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Instead he just hops off into the snow and walks to the edge of the road.
“Where is he going?” I ask, watching him through the window.
“Who knows?” Tate replies. “But that’s Ares for you. He hates sitting still when he doesn’t have to.”
I’m about to say I have no idea what the other option is when an SUV comes down the road and Ares starts to wave at them. To my surprise, the vehicle actually slows to a stop, and the driver rolls their window down to talk to Ares.
He only talks for a while, but there’s a new light in his eyes when he climbs back onto the bus and comes back to us.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I ask, bewildered.
“I got us a ride.”
“You did what?” Tate wants to know. “With a stranger in an SUV?”
Callan makes a low, skeptical noise.
“It’s fine,” Ares insists. “Just get your stuff, and let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Since the other option is staying on a broken down bus in the middle of a snowstorm, we follow his lead, grabbing our things and heading off the bus and back into the weather.
The SUV has pulled over and the hatch is open for our bags. Standing next to it is a small woman with a knitted beanie pulled down low over dark curls. She’s shorter than me, and I realize that Ares must be banking on the fact that if she tries to pull anything, we—or at least Callan—can take her.
“Better than sitting on a bus all day?” Ares asks me.
I glance at him, surprised he’s talking to me at all. “Yeah, I guess so. That was actually quick thinking to try to hitch a ride with someone.”
Ares smirks. “Well… you might not love it when you realize why she agreed to take us.”
Before I can ask him what the hell that’s supposed to mean, the woman bounds over to us, her eyes bright with excitement. “Oh my god, it is you!” she says, clapping her hands together. “You’re Brynn Carter!”
Oh great. She’s a fan.
Ares snickers from behind me, taking my bags so he can toss them into the back of the SUV.
“Uh yes,” I say, at a loss for what else to do. “That’s me.”
“This is crazy. This is amazing. My friends are never going to believe me when I tell them this happened. Everyone was all, ‘No, Steph, you shouldn’t go out with the weather this bad’, but look at what happened! I get to give Brynn Carter and her guys a lift.”
“They’re not really—”
“Come on!” she says, not letting me get a word in edgewise. “Let’s get you guys out of the snow and on the road.”
That’s at least a good suggestion. I start to go for the back seat, but Steph doesn’t let me get that far. She ushers me into the passenger seat next to her, leaving Ares, Tate, and Callan to squeeze together in the back.
It’s uncomfortable, but at least we’re moving again.
“Your music saved my life,” Steph says, merging back onto the road. “And I know you probably hear that a lot, but I mean it. I was going through this breakup, and everything reminded me of him, you know? All the shows we used to watch, all the stuff we did together. And then randomly I heard a song of yours when I was at the grocery store trying to remember what kind of ice cream I liked before he came along, and it was like… everything just fell into place that I was going to be okay. I looked you up as soon as I got back to the car.”
“Oh, well, I’m glad it resonated with you,” I say, not sure what else to tell her. The gushing fans have always been the part of being famous that I’ve never known how to deal with well.
“I just felt like you really understood how I was feeling. When I heard Fly Free, I just… I sat in my car and cried for like an hour. How did you even write that song?”
Fly Free is a song off one of my earlier EPs, just something I wrote over the course of a night, eating leftover Chinese food and feeling disconnected from my life and my hometown. I never expected it to get as popular as it did, and Steph is not the first person to tell me it resonated with them after a breakup or some other big change.
“I just wrote what I was feeling at the time,” I tell her, my cheeks flushing. It’s weird talking about all of this, especially with an audience in the back seat. “That’s all I ever do, really.”
