Ro’s got the truck iced out by the time I meet him out front. On another warm summer night, I’d welcome the AC, but when I get drunk, I get tired, and when I get tired, I get cold.
I hardly register the shiver ripple up my spine. “Thanks for waiting. Pizza was the thing I missed most when I was in Kansas. Don’t tell Zola I said that.”
Ro laughs and wordlessly reaches into the back seat to retrieve an enormous black hoodie. He’s already turned the air off, but I don’t argue when he holds it out to me. I slip into the plushness, burying my nose in the cowl neck once it’s over my head. Because I’m cold. Obviously. Not because it smells clean and earthy, a little minty, with the tiniest hint of musk. Just like him.
“What were you doing in Kansas?”
I turn toward his voice and the outline of his strong profile.The visual serves as a reminder that if I can see him, he can see me too. So I should probably stop sniffing his clothes.
“Oh,” I say, almost forgetting I’d mentioned it. “That’s where I went to school. The University of Kansas.”
“Well, damn, E. That’s your problem. What’s an East Coast girl gonna do with the guys in Kansas?”
“Oh, you East Coasters had my heart plenty black and dead by the time I left,” I say, laughing. “But shocking as it may be, I went for the school. Not the men. And Kansas has a great early education program.”
“Oh, are we talking about that now? The other day, it was off-limits.”
“Please don’t. I still feel terrible about that,” I admit freely. “I don’t know if it makes it better or worse, but it really had nothing to do with you. Everything’s just been so off since I got back—Zola had been in my ear that whole day, I thought my best friend was blowing me off, and you caught me mid-realization that what had felt like four years of forward progress might’ve been a giant fucking circle that dropped me off right back where I started. You were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
No more than a single breath passes after I finish, a single beat, but it’s enough time for me to want to take it all back. “Sorry. That probably doesn’t make sense out of context. Ignore me. I’m drunk.”
Ro smiles, and it’s even more brilliant in the moonlight somehow. “I don’t think you’re that drunk anymore.”
He pulls away from the stop sign, leaving the moment and my confessions behind.
We’re a few miles down the road when Ro breaks our comfortable silence. “I still don’t get what kind ofbreak the internet,straight to jail without passing godirt Zola has on you to get you toagree to these dates. The more I get to know you, the less sense it makes.”
“I’m gonna take that as a compliment,” I say, laughing.
“You should! You don’t seem like you get caught up doing things you don’t want to.”
“You’ve met my sister,” I joke, hoping maybe this time he’ll let me off the hook.
The hum of Ro’s tires on the highway fills the silence until he offers me an out I should take. “It doesn’t matter if it makes sense to me. You know what you’re doing.”
“I thought I did.”
Even to me, the words sound cryptic. But I’ve been trying to answer this question myself for weeks. I didn’t expect to do it tonight with an audience.
“This one doesn’t have a quick answer,” I say, offering him one last chance to stop the clock on this impromptu therapy session.
But he doesn’t take it. “I’ve got time.”
I try to remember how I got here, but it goes so much further back than coming home.
“My dad was hilarious,” I say, before I can stop myself. “Sometimes it’s the only good thing I remember about him. If he was around, somebody was laughing. I used to love that—how laughter followed him. And my mom was all heart. Zola’s always been exactlyZola—this genius firecracker of a person. Everybody in my family had their thing. But I could never figure mine out. It was like everything good had already been spoken for before I came along. So I just tried to fly under the radar. I used to prefer it that way.”
At the stop sign Ro looks at me. His eye contact is so focused and intense that I know his silence is not for lack of interest.
“But then my dad left, and nothing fit together the way ithad before. He took the laughter with him. And my mom’s giant heart that had always been her superpower became an overnight liability. She’d go from being a puddle on the kitchen floor to some random guy’s fiancée and back again.”
We still haven’t moved from the stop sign. Ro still hasn’t stopped watching me. And despite my better judgment, I still haven’t stopped talking.
“Zola stepped up to keep things on track. She shouldered a lot of it, and I think it burned her out. And it sounds pathetic now, but when everything fell apart like that, I finally saw an opening. My mom and Zo needed me. I became the bridge between the bleeding heart and the brain. And I did it well. The three of us made sense together. It feels like that again now.”
“And that’s why you’re doing this? To hold them together. To help them make sense.”
“It’s not like I have anything better going on,” I try, but by the look on Ro’s face, he’s unamused.
