To Elise, because you recommend great books, and you have no idea how much your comments mean. hugs To Hadar because I miss you. To Mai for the banner and the help, and because being random is a very good thing. To Lia and to Katie because you both always seem to say exactly what I'm thinking! To Jin—I'm so coming up with a good nickname. Hee. To everyone I owe reviews—know that you and all your stories rock.
And it's all a dull, droning gray, on and on. Gray and brown and green, but it's not the bright green that shouts the beginning of spring or the deep green that means it's the middle of summer and everything is alive.
It's just green.
His feet, bare and scratched from the dirt and gravel on the floor of the car, shove the accelerator down harder. It creaks. He doesn't care if it wakes her up. Or he does, but he knows it won't.
Mist creeps alongside them, silvery gray tendrils that can enhance either mystery or dismal thoughts, and in this case it is the latter. Speeding, speeding, speeding. He's never going to stop—they are never going to stop. Getting away. He thinks that both their hearts are left in a hotel room a hundred miles east of here, and this is the only way to escape from it all.
She curls up closer in her seat, not wearing her seatbelt because she says it's uncomfortable. He is, for once. There's this feeling that he should be. He's breaking enough laws, the speed limit for one. He's taking her away from everything she knows and everything he knows, but he doesn't know much, so that doesn't count. It's as if all the books he's read aren't traveling, but the posters she once had in her room of glamorous faraway places, they are.
She's here but she shouldn't be. He'd like to think that where she should be is back in that hotel room; that it's where he should be too. That isn't true, and all this running can't break them away from the painful truth that will crash down eventually.
Moments pass. He doesn't feel the time, and the landscape gives no hints that they are moving at all, other than the blur of the boring colors and the lonely traffic islands every hundred feet or so.
She yawns and wakes, opening her eyes and closing them again. Half of him wants to keep driving, keep driving, ignoring it all. The other half wins. "You feel better?" (She gets carsick.)
She nods. "Do you want me to drive?"
He hesitates before his voice wavers. "I'm fine," he says roughly.
She sits up and touches his arm. "Sure?"
"I'm sure." He says it more harshly than he wants to. She knows what has to happen; she's not stupid. She's just out to make this harder.
Come on, he tells himself. That's not his Rory… No, he means, that's not her. That's not that girl sitting next to him in jeans and his shirt. That girl whose hair is brushed back by the wind, tangled, and he remembers when his hands were in it and that was why. She turns away from him.
"Looking out the window helps," he says in a tone he himself doesn't recognize. The look she trains on him is strange for a moment, and then she relaxes.
"Yeah. Thanks."
He wants to hate her for pretending like nothing happened.
He wants to play last night over and over again in his head, because right now it feels like that's all there is that's good. Now they can't stop because the pain is right behind, chasing and not tiring, and if they do halt it will choke them. It will choke him.
Her head is tilted against the window, watching this bleak view of the world go by. She seems to find it almost interesting. Maybe there's something there he doesn't see. A dark blue car edges near him, and he slows to let it pass.
"Jess…" she says softly.
"Yeah?" He keeps the harshness out of his voice.
"You okay?" She sits up and rubs his arm gently for a second. "There's a rest stop in fifteen miles."
"Reading signs isn't good for motion sickness," he informs her, trying to lighten the mood.
"Reading is good for anything," she answers with a hint of a grin.
"True." He pauses. "There's that book I was telling you about, in my backpack…"
"No, I'm fine."
She's turned entirely away from the window now, looking at him. It's uncomfortable. She's too good at this, too good at spotting problems a mile away, especially in his face. He can hide feelings from everyone else he's ever met, but it's pure fact that she has some kind of sixth sense. Lorelai always said she did, anyway.
"I read somewhere," she says carefully, "that if you drive for more than a hundred miles by yourself, when you're tired, your vision can go down five points."
"Five points?"
"From 20-20 to 20-25…"
"Where did you find that, Ripley's Believe It Or Not?" he jokes. Damn, she's good at this. Against his better judgment, he reaches out and rubs her arm in return, affectionately because he doesn't think he can touch her and feel any other way. "You wanna go to the rest stop? Eat lunch or something?"
It's almost like he's talking to someone he met yesterday. It's driving him crazy fast.
"I know you're tired. And you're the one who let go of the wheel, that time we got ice cream…" She's teasing him. Great. "I'm at least as responsible a driver as you are."
He smirks. "Oh, I know."
"And you should get a good night's sleep, before a drive like this."
He nods.
"Your eyes are almost closing."
"No, they're not."
She knows the reason behind all this. It was why she got into the car with him, wasn't it? She knows. Does she feel the pursuing pain, the guilt? The memories he wants to remember so badly and that he's starting to forget?
"And we…didn't get much sleep last night."
It had to be brought up sometime. But he prefers it to be an untainted memory, one good thing in the midst of everything surrounding them. Doesn't want it beaten into the ground, explained, recapped. Doesn't want to find the hurt that lay underneath it all—the coating, what's visible, what he remembers now: it's good enough.
"No, we didn't." He can hear the coldness in that, and he doesn't correct himself. She sits straighter, facing forward again, not angry, yet…
"Yeah."
Another sign, with fast food restaurant logos, hotel and gas station icons. "We'll be there in ten minutes," he tells her.
"Okay."
There are fewer random comments for a while. He's torn between sorry, regretful, angry…loving. It's a choice he's never been able to make in any situation.
This may be part of the problem.