by Cal, Sarah
Emma gave a sharp nod. "I promise that we'll return with something to show for our trip."
As they set off, she really hoped that was true. The last thing she wanted was to leave them with more disappointment after last time, even as she was glad to be leaving town if only for a little while.
Chapter 6
Emma, Brian and Chase rode in silence.
It was worrying, for several reasons. Emma knew Chase was still angry, if she would have let him, he probably would have started a fight with Brian. Brian, who wasn’t the kind of person that would back down from any kind of fight. She was pretty sure they both felt the aggression Chase barely held back, and Brian was ready to rise against it with his own.
She didn’t want to see them fight. Especially because of her, over her. She could have told them not to bother, but she didn’t think they would just listen. Chase, for once, wasn’t thinking rationality and his relatively happy go lucky personality was nowhere to be seen.
The silence would have been appreciated over their arguing, except she knew they wanted to go up against each other. Chase for some slight she couldn’t understand, Brian because he was already on edge in a tough situation and having someone treat him like this wasn’t exactly helping.
It's all my fault.
The words kept running through her mind, and she knew it was true. She'd done something she knew was wrong, and kept doing it anyway. If she'd just not gotten involved with Brian, or stopped after the first time they fell into whatever it was between them, Chase never would have found out about it happening. She would have put it out of her mind, acted like it never happened. The situation would have been different.
Instead, she rode between them two of them, quite deliberately separating them, and the pressure falling on her because of it depressed her a little.
"Do you guys have any idea what we could find," she offered as a start point to a conversation.
"Who knows," Chase muttered. "It could be what we saw before, it could be worse."
Brian hummed. "It could be like what we saw when we went to see Williams."
Though both of them sounded matter-of-fact, she could almost imagine them drawing lines. She'd gone with both of them out on different occasions to different towns, and they weren’t letting the other forget it.
She huffed to herself, resolving to keep quiet. They were both acting like sulky teenagers, and she wouldn’t get anything useful out of them with the way they were acting. No matter how much it made her stomach roll because of the tension that had fallen over their little group as soon as Brian had joined them.
Emma had been trying to coax conversation out of the men since they left town, but they were both brooding. She hadn't gotten a real answer to any question, just more of the same and they had been out several hours already. She was tempted to be mad at them. Whatever problem they had with each other, she didn’t want to be a part of it. The only thing that kept her back from snapping at either of them was that she knew it was her fault.
So she gave up and focused on the road ahead.
She thought about how good it felt to be away from the town, where everything seemed to be falling apart. Out here, away from home, she didn’t have the same worries hanging over her. The accident, the shooting, Merry, Williams... away from home, none of it could affect her.
Not that she was so quick to escape responsibility that she would run away. It would feel so freeing, but she knew no matter how much she tried to act like it did not affect her, it always would. She was a worrier. She could forget for the time being, but the responsibility was hers to get back to. Nothing would change just because she had left. The way the world was now, there would be trouble wherever she went. The problems she'd left at home seemed almost comforting compared to the uncertainty of what could be waiting out there. She would go back to it, eventually, because she had a baseline of how to deal with it, she'd been dealing with it for a while, after all.
The escape was blissful, but it would be kept short. The thought made her miserable, even as it made a vice in her chest release.
Emma noted that out on the road, she could pretend everything was fine, that she was just going for a ride. She could almost imagine things were as they used to be, when it was her, her sister and their parents going out for bike trips. They would go out, the only rule being that they wouldn’t be out at night, their parents enforcing it with relish. If they made it to another town and were too late to return, their parents would find them a place to sleep and they would stay for a while, then go back the next day or after more time spent exploring and riding. It was usually saved for the summer, when they would all be able to let go of responsibility and just go, with no planning whatsoever.
It was one of the many things she missed about having her parents around. All the responsibility. She couldn’t stand it, it felt like it weighed too much on her shoulders, yet both her parents had taken to it so readily. That wasn’t to say they never got stressed, but they knew how to bear it in a way she likely never could. Especially since there had been the two of them, and only one of her. If they had been around for the disaster, she knew their lives would have been so different. Where she floundered, they would have found a way to succeed.
But they were gone. And thinking too much about them might be another way to escape, but it wouldn’t be healthy. Merry already suffered because she couldn’t let go. Emma could not allow herself to go the way of her sister. She had to be strong, to look after them and their grandmother, and holding onto her parents would only hold her back, make her doubt herself.
She let herself, just for this small moment, though. She put the shooting, and Merry, and everything else, out of her mind and enjoyed the ride and her good memories.
They had made quite a bit of distance by nightfall. It was growing dark, and they were only ten miles out of town. She was a little worried about moving on in the cover of darkness. She would like to get the trip over with so they could be on the way back, but moving in the dark would mean they wouldn’t see an attack if it came. Not that they could do anything about it, even if they could see it, but the darkness still worried her.
It did surprise her when one of the guys broke the silence before she did, though.
"Why don’t we stop for the night?" Brian suggested.
Emma would have jumped. Save for the sound of their bikes riding alongside hers, the other two had been so silent a few times she'd forgotten she was with them at all. But she was on a bike, and she didn’t want to fall off it. Her hands tightened around the handle bars, but her movements didn’t stutter too much. She wavered slightly before she got control of her bike, it was barely noticeable.
She wanted to reply, but Chase beat her to it, arguing back.
"We can't just stop out here. We're not that far out, we could make it there in better time."
She sighed, and could almost feel Brian's need to continue the argument. She stopped her bike, the other two stopping with her, and she was glad they were at least aware enough of her not to blow past her before realizing she wasn’t still with them. As much as the atmosphere between them made her uncomfortable, she didn’t want to be left by herself.
"I'm tired," she offered, sending a pleading look at Chase. "We could continue, but I would rather complete the journey tomorrow."
It was too dark for her to see his eyes, but the look on his face was inscrutable. Brian and Chase both kept themselves fit. She did, too, of course, though to a lesser degree of obsession than the two men; Brian with too much time on his hands, Chase for the sake of his job. Still, it wouldn’t change that, as a woman, being smaller, left her disadvantaged. It chafed, but not liking it didn’t make it any less true. Maybe that would change if she practiced and trained more, but she didn’t have that kind of time now, and neither did she think she could spare the effort.
They had been biking since morning, with only two breaks that lasted maybe ten minutes to eat food and drink and stretch out their limbs. Her legs
hurt, they would hurt more tomorrow and if they got things finished early, they would be on their way back. She wasn’t looking forward to it. She wasn’t used to being back on a bike for so long at a time, and resting sounded a lot better to her than going on in the dark.
They were all still and silent for a time, before Chase got off his bike. She knew he was angry by the way he just let the bike fall to the ground instead of putting it up on its stand, or even laying it down more gently. Then he stomped over to Brian, grabbed the tent off him, and staked off the road. She and Brian watched him go, before she sighed.
He wasn’t angry at her. She knew he wasn’t, but she felt insecure for a second. What if he thought she was siding against him by agreeing with Brian? The truth was, she was just being selfish. She was tired, she wanted to rest. She only knew he wasn’t truly angry at her, because he cared enough to agree to her request, even wordlessly, without making more of an argument. He was just frustrated with himself, and she hoped it would pass soon.
"What the hell is Chase's problem?"
She sighed again at Brian's question. It sounded simple, but it was, in its own way, complex. So much so that she didn’t understand it herself. That meant she couldn’t help him understand it either.
"I don’t know," she said simply.
It wasn’t entirely true, but it also wasn’t an outright lie. Chase had hated her being with Brian, especially once he found out her attitude about it. Emma didn’t feel anything for Brian, not really. They had been in an affair for a long time, she'd slept with him more times than she could count. She wouldn’t want anything to happen to him, but she didn’t particularly care for him, either.
The affair had been another way to escape for her. She'd gone along with it because it took less effort than having to go out and look for a relationship, then put work into that, not to mention all the time she didn’t have and attention she saved for work and her family. Brian had been convenient. He had admitted to it being the same for him.
Chase didn’t view it that way, and she knew it had a big part to do with her being involved. If Emma had been capable of getting into a normal relationship and keeping it, she would have, but she didn’t think she could. Chase hated that she thought that way, hated that she had settled for Brian when it only made her more unhappy. She would have tried to explain to him how it had helped her, in little, short-term ways, but she didn’t think it would make anything better.
The escape had been wanted, appreciated, but the help had been temporary, like a drug fix, only good for as long as she was under the influence, and leaving her worse than she was before after. Though she had been an active participant, no matter how many times she'd tried to talk herself into breaking it off, but Chase completely blamed Brian for it. Not that he entirely absolved her of blame, he just felt Brian was more in the wrong for approaching her in the first place and taking advantage of her situation, knowing she never would have done it on her own.
Emma got off her own bike and dragged it in the direction Chase had gone. Brian followed after her, and when she picked up Chase's bike, he held the other side of it so they could take all three at once.
Chase had moved a bit from the road, so they weren’t visible from there, not at night. They arranged the bike a short distance away and she and Brian moved to help.
She knew nothing about tents, and all she could do was flutter around, trying to be useful while not knowing how to do it. She wanted to help, even knowing Chase wouldn’t put her to work, especially after she'd claimed to be tired. He barely let Brian help, either, only allowing it when the other man pointed out it would make the process go faster. Chase had thrown a look her way, and she knew it was, again, because of her.
It warmed her, at the same time, it worried her. Chase cared about her, he'd never hid it from her, but she wondered just how much. She remembered her recent change in how she thought about Chase. It wasn’t something to explore with Brian there, and it was the only reason she kept it out of her mind.
She worried, because the last thing she wanted to do was disappoint Chase. She considered them friends, but they had never truly talked about their relationship. She wanted to now, but she also didn’t want things to change. More than enough already had. So she let the two men work as she looked on.
When the tent was pitched, Brian went to get in first. "I want to get changed, so the two of you wait out here."
He slid inside with his own supplies, leaving Emma and Chase somewhat alone together. She wondered if it had been deliberate on his part, or if he really just wanted to be away from the both of them. Either way, once he was inside, Emma took Chase to the side, making sure not to move too far away from the tent. He went willingly, but she could tell he was still in a bad mood.
"What's wrong, Chase?" she asked, point blank.
He wouldn’t look at her, not that they could see much in the darkness anyway, but she didn’t want him looking away from her. She squeezed his arm and felt him hesitate, before he turned to face her fully. Her eyes were adjusted enough she could just see his face, even away from the open road and what little moonlight there was under the cover of trees. He sighed, his shoulders hunching, but she could feel him relax.
"Brian is my problem, Emma, surely you've guessed." He snorted derisively, pulling his arm gently out of her hand to cross both over his chest.
"Of course I know that," she sighed. "But why specifically? We are stuck with him for the moment, so this passive aggressive attitude isn’t going to help any of us."
"I wish I could tell you that I would do my best to act differently, but the thing is, I know I can't and I don’t want to lie to you. I can't stand cheaters, Emma, and you could do so much better than Brian. Even now, I'm sure he wants to get back with you, even after his wife threw him out of his own home. Which he totally deserved."
She could have stayed there and started an argument. She could have told him that she bore some responsibility, too. She had slept with a married man, over and over, even when she'd know Brian's wife longer than she had him. Brian seduced her, and she didn’t stop him. She was as much to blame, but she knew he wouldn’t see it that way.
"You and Brian used to be friends," she reminded him instead.
It had been a surprise to learn, but then, she hadn't been the one to tell him about the affair. Emma didn’t know about him knowing until much later. When Chase had realized Brian was married to Emma's neighbor. She wasn't sure what Brian had told Chase about them. Chase of course had friends she didn’t know, she wasn’t even sure how Chase and Brian knew each other, though they did have the fitness thing in common. They weren’t as close friends as she was with Chase, but he told her once he figured it out, after she brought him to her house, and Emma was horrified.
"Besides," she continued, "I'm not even with him anymore. It should have ended a lot sooner, it didn’t, but it definitely has now. You don’t have to worry about it anymore, because I don’t plan on falling back into it."
Not when she was busy trying not to look into other avenues of romance. A part of her wanted to, even as a part of her thought it was pointless. Unless she came to a decision, she was too preoccupied even for something casual.
Chase sighed, and she could feel the reluctance in him. But he spoke, and it was what she wanted to hear. "Don’t expect a miracle. I'll try and be friendlier, but only for as long as I need to put up with him."
He meant it, but more importantly, he meant it for only when she was around. He turned to go get into the tent, and Emma watched him a moment before sighing herself and following behind him.
Emma lodged herself in the middle of the two men, hoping to keep the argumentative pair apart, ignoring the tense atmosphere, even as she felt it had lessened slightly.
"Goodnight," she bid them both as she crawled into her own sleeping bag.
She felt a pressure on her waist and realized that Chase had slung a protective arm over her. Instead of arguing the matter, she allowed it—welcomed it—a
nd let herself fall asleep.
Chapter 7
The next day, Chase was in a better mood, while Emma was tired and groggy from sleeping on the ground.
She almost hated how chirpy he was, knowing she was the exact opposite of him. Even with the sleeping bag, she'd never slept on the ground before, and it wasn’t an experience she would ever think to repeat. It felt like she hadn't even truly rested, the aches in her body might actually feel worse because of it.
When she opened her eyes, it was considerably lighter. Chase sat with his legs crossed, clearly having been up a while, and when she met his eyes, he smiled down at her, looking refreshed. If she hadn't trusted her memory, she would have thought she'd imagined his attitude the day before, seeing as he was back to his usual self, if not a little livelier.
"Hey, how did you sleep?"
Terribly.
Not that she could—or would—tell him that. She was almost envious of how truly relaxed he looked, but then it wasn’t his fault. Usually, she was the one getting up early while Chase wasn’t a morning person, but he just seemed to thrive outdoors, unlike her. She felt envious, but all she could do was sigh.
So she put on a brave face, saying, "I feel fine."
She didn’t give him the chance to prove her wrong, rolling over, pushing into a sitting position and blinking her eyes. She ran a hand over her face and grimaced, imagining how gross she looked. She hadn't thought to carry a mirror, as it hadn't been a necessity at the time. They were going to meet people, she had to make a good impression, but it hadn't been top of her list when she'd been thinking of what to carry for the trip.
Emma looked around and wondered what time it was. She wondered if there was a way she could get water, enough to wash her face, at least. She wouldn’t use the little water they'd carried just for that, though. They hadn't brought a lot, simply because water was heavy in large quantities. After riding out in the sun, she'd drunk quite a bit, and the journey wasn’t even half done yet. She just hoped Chase would tell her if there was something wrong with how she looked, so she wouldn’t make a fool of herself. She ran her hands through her hair to get it to behave, wiped her sleeves around her mouth and chin in case she'd drooled in her sleep, and hoped that would be enough.
