock on the dashboard.
"Don't worry," Emma said. "We're only an hour away now and the sun's still high in the sky. Your mom's not gonna tell you off."
"Shut up," Regina laughed, slapping Emma's thigh lightly before putting the car into gear and pulling back onto the road.
