by Selena Scott
A few more miles passed until Dawn spoke again. “Jeez. I didn’t even know there was this much sky in the first place.” She leaned forward to peer out the front windshield.
“Yeah. I know. This part of the country has a lot of sky.” They were in Wyoming now, the burnt, red rocks of Utah in their rearview mirror. Now the hills were flattened and green in the distance, but a scrubby brown up close. And the sky was gigantic, taking up more than half of their vision, seeming to stretch farther than even the earth itself.
“I didn’t think the sky would look different in different parts of the country.”
“Yeah. I’ve got family in Michigan. In the winter there, it’s just a flat gray lid. It looks like it’s about two feet away from you at all times. But Louisiana, for example? There the sky is freaking tall. I can’t explain it, but the clouds just go up and up forever.”
“And here it goes on and on forever. Jeez. It makes this road look endless.”
“It pretty much is. We’re on this same road for about twenty more hours.”
She studied him for a minute and he tried to hold still under her perusal. “I can drive, you know,” she said after a minute. “I don’t mind taking over. You drove all day yesterday. You’re probably stiff.”
His eyebrows came down as he swung his head to look at her. “You worried about my well-being, Dawn?”
She flinched and faced out the window again. “No.”
It was almost like she was reminding herself that he wasn’t someone she cared about. Like she’d forgotten, at least for the length of this conversation, that he was her enemy.
CHAPTER FOUR
Two hundred miles later, he let her drive.
And she was freaking grateful for the task. Sitting in the passenger seat, twiddling her thumbs, trying not to think about the fate she was barreling toward, trying not to think about the family she was leaving behind, and most of all, trying not to think about the man who was sitting beside her—it was such a confusing tangle of anger and sadness coursing through her. It was a holy relief to just stare at the road ahead, her only job to keep the car on the road.
“It’s kind of fun to drive on the highway,” she mused after a while. “Way more fun than city driving.”
“Definitely. People have written songs about it.”
“Really?”
“Sure. You’ve probably heard some of them on the radio. On the road again…”
The side of her mouth that he couldn’t see quirked up in a half-smile. She’d never heard him sing before. He was not good at it.
She shook her head to let him know that she didn’t know that song.
“No? Okay what about, life is a highway…”
He sang a few more lyrics and then segued off into what she assumed was supposed to be some sort of instrumental segment, though she couldn’t for the life of her have guessed which instrument it was supposed to be.
This time the smile couldn’t be contained to one side of her mouth, though she quickly coughed and pursed her lips to keep it from growing too large. She shook her head again.
“Not that one either? Jeez, you have to listen to the radio more often. How about baby, you can drive my car.”
But even before she could shake her head no, he was already cutting himself off.
“Actually,” he said, “I’m not even sure that one is really about driving a car. It’s probably an innuendo for something else. Beatles songs are never about what you think they’re about.”
“Who are the Beatles?”
“Oh my god.” He lowered his face into his palm. “Man, I must have really sucked as a mentor if I didn’t even properly introduce you to the Beatles.”
“Yeah, I think you pretty much destroyed any chances at having been a good mentor the day you sold me and my brothers to a shady government program to be tortured and experimented on.”
The silence in the car was so perfectly chilly that you could have slicked across it on an ice skate.
She’d effectively murdered the good feeling between them and she couldn’t say she was sorry. She only felt kindly toward him when she let herself forget what he’d done. Solution? Simply keep reminding herself that the man beside her was a snake.
“I guess I deserve that,” he said in a low voice. A few miles passed by while he stared out the window. She noticed that now, though, he held perfectly still. He was no longer bouncing a leg or drumming his fingers. His light had gone out. He was hiding in plain sight. She’d seen rabbits do the same thing when confronted with a predator.
They were almost out of Wyoming, the craggy hills turned to rolling ones lined with velvet green, when she spoke again.
“I’m hungry.”
“All right. Let’s see if there’s any good restaurants coming up.” He reached into his pants pocket and froze. “Oh. Right. Neither of us have phones.”
“So, we’ll just have to starve?” she asked sardonically. She’d only had use of a cell phone for a few months and it never ceased to amaze her how dependent people were on them. For 95% of her life, she and her brothers had literally hunted their own food. Every single meal. They’d survived, as wolves, through every winter, every rainstorm. They’d hung together and found shelter and warmth and water. It didn’t get much more self-sufficient than that. Even as adaptable as Dawn had discovered herself to be, she’d been pretty flabbergasted by the idea of Yelp.
Restaurants were literally places where all you had to do was hand over money and they handed over food. A living miracle.
And yet burritosavant069 could have a terse interaction with a waiter and effectively tank an establishment’s Yelp score. Sigh. What an embarrassingly human practice.
“No. I won’t let you starve.”
She frowned at his serious tone. It wasn’t that she wanted to joke with him, necessarily, but the way he’d said that made her think that he really meant it. Which was confusing, considering the fact that he was a complete and utter traitor.
“We’re coming up on Laramie. Just pull off when we get there and we’ll find something to eat.”
They found themselves driving down a main drag of Laramie, Wyoming, just in time for lunch. An hour or so before, Dawn had inspected the sandwiches that Sasha had packed for them and deemed them much too soggy to eat. It had seemed to cause Quill a jolt of satisfaction, but she hadn’t given it too much thought. So, now, here they were looking for a place to have lunch.
“Oooh!” Dawn shouted, pointing out Quill’s window and accidentally swerving the car.
“Watch it!” Quill flew across the console and grabbed hold of the wheel, straightening the car in the lane. “Jesus!”
“Sorry,” Dawn said, bringing her shoulders up around her ears and deftly parking the car on a side street.
“What the hell was that all about?”
“I found the place where I wanted to eat lunch.”
“…and promptly decided to commit a murder/suicide by driving into oncoming traffic?”
“So, I got a little overexcited. You would too if you’d seen what I had.”
They got out the car and rounded the corner so that Dawn could rise up to her tiptoes and point toward the restaurant she’d seen.
Quill squinted to see the sign and then rolled his eyes, chagrined laughter puffing out of him.
For some reason, that laughter made her want to take a step closer to him. She didn’t, of course, but still, the unexplainable desire floated up out of nowhere.
“The Library,” he mused, reading the name of the brewery and grill. “Of course a nerd like you would want to eat lunch in a library.”
“It’s not an actual library, I’m sure. And besides, I didn’t even get to properly resign from my job at the library in Portland. I’m driving across the country to turn my life over to some whacko in order to save my family. The very least you can do for me is let me say goodbye to my dream job in a bar masquerading as a library.”
He sighed and followed her down the block. When sh
e glanced back at him, his light, pretty eyes were on the ground, watching the sidewalk squares tick away under his feet. The look on his face, it was almost… defeated. For a moment, Dawn wondered if he was actually starting to feel bad about the predicament that he’d put her in.
It was much easier for her to think of him as unrepentant, so she turned back to face forward and marched right into the restaurant.
They were apparently on the earlier side because there was only one other customer in the whole joint. He was a kid wearing a backwards baseball cap and glancing repeatedly at the front door of the restaurant. His knee jumped up and down and Dawn instantly guessed that this was some kind of first date situation.
“Sit anywhere you like!” called a scratchy voice from somewhere behind the bar. A moment later, a youngish woman with a blunt black bob stood up, a tray of steaming glasses in her hand. She lined the glasses up behind the bar and surveyed Dawn. A moment later, Quill followed Dawn into the bar and Dawn watched as the waitress’ eyes sharpened with feminine interest.
The waitress looked between Dawn and Quill, trying to figure out if they were eating together or separately, and Dawn had to fight the urge to roll her eyes.
“The waitress wants to spread you on a cracker,” she muttered to Quill as they sat at a four-top by the window.
“They usually do,” he muttered back, not even bothering to look up. Grabbing a menu, he seemed to choose a sandwich at random, jabbing a finger at it. “Order that for me, will you? I’m going to hit the bathroom.”
Dawn watched him go and then turned to her own menu with a shrug.
“Your boyfriend’s a looker,” the waitress said as she sidled up to the table, looking in the direction that Quill had just gone, sucking her teeth.
“He’s not my boyfriend and trust me, he gets significantly less attractive the better you get to know him.”
The waitress swung her gaze to Dawn and laughed in surprise. “You got a mouth on you, girly.”
“Hm.” Dawn wasn’t sure what to say to that. Honestly, she was kind of surprising herself here. Usually, she was quiet and demure, barely saying more than she absolutely had to when she spoke to a stranger. Something about the last few days had shaken something loose within her, apparently.
It felt good.
“He’ll have the turkey Rueben and I’ll have the bleu burger. Two Cokes. Thanks.”
The waitress raised her eyebrows at Dawn’s tone, but she didn’t say anything more. The front door opened and closed and the kid across the restaurant swung his expectant gaze upward like a dog waiting for his master to come home from work. But it was only an older gentleman in a corduroy vest and dusty boots who walked in. The kid sagged down in disappointment.
A moment later, Quill was sliding back into his seat.
“Did you just go to the bathroom in order to avoid the waitress?”
Quill pursed his lips. “So what if I did?”
Dawn plopped her chin on her hand and raised her eyebrows. “You don’t want the waitress to spread you on a cracker?”
Quill leaned back and crossed his arms. “I liked you better when you didn’t talk.”
Dawn snorted and rolled her eyes. A moment later, the waitress was back with their drinks. “Sandwiches’ll be out in a minute. Anything else you need in the meantime?”
She was looking right at Quill as she spoke but he was looking pointedly out the window instead of interacting with her.
“Huh,” the waitress said to Dawn a moment later. “I think I see what you mean about getting to know him.”
“What did she mean by that?” Quill asked once the waitress had left.
“Huh? Oh, nothing. She just told me that you were hot and I explained that it was pretty much your one and only positive attribute.”
Quill flushed but Dawn couldn’t tell if it was in embarrassment or insult. A moment later, though, he was tipping his chin down, looking up at her through his thick fringe of dark lashes, his hair tumbling over his forehead. “So. You think I’m hot?”
She huffed out a laugh and rolled her eyes. “Stop flirting with me, traitor.”
He clapped his mouth closed but his silence didn’t seem quite as tense as it had been before. They waited for their food in silence and ate in silence once it came. Halfway through the meal, the door swung open and finally, the kid across the restaurant got what he was looking for. Quill’s eyes swung up and followed the path of the twenty-something blond who sashayed across the restaurant to join her date.
Dawn narrowed her eyes at him, but neither of them said anything for the rest of the meal. Quill paid while Dawn ran to the bathroom and by the time they met at the car, he’d already bought some snacks at the drug store.
She slid back into the driver’s seat and waited until they were on the road to ask the question that was burning in the back of her throat. She didn’t think she could go another mile without asking it. Which was a bummer, because it showed her hand a little bit.
“So. You’re into blonds, then?”
“Huh?” he swung his eyes from the landscape over to her.
“The blond in the restaurant, you watched her. And Jen was a blond too. Are blonds your thing?”
“Not especially,” he said after a minute.
It was probably a good time to let the subject drop, but Dawn was like a dog with a bone. “What was the deal with you and Jen anyways? I sensed some weird energy there the one time I met her.”
He just looked at her, as if she were a puzzle he was trying to solve.
“What?” she demanded. “You can ask for all the details on my love life and I’m not allowed to ask about yours?”
He jounced his closed fist up and down on his knee for a minute. “There’s not weird energy between me and Jen. It was… nothing special. And “love life” might be pushing it a little too far.”
“You didn’t love her?”
He laughed reflexively. “No, of course not.”
“Why of course not? Isn’t that the point of dating? To share love with someone? Maybe find the person you want to spend your life with?”
“I’m sure that’s the point of dating for some people. Not for me. And certainly not for Jen.”
Dawn had the feeling that he was implying something that someone who’d grown up in human culture might have gleaned already. But she hadn’t grown up in human culture and she was only armed with the small library of romance novels she kept on her Kindle back home. She flipped through the Rolodex of her memory, trying to find some scenario she’d read about that might shed light on this situation. She came up empty.
“Why?” she eventually asked.
“Why isn’t Jen looking for love?”
“Sure.” It was one of the many questions she was looking for the answer to.
“I mean, I guess I can’t say whether or not Jen is looking for love in general, but she definitely wasn’t looking for it from me.”
“What did she want, then?”
“Sex.” His icy eyes swung toward her. “Pretty much exclusively sex.”
“Right.” She faced the road and felt dumb for not having put two and two together before this. Of course that was the other reason that people dated. They wanted love, companionship, and sex. Sometimes all three and sometimes a combination of the three. It was just that sex in her relationship with Sasha had been so minimal that it kind of fell off her radar when she thought about other people’s relationships. It seemed obvious to her now that Jen would have wanted Quill for sex.
Dawn glanced at him and in the afternoon sunlight that slanted in through the window, she was slightly surprised to see a little russet in the dark strands of his hair. He was dark, made of shadows, every angle sharp and sure. Such a contrast to friendly, light Sasha with his rounded nose and wide smile.
But yeah, Jen and the waitress at the Library were right. Quill was hot. Empirically. And as much as it pained Dawn to admit it to herself now, there was a time when she’d been as susceptible to his ch
arms as these other women obviously were. She’d had a little crush. So sue her. It had obviously dried up the minute she’d confirmed his betrayal. But still, yeah, no use denying that he had a certain dark beauty that drew the eye.
“So,” she cleared her throat. “You two broke up when the sex got boring or something?”
He lifted an eyebrow at her.
“Oh, come on, Quill,” Dawn huffed. “We have, like, a million hours to drive before we hit our destination, which, by the way, is a destination neither of us are very excited to get to in the first place. Will you just freaking chat with me?”
He laughed, his lips twisting to one side. She thought he mentioned something about her wanting to do this the hard way. He cleared his throat. “The sex wasn’t boring with Jen. It was just very, ah, one dimensional.”
“What do you mean? Like impersonal?”
“Not exactly. She just didn’t care about me at all. She only wanted me because—” He turned to her with his eyes narrowed. “Have you ever heard of shifter chasers?”
“Nope.”
“Well, Jen is a shifter chaser. It means that she thinks shifters are really hot. She gets off on it. Only dates dudes who are shifters.”
“What? Is that a thing?”
Quill smirked. “That is definitely a thing.”
“Oh, gross,” she said, frowning at the expression on his face.
“What? It’s not like being a shifter has historically had very many perks. Being a sexual fetish for someone like Jen was not a bad thing while it lasted.”
Dawn frowned, but unfortunately, she kind of got his point. Jen was hot. She imagined Quill had probably enjoyed that a fair amount. She was a little flabbergasted by the whole revelation, but she refused to be speechless. She forced a question out through a dry mouth.
“So, it didn’t last because…?”
Quill drummed his fingers against his knee. A few long moments passed but Dawn recognized it as him gathering his thoughts. “Jen is kind of a hit-it-and-quit-it type. We dated for about a month and a half. It was kind of a personal record for both of us. But then she got work in Eugene and neither of us cared enough to be long distance. It was over.”
