“What do we have here?” He pushes off the tree and peeks into the bag.
“I’ll show you.”
She cracks open the journal to its first blank page, the paper speckled with leaf-shaped shadows. She passes it to James before unscrewing the pen’s glass barrel. Wincing, she digs the tip of the pen into her palm until she draws blood. Then, with the nib wedged between folds of her flesh, she presses the plunger down and begins the process of extracting blood from her hand.
It tickles in a horrible way. Like someone pulling a sheet beneath her skin, tugging toward that incision in her palm. Within a minute, the pen is full. A part of her hates that James has to see this, but she refuses to feel shameful about what she is. Who she is. She gets one shot now, and if she has to live afraid of herself, she won’t be living at all.
In the car, Nelle flips through the new journal. The road is dotted with red brake lights and gray puddles. She runs her finger over the half-filled first page. On their way from the park to the twelve-hour garage where they left the truck, they detoured at a coffee shop and an independent bookstore filled with putrid cats. James loved them and scratched each one between the ears. Nelle thought they were cute until a long-haired orange one hissed at her. She hissed back, which made James laugh.
The last line in the journal fuzzies up her stomach.Nelle rides in the car.With the road ahead of her, she can go anywhere.
She shuts the leather cover, slides it into the inner pocket of James’s denim jacket, and reclines her seat until she’s staring at the ceiling of the cab.
“Where’s the next stop?” she asks.
“We can stop wherever you want. Whenever you want.”
She studies the slope of his nose. The bags under his eyes, how his cheekbones sluice down his face. The brown curl tickling his brow.
“Thank you.”
His head ticks. “Why do you say that?”
“I thought I’d be stuck in that house with Quill forever. I never imagined ...” Her throat closes up, and she laughs at her own emotions. “I never thought I’d be here, in the car with someone like you, driving aimlessly.”
“Welcome to freedom,” James says.
So much beauty in the natural world. Craggy trees, wispy clouds, rain, stars, and seas. Cats and fireflies and rats. And the architecture. The art. The people, too. Random pedestrians, a shop owner, James—she falls in love with them just for being human.
“What do you want to see?” he asks. “I’d like to visit New York eventually, but we can go anywhere you want.”
Anywhere I want.Nelle pulls her legs to her chest. “Paris. London. Scotland. Madrid, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Alaska, Boston, Vegas, Salt Lake City—”
“So . . . everywhere?”
She grins into her knees. “Oh, and Africa. I’ve always wanted to see a lion.”
“We can go to a zoo.”
“Not a lion in a cage,” she says. “And not just in a book, either.”
Tires roar on the interstate, eighty miles per hour breaking into ninety.
James blinks salt, his caffeine and adrenaline stores long depleted. “Shall we pull off?”
He takes the next exit. Nelle leans out the window, her hair a fiery blond tangle. The road curves into a forest, which opens up onto fields of sleeping cows and horses.
“This is amazing!” she yells, tasting summer’s breath.
James pulls onto the side of the road in a stretch of grass by the tree line. “Aren’t you exhausted?”
He cuts the truck off, and the headlights die, leaving them stranded in darkness.
Nelle gasps for air through her laughter, skin buzzing as her heart rate slows. “What are we doing?”
“Sleeping. You do sleep, right?” He grabs two rolled quilts from the back seat. At her nod, he says, “You all right with sharing the truck bed?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” she says, though the thought of sleeping beside him makes her want to choke. She sits, still buckled.Is he going to leave me in here?
