Once we’re back on the road, he brings it up again.
“I get that your work is off-limits,” he says, his eyes never leaving the road. “But when it’s the only thing you care about, it makes small talk...hard.”
I don’t bother to argue the point that it’s the only thing I care about. I won’t win that fight.
“Nobody said we had to make small talk,” I mutter.
“Touché.”
“This road trip was your idea,” I point out.
“Because I know how important it is to you to get home for Christmas.”
Something about the way he says that takes my breath away, makes me all hot and furious inside. “So magnanimous!”
“Come on, Roar, you didn’t have another option, and I was right there.”
“I could’ve rented a car.”
He snorts. “You think there are any rental cars left? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”
Deep down, I know that.
But I still bristle. “Why did you come to check on me?”
“You really want to pick a fight about me trying to be a good friend?”
“Maybe. Yes.” I sigh. “No.”
He nods. Then he groans. “I don’t know how to turn off the part of my brain that thinks about you. You, uh, still have your location shared with me. I was checking to see where you were on the road, and when I saw that you hadn’t left yet, I knew there was a problem. And when there’s a problem for you, Rory, there’s a problem for me.”
Hot tears press against the inside of my eyelids. I wish his desire to fix my problems didn’t extend to a need to fixme, too.
“I don’t even know why we fight anymore,” I say, after a long stretch of silence. “Half the time I’m not sure what we’re even fighting about sometimes.”
Garrett shoots me a surprised look. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Like we just keep picking up an old fight that we never finished?”
That feels surprisingly accurate. We never got closure on our breakup. We went from raw emotion to a cold agreement that we needed a break so fast, there was no processing time. And then it was painfully polite, like a Cold War, followed by heated clashes that turned sexy every time instead of actually resolving anything.
“It’s not as if we had a lot of practice arguing,” I muse out loud. “We didn’t fight this much when we were together. I mean, before those last couple months.”
His jaw flexes. “Is that how you remember it?”
I blink. “Do you remember it differently? When did we fight?”
His body tenses, his shoulders hunching up around his ears. His hands grip the steering wheel so tight, his forearms flex.
“Only like… every four years.” He says flatly. “Or five, in this case.”
I frown. “What do you mean, once every four or five years?”
“Every time you finished another chunk of your school, Roar, you moved the goalposts. And when it happened again and again, I started to feel like everything we had agreed upon to that point was a lie.”
“A lie?” Oh, this, this feels real. This feels raw, but we’re getting somewhere now. Yes, wedoneed closure on this, apparently, because Ineverlied to him, ever.
I swallow hard, staring out at the frozen highway unfolding ahead of us.
My throat tightens, but I don’t cry. Not yet. But God, we are long overdue for this fight. And maybe, finally, for what comes after it. My voice is barely above a whisper. “I never lied to you. You knew. You knew, from before we started dating. You knew when I was seventeen that I wanted to be a doctor.”
