“We’re fine.” She grins and pops a yellow gummy in her mouth. “Hurry up and get your work done so you can relax and enjoy our next stop.”
“If by next stop, you mean the point at which we have to get out and push Tallulah, count me out.”
She pops another candy into her mouth and turns the radio up, drowning out my concerns with the sounds of aespa.
Resigned to my fate, I tap my noise-cancelling earbuds and return my attention to my inbox, which is once again overflowing. There’s nothing quite like losing your assistant to highlight just how many emails you receive daily.
I plow through my messages, deleting, filing, and shooting off canned responses where I can get away with it. Thirty minutes later, I’ve barely made a dent in my inbox, and I’m typing up a new proposal for the marketing team when Lucy mutters, “Mierda.”
My eyes go straight to the dashboard, where the low fuel light is now glowing orange.
“If this is a ploy to win the bet,” I say, snapping my laptop closed, “you should have offered to let me out at the last gas station.”
“Very funny.”
“Who’s kidding?” I slide the computer into the bag at my feet. “How far until the next stop?”
“Maybe thirty miles?”
That her reply comes out as a question isn’t concerning at all.
I open my mouth to say as much, but she cuts me off.
“If you say ‘I told you so,’ I really am going to let you off at the next stop,” she threatens, shooting me a dark look.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” It’s a bald-faced lie, but I hardly need to say the words for them to be true, and we both know it. “I was just going to suggest you change your shoes when we run out of gas. The only thing worse than hiking ten miles through the desert is probably doing it in flip-flops.”
Lucy lifts her chin, but I don’t miss the way her grip tightens on the steering wheel.
“Who said anything about hiking? We can hitchhike.”
“Like hell.” There is no fucking way I’m going to let her get in a car with a stranger. I’m all about personal agency, but in this case, I’ll make an exception, even if it means I have to lock her in the Airstream while I go for help. “We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if you’d just listened to me and stopped for gas.”
She huffs out a breath. “I did the math in my head. We should’ve had more than enough fuel to make it to the next stop.”
“The math?”
“Yes. The math. You know, distance traveled divided by miles per gallon?” She quirks a smile. “Turns out those standardized tests aren’t entirely useless.”
“Did your standardized test include an adjustment for towing a trailer?”
We’ve got a few thousand pounds dragging behind us. I’m not a mathematical genius, but that has to impact fuel efficiency.
She does a slow blink and her knuckles go white as she realizes her mistake.
“It’s possible there was an error in my calculations.”
A laugh bubbles up from my gut, bursting from my lips. It’s raucous, but damn if it doesn’t feel good.
“I fail to see the humor in the situation,” she says, worry creasing her brow.
“Then you’re not looking hard enough.” I scrub a hand over my face, blinking back tears. “This might be the first time you’ve ever admitted to being wrong.”
She rolls her eyes.
“And it’s definitely the first time you missed such an important detail. One even I picked up on, despite being… What did you call it? Oh, right. Surface level.”
Another quiet laugh escapes, and this time, Lucy joins in.
