by Julia Kent
“What position?”
He looked up at me and his eyes shone with so much emotion I felt blinded. “Relying on you. Your kindness. I really don’t know why you’re doing this, Maggie. But I’m glad you are. I need the help. I got a shit turn of luck.”
“Um,” I said, clearing my throat.
Panic flashed across his features. “What?”
“Did you really need to use the word ‘shit’? I think we’ve had enough of it for the day.”
He laughed, relieved. I wonder what he was afraid I was about to say?
“Yeah. Not the best word.” His gut rumbled and he closed his eyes.
“This too shall pass.”
He groaned. “That was bad.”
“I know.”
He blinked, hard, and looked up at the sky. Dusk was just starting to fall and I wasn’t going to make it twenty-nine hours straight. I had a credit card and could pay for a hotel. We couldn’t drive through the night. And Tyler couldn’t drive a stick shift at all.
And yet I was wired. It was like someone had given me ten cups of coffee in one sip.
“Maggie, you asked what happened to me. How this happened.” He spread his arms out.
“I know how this happened. Darla and her damn gummy bears.”
He was serious and didn’t laugh. A prickly feeling began in my forehead. While I was used to Tyler and his serious face, I got the sense that this was going into new territory.
“You...have been so nice to me. For no reason.”
“Tyler, I’m helping you. It’s what people do when they’re friends.”
“We’re friends?”
“We’d better be. Once you start openly talking about your bowel habits with someone you’re pretty much married.”
He smiled. It lit up the world, a dark and smoky smile this time, one that made me bite my lower lip and laugh because you really shouldn’t look sexy and intriguing when talking about your colon.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Us.”
“I am never, ever eating another gummy bear again.”
“I’m never eating anything Darla hands me again,” I replied.
He nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll give gummy bears another chance, but give me the real sugar next time.”
Our stomachs made mild earthquake sounds. Tyler twitched and grimaced.
“This is the weirdest way I’ve ever bonded with someone,” I joked.
“We’re bonding?”
I shrugged. What was it about him that made me so acutely aware of every hair on my body, every breeze that blew by, every noise near and far? The rush of cars on the highway and the sweet song of a bird in the background were both equally important. Relevant. There.
“I think,” he said slowly, “you bond when you trust someone.” He just narrowed his eyes and let that hang there.
“You don’t trust me?”
“I don’t trust anyone, Maggie,” he said with a rueful smile. It didn’t light up his face. That smile made me want to cry for whatever it was that happened in his life to make it appear.
“Then you’re not really alive, Tyler.”
“Pithy.”
“You were the one quoting Thoreau from coffee mugs earlier today.”
He tilted his head as if to concede. “Not one to talk, then,” he said sadly.
“Tell me what happened to you this morning,” I asked. Pleaded, really. “Who stole from you? Why did they take everything?”
His long inhale held entire worlds in it. As he blew out, he shook his head. “That was just this morning, wasn’t it?” The pale grey sky met the fading sun, leaving a streak of pink in the sky. We were still, even after after five hours on the road, not even in Junction City, Kansas. We had a long stretch of absolutely nothing ahead of us, and I was the driver.
“Quit changing the subject.”
“Tell me the real reason why you wanted me to fuck you two months ago.”
A knife sliced through my heart.
I couldn’t.
“I’ll tell you, then, Maggie. I’ll tell you.”
“You know me better than I know myself?”
“No. It’s just always easier to see someone else’s fear than it is to see your own.”
“So what’s my fear?”
“That there’s some parallel Maggie out there who was supposed to be you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” And yet my body began to shake inside. He couldn’t see that. What he said felt true, though. In my marrow.
“Sure it does. There’s this part of you that believes your better self got taken from you that night. Worse than anything else those guys did. They took your undamaged self, and—”
“I’m not damaged goods!” I shrieked, the words high and loud, out before I could even think.
“I never said you were.”
“You just did!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Quit gaslighting me, Tyler.”
“I haven’t passed gas in several—”
“Gaslighting! Quit trying to tell me I’m not experiencing what I am experiencing!”
“What are you talking about?” He seemed completely perplexed. My fight-or-flight response was kicking in and I worked to tamp down my massive flashpoint within.
“You called me damaged. You did. Then you tried to claim you didn’t. Gaslighting is when you—”
“Maggie.” He reached out and grabbed my hand. His touch was like a tight sigh in my bones. “I didn’t say you were damaged. I said those guys took your undamaged self and—”
“And what?”
“—broke it. There’s a difference.”
“I’m not broken!”
“Would you take a minute,” he said, gently squeezing my hand, “and just listen before you argue? I’m not good with words. I don’t explain things right. When I try, it’s like the hardest thing in the world. I’m not trying to be mean or say the wrong thing. I’m not playing mind games. I’m not putting you down on purpose. I’m trying to say something true and whole. I am fucking it up royally, but I’m going to say this.”
I squeezed back. “Okay.”
“I think you came to me that night because you needed someone damaged to be undamaged with.”
I closed my eyes, my breath coming out hard.
He made me less afraid because he named my fear.
And once you name something, you can fight it.
I wasn’t afraid of being hurt.
I was afraid of never really living. Never really loving. Never really being loved. Real love comes with pain, my mom always said. She and Dad had been married for thirty-one years.
Real love, Maggie, means going past the fear of being hurt and rejected and realizing that you only become more real when you test yourself. When you trust and love beyond your wildest fears—in spite of those fears. The real risk isn’t in being hurt. It’s in never putting yourself in a position to be hurt.
Tyler made me want to try.
And I kind of hated him for that.
“But I—”
I held my breath. Whatever came next out of his mouth was like a ripple in time. Like some kind of separation between seven years ago and now was being breeched. Shaken. Smoothed out.
He sighed through his nose, lips pursed, and let go of my hand. “You know what? Let me talk while you drive. It’ll keep you awake. I’ll tell you what happened.”
My belly button made an ominous sound.
“After one last bathroom stop,” he sagely suggested.
We dispatched with the necessaries quickly and resumed our drive, the relationship between us forever altered.
Not that I knew what this relationship even was, but it was something.
And I felt like we were about to find out what something was.
Chapter Eight
Tyler
Compulsions come in a lot of different forms, but I’ve never had a compulsive need to do or say something good. Talk about a massive m
indfuck. Touching her hand felt so right. Letting go felt like breaking.
All that shit I said about her fear? A total guess. A shot in the dark. The fact that I was right was written all over her shocked face.
It made me proud.
Like I gave her something back.
Maybe I should sleep with her. What if that’s what I could give her, to show her how much I appreciated all that she did for me? Not a pity fuck. Hell fucking no. I don’t do pity fucks, and I don’t receive pity fucks. I meant a thank you fuck. A let’s-be-grown-ups fuck.
A wipe-the-slate-clean fuck.
Maybe giving her the chance to make love with someone would—
Hold on.
Make love?
When did I ever call it that?
I realized she was looking at me from the corner of her eye. Expecting me to say something. Problem was, I was imploding in the passenger seat, reeling from—
Make love.
I was falling for her. That’s why it never occurred to me to ditch her. I could have. It wouldn’t have been hard to find some trucker and hitch my way to L.A. In fact, maybe I should do that right now.
Stop this before it all went any further.
I grabbed Lena’s guitar and started playing Trevor’s song, “Random Acts of Crazy”, then dug in to the lyrics:
Your Mama told you to watch out for me
Your God told you to walk away
Your Daddy said nothing, for he was gone
And you weren’t sure what to say
“Ha ha,” Maggie said with a laugh.
I continued:
The night you found me, wandering and lost
Naked by the side of the road
My guitar shattered, my body bereft
You fought everything you were told
Her face went serious.
When a naked soul finds you
You don’t have a choice
You have to stop and pause
You can turn away and never look back
But it will yank you back, because
Random acts of crazy draw you in
Random acts of kindness draw you in
Random acts of love draw you in
Maggie
It was like being serenaded without being serenaded. Odd and haunting, his voice filled me with a deep longing. I fought to keep my eyes on the road, and increased my speed. The sooner we arrived in L.A. the sooner I could untangle myself from this weird ball of twine in emotional form, our separate threads rolled into a ball that we needed to unravel in order to make use of ourselves again.
He moved immediately into “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer”. I hadn’t joined in when he sang the first song, though I’d memorized the lyrics. He didn’t know that. He especially didn’t know I could play the music from memory in my sleep.
His voice was gritty and nuanced, full of smoke and memories. When Tyler sang he brought you with him to a place where the words told a real story. This was no ordinary melody made into a catchy tune. He painted the world with notes and sighs and a kind of raspy caress that took you somewhere you needed to go.
He sang:
Oh, I wasted
my only answered prayer
on a woman
who didn’t believe in God....
We were coming up on Oklahoma City by now and as the buildings became more dense and the lanes widened, I detached from his singing, hating that I had to. The road demanded more attention from me than I could spare and also be emotionally attuned. That ability to push my feelings behind a barricade came in handy in moments like these.
The rest of the time? Not so much.
At one she walked away
At two she said no
At three she said please
At four she said more
He finished the second song and before I could say anything, went right back into “Random Acts of Crazy”. Tyler was driving me crazy. The promise of his story faded as the soulful song made me tearful. I fought back a sob that began in my chest and ended somewhere in the space between us.
What the hell was this? What was I feeling? Was he feeling it, too?
I wanted to respect him, but when he started on “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer” again I reached out and tapped the guitar. He jumped like I’d lit him on fire.
“What?” he gasped.
“It’s great. Really. And I know you need to practice, though you’re not the singer. Trevor and Liam are. You’re avoiding talking to me about what happened to you this morning. C’mon. You promised. You’re the kind of guy who always keeps his promises.”
“I am?”
“You are.”
“You sure?”
I paused, mulling that over. “If I’m wrong, I’ll take that chance.”
“You are not like anyone I know, Maggie.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my words.
“I mean it. And that is a vote of confidence.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere, but it won’t get you out of telling me what happened.”
He laughed and snapped his fingers. “Damn.”
Traffic thinned out enough for me to get up to sixty-five miles an hour from the creeping forty we’d been doing for a while. As I sped up I looked at the fuel gauge.
“We need gas.”
“The last thing we need in this car is more gas,” Tyler cracked.
“Ha ha. I meant gasoline.”
He grunted.
I found a gas station at the next exit and Tyler jumped out before I could even reach my handle.
“I got this,” he insisted, walking into the gas station store. Two minutes later he came back and began pumping gas.
“I have a credit card, Tyler. I can just charge it and you can pay me back later.”
He gave a tight head shake and said nothing, finishing the tank filling and walking around the car. Then he went back into the gas station and came back five minutes later carrying two hot pizzas, some soda and bags of chips and carrots.
“Dinner’s on me,” he said. “We can eat while we drive.”
I stretched, the feeling a luxury, and realized most of the daylight was gone. We were barely a quarter done with our journey.
The driving journey, that is.
The journey of the heart was just beginning.
Tyler
I knew I promised I’d tell her what happened, but as she drove and we got out of Oklahoma City and into the rural section of No Man’s Land until we hit the urbane metropolis of Amarillo, Texas, we were left with nothing but time.
And she expected me to fill it with words.
Maggie loved words. I didn’t. This was one of many things we were incompatible about. If you asked me to name the others I couldn’t. Not specifically. It was just a feeling. We weren’t—compatible.
But I couldn’t tell you why.
If we weren’t compatible, then why lead her on? Why take her down a road that would bring her nothing but frustration and heartache in the end? Why open myself up to her and just end up disappointing her?
It was better to stay closed up.
Let the music make a wall.
I didn’t have that many songs in me, though.
“Tyler,” she said in the voice of a teacher telling you not to do something you know is wrong.
“Yeah?”
“Talk.”
I almost said, “About what?” but what the hell. Why not tell her? It’s not like it mattered any more.
“I woke up at my house and someone stole my phone, my wallet, and all my instruments.”
“Your house was broken into?” she gasped.
“No.”
“Huh? Then how—ohhhhhhh.” She started and stopped talking two or three times, making nonsense sounds, until finally she said, “Your dad?”
“Brother.”
“You’re sure?”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry. Isn’t he just a teen?”
“Eighteen. Turned eighteen a couple weeks ago. Just in time for Dad to go back in.” I was practically vibrating as I said those words. If felt like, well—farting in front of someone.
“Back in...to prison?”
I closed my eyes and just breathed in.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Why would your brother steal all your stuff?”
“Why do you think?”
“Drugs?”
“Yep. Not a drug deal gone bad. More like a junkie needing a fix.”
“And you were the victim.”
“I really hate that word.”
“Doesn’t change the truth.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like the word.”
“Got it.”
Good. I was glad she got it. I, on the other hand, felt like a tuning fork being banged against a gong over and over and over. Even if she understood everything I said and accepted it as fact, I was still nothing but one painful nerve ending being poked to infinity.
“So you came home yesterday—God, was it just yesterday?—woke up this morning, had no wallet, no phone, no instruments, and you...found me?”
“I went to the library to use their computer to get on my email. Got ahold of Darla. Man, she answers messages fast. She gave me your address and told me she would call you. Took a bus and walked the rest of the way to your house.”
“That took a lot of ingenuity.”
“When you’re desperate, you do what you can.”
She stared straight ahead and we passed a few minutes in silence. I took in the dark night. As we drove further from the city the night sky glittered with stars above. If we weren’t rushing to L.A. and going eighty-two miles an hour, and if I hadn’t just cracked my breastbone open and showed her my beating heart, I’d probably have taken a minute to appreciate the beauty outside.
