She gripped the steering wheel resolutely and refused to blink away the tears blurring the highway. The same sad song played on repeat and when she could remember to, she sang along. Now and then she felt that she wasn’t breathing and let a few bullish exhales blast through her nostrils. And then the ragged inhale, like a hiccup. She imagined her blood cells as tiny boats carrying little packages of oxygen through her body and the tight chest feeling breaks. A cool easiness oozes from her core to her extremities. She watched the pink rush back to her fingernails and the road become clear as the tears dive from her eyelids to her cheeks. A look in the rearview mirror made her smile maniacally and she thought hard about breathing so the tight chest feeling wouldn’t come back yet. The road stretched straight and lazy disappearing between a V of cornfields several miles back. His head bobbed dumbly in and out of the frame of her view.
“I guess now is the time when I’m supposed to say something crazy like ‘It didn’t have to be like this’ or ‘How could you do it?’ Right? Finish painting my martyr mask and take the stage on my own personal tragedy. You’d love that, wouldn’t you.”
He responded with a few panicky grunts muffled by the hood.
The hood might be a bit much, she thought, and her throat closed. She realized with a choke that she had really come this far and couldn’t turn back now. The insanity was tenuous and wavering, and as reason peeked through the muddle of her mind – a swirl of emotions in finger paints, rage and hurt and fear and betrayal – the tight chest feeling wound itself around her lungs again. Her eyes burned.
A few deliberate grunts hummed through the hood.
“What was that?”
Grunts again, this time with the rhythm and inflection of speech more distinct.
“Speak up, I can’t hear you,” she grinned through the new tears, ” ‘Where-are-you-tak-ing-me?’ Is that what you said? ‘Where are you taking me?’ Where am I taking you. Well.”
She turned down the music. Her foot pressed the gas. She let herself get lost in the coral sunset smeared above the cornfields, but felt too hollow to cry anymore. She was just about to remember to answer his question when a familiar three syllable grunt lilted through the hood.
A spray of gravel from the road’s narrow shoulder cascaded around the car as she skidded to a halt – in a flash, she was in the backseat at his throat yanking the hood back to reveal his eyes, gripping his face like a vise, watching her nails sink into his jaw. She tried not to recoil from the softness of his cheeks or kiss him or trace his eyebrow with her lips. “Say ‘I love you’ one more time,” she growled through clenched teeth, “and some poor trucker will have to squeegie your tongue off his windshield.”
She threw his head back against the window, then leaned in to cover him again, with a slow tenderness. And got back in the driver’s seat. Put on her seatbelt. And with a breath, began to drive.