“You invited me. Aren’t you supposed to be all happy I’m coming?”
He puts his arm around me. It’s so rigid that stretched out, it could be a battering ram. Which makes me feel kind of secure. I might need a battering ram.
But he was so smiley before. After we changed the subject. After we buried the whole conversation about his horrible dad in three boxes’ worth of baked blueberries and lightly whipped cream. He ate seconds. He had a purple tongue from all the berries.
God, I don’t want to leave him. Have to. Don’t want to.
“Can we please go?” he says. He takes the grocery bag and drags me out the door.
All the way to the car, he’s bent over me like a live raincoat with a hood. My head is under his chin for part of the walk, and then he’s moving from one side of me to the other on the sidewalk, like he can’t make up his mind.
I say, “You’re acting kind of strange.”
He says, “Hurry up.”
We drive through student housing, south of the college, and then pull onto the freeway. Then off. Then on again.
I say, “Do you even know where we’re going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Then it occurs to me that maybe this is the big seduction scene.
A car that smells like peanut butter sandwiches so isn’t what I had in mind.
He reaches behind my head and weaves his fingers through my hair. “We could be in the mountains in two hours. It’ll be awesome.”
Except he’s changed directions twice.
I say, “Are you all right? Listen, if you’d rather go to a motel instead of the mountains, I might be open to it.”
One last slight fling.
Why not?
I know why not, but I halfway don’t care.
“You might be?” he says. “I have to keep outwitting you to hang on to my virtue.”
“Stop teasing me.”
“I’m sorry.” He sounds kind of shocked, actually. “You want to go to a motel with me?”
Shock is not what I was after. “That might not mean what you think it means. You know, fool around a little. Not conceive your first-born child. Sack out. Beats going into a ditch when the driver falls asleep.”
“So fooling around with me . . . or whatever . . . would be a step up from being in a car wreck?”
“Possibly two steps. Even three.” I have no idea what I’m doing to freak him out, but he’s driving like a crazy person. Perfect speed limit, checking his rearview constantly. First we were pointed south, then west, and now we’re pointed toward the mountains.
I say, “We could park and eat sandwiches. We could wait a while. Maybe you’ll feel better.”
“Wait for what?” He’s shouting at me.
“Don’t yell at me! It’s not like I’m questioning your manhood. Do you want me to drive?”
He shouts, “I’m fine!” Looking straight ahead, he says, “I need to talk to you. Let’s get out of here.”
We need to talk??? This is so not what I had in mind.
“Just so you know, you can’t break up with people after you drive them two hours from home. It’s bad form. If that’s what this is.” I’m rethinking my stealth breakup by disappearance. If this is what breaking up with him feels like.
“How can we break up if we were never together?”
This feels like a blow to the head until I remember I’m the one who said we weren’t together in the first, second, and third place.
“Are you teasing me?” I say. “Because I thought all was forgiven. Only then you call me at three in the morning because you’re pissed off and you want a sandwich.”
“Are you angry? You sound angry.”
I snap, “I’m not angry!”
“Because if you’re angry that I didn’t spill my guts about how it felt to have a guy three times my size come at me with a belt buckle, get used to being angry.”
“You’re the one who’s angry. And I wasn’t pressuring you to spill anything. When you said you couldn’t talk about it, I respected that.”
J accelerates around a curve so fast, I’m afraid we’re going to spin out.
I try again. I touch his arm. “I hate what happened to you. And”—giant leap—“I understand. I do. I get what it’s like to have somebody you lean on turn on you. I get not being able to talk about it.”
He tightens his grip on my hair. “Why, did somebody turn on you?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
He pulls his hand out of my hair. “That’s not funny.” Scary voice I do not want to hear again. Ever.
“You so don’t get me! I wasn’t mocking you! Stop growling at me!”
How could he think I’d tease him over something like that? I was being honest. We’re miles from civilization. We’ve turned off the main road and we’re heading into the national forest. Soon we’ll be fighting on hairpin turns. In mountains. Narrow roads, sheer drops. Fighting.
I’m from Northeast Ohio. It’s flat from crushing sheets of glacial ice. Taking the Greyhound bus across the Rockies was a nightmare. Being scared that you’re about to crash through a guardrail because the driver is yelling at you isn’t romantic.
“I want to go home.”