Page 15 of Cruel Summer

EIGHT

Now

“Your turn to drive, sunshine.”

Logan tossed the keys her way, and she watched them hit the ground. Then looked back up at him. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

“I know.” He smiled and her, and she wanted to punch it off his face. “Because breakfast doesn’t start till 6:30 a.m. This was poorly planned.”

She rolled her eyes and bent down to pick the keys up. “I’m driving us through Starbucks.”

“I can’t stop you.”

“No, you can’t. I’ve taken women’s self-defense courses, and I am well-versed on how to attack a man’s fleshy parts viciously with nothing but a set of car keys.”

“I don’t want a demonstration.”

She slid into the driver’s seat and, without thought, ran her hand over the dash. It was a beautiful car. She could honestly say she’d never felt the urge to pet a car before. But this one was…well, it was a hot car.

She put the keys into the ignition—a novelty since her car had a push-button start—and turned the engine over.

She closed her eyes and just savored the moment. This sounded like freedom.

She was a little crabby because it was so early, but in general, she was still riding on the euphoria that had overtaken her last night. The first moment she’d felt…happy since all of this started. She could keep on feeling happy.

This was freedom.

She was going to enjoy it.

“Head out of the parking lot and turn left,” he said.

“Map me to coffee,” she said.

With a lot of grumbling, he acquiesced. In under five minutes—five minutes; he was a drama queen—they were back on the road.

And he had also gotten a coffee.

She was glad they’d gotten coffee, because it was clear the drive was going to involve quite a few hours of nothing but dust and scrub brush.

The rolling hills soon turned into bigger mountains, the short, scraggly plants giving way to twisted clusters of Joshua trees that looked like they belonged on an alien planet rather than in the eastern part of California.

Desert towns, Sam quickly decided, were like dry coastal towns.

A tacky, quirky sensibility seemed like a prerequisite for living there.

Sam loved it. The landscape was monochromatic—various shades of tan beneath a sun-bleached sky—but the buildings were bright pink and teal.

One had a giant roadrunner painted onto the side of it.

They passed caravans selling tacos and a vintage thrift store called Funky and Darn Near New.

She looked down and saw the gas gauge was migrating toward E , and she wasn’t sure how plentiful gas stations would be the rest of the drive to Flagstaff.

She pulled into one of the smaller stations just off the highway, and Logan opened the passenger door. “I’m going to grab some snacks.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Um. Okay, I hate to admit this, but I haven’t ever actually pumped my own gas.”

He tilted his head to the side. “What?”

“Well, we were never allowed to in Oregon, and I still don’t go to the self-serve pumps! I’ve never not been on a road trip with Will, and he just does it.”

“Oh, well, there is a first time for everything, Sam. Consider this an education.”

“Do you have to say it like that?” she groused.

“I do.”

She got out of the car behind him and stared at the pump.

“The directions are on it,” he said.

“Yeah, I know, I know.” She turned and looked around for the gas hatch.

“Sorry, this actually isn’t fair.” He walked further to the back of the car and opened up a hatch she hadn’t seen on the fin, made of chrome and blending almost seamlessly with the rest of the trim. Behind that was the gas cap.

“So the car is, like, complicated on top of everything else?”

“Yeah,” he said, “sorry. But now you know, and the rest will be straightforward.”

“It isn’t straightforward!”

“Okay.” He moved closer to her, and she was awash in instantaneous regret as his scent overtook her. Soap. Skin. Him.

“Hang on,” she said. “I just… I’ll swipe my card.”

“No, I’ll swipe my card.” He leaned forward and did exactly that. “Choose the kind of gas you need.”

“Which kind?”

“Premium. I don’t play with my cars. Now get the nozzle out.” He gestured to the unwieldy-looking thing stuck into the gas pump.

“Okay.” It had a lever, and she pressed it before pulling it out.

His hand was suddenly over hers. “No. Don’t do that.”

Suddenly the mid-morning sun felt unbearable. Her skin felt unbearable. Too tight and not her own, as goose bumps broke out over her body in response to the firm press of his hand over hers.

“No trigger,” he said, his voice a little softer, no less raspy, as he removed his hand from hers.

“Okay.” She released her hold on it and then went to the gas tank, figuring the gas cap out easily enough before slipping the nozzle inside.

“Now you want to lock the trigger down.”

She fumbled with it for a second, but he didn’t move back to help her. He kept his distance.

“Got it,” he said, pointing toward the numbers that were now counting upward. “Going to get snacks.”

“Okay,” she said, leaning against the side of the car and crossing her arms as she stared across the street at the rocks, twisted trees and rugged mountains.

She felt very suddenly outside her body. But at the same time very conscious of her hand, and the feeling his had left behind. Of the heat and pressure.

She reached over and traced the place he’d touched her.

Logan always made her feel so…

So uneven.

She jumped when the trigger on the gas pump popped, signaling that it was finished.

Then she managed to get it put back into position herself, got the cap back on the tank and closed the hatch.

She chose to focus on the triumph of having done something—admittedly simple, that most people could do—for the first time.

“I am expansive,” she said to the tumbleweed resting right against the front tire.

It did not answer.

She heard gravel crunching behind her and turned and saw him walking toward her across the gritty parking lot.

“Road snacks,” he said, holding up the bag.

“I want real food,” she said.

“This,” he said, getting into the car as she did, dumping the bag out over the seat, “is real food.”

“It’s Fritos.”

“Fritos are food.”

“It’s not a full spectrum,” she said, examining the rest of the haul. Powdered doughnuts, potato chips and Milk Duds.

“Not true.” He dug into the bag. “There’s jerky.”

“How are you…” She waved a hand toward his general physical perfection. “That.”

“I work out all the time.”

“Really?” she asked as she buckled up, started the car and got them back on the road.

She hadn’t expected that answer, because honestly, even if it was the truth, she wouldn’t expect him to admit it.

“The better to keep the demons at bay, Sam.”

She had no idea if he was serious or not, but the comment swirled around in her head, along with the hard rock music he’d chosen to put on.

“Working out all the time is not how it was suggested to me you spend your time,” she said, not sure if she’d regret going down this path or not.

“Oh, meaning you were told I live a life of general debauchery?”

“It was implied, yes.”

“I dabble in debauchery. I’m not going to lie about that. You have to do something with the nights or they get long.”

She’d never really thought about what all that meant. Not in a detailed sense. She knew Logan went out a lot, and had the sense that he hooked up— hooked up , like he was in his early twenties or something. But she’d never really…

Of course he did.

It was far too easy for her to imagine, suddenly, the impact of the man, were he to walk up to you in a bar.

“But it’s certainly not my whole life,” he said. “It’s not…not a goal to aspire to.”

She frowned. “If you don’t like it, why…”

He turned to look at her. “I like parts of it. I like the part where I’m not thinking about anything.

But after…all the thoughts you didn’t have for those few hours hit you, and they hit hard.

It’s deferring pain, not stopping it. Sometimes it’s still worth it.

For a little bit of oblivion. But it doesn’t fix jack shit. ”

Was it still that hard?

A canyon of terror opened up inside of her. Was this what happened to you when you lost the relationship you wanted? Yes, Becca had died, but if Will ended up leaving Sam…would this be her?

Ten years on and not okay.

Not healed.

Just looking for bandages to put on the hemorrhaging wound that was your soul? It was a horrific thought. A terrible idea.

No. Things will go back to how they were.

This will never be you, because you and Will aren’t finished.

Again she deliberately shoved those thoughts to the side. She wasn’t supposed to be linking all this back to her. And she really wasn’t supposed to be tying everything back into Will.

“That doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “What…would fix it?”

He opened up the bag of Fritos, the gesture alarmingly casual for the subject matter. “I don’t have the slightest idea. But I’ve come to the conclusion that some things aren’t fixable.”

“You just have to walk around wounded for the rest of your life?” She didn’t like that at all.

“Yep,” he said, taking a handful of chips from the bag. “There are certain things you don’t control in life. You can’t choose to have everything you want. An unpopular conclusion in this modern culture,” he said, his tone dry.

“Unpopular because it sounds sad. People want to be happy.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t happy. I have Chloe. I have a job I love. I’m often happy. I’m just also often sad. Unfulfilled. That’s part of life, isn’t it?”

“People want to be happy more often than they’re sad.”

He laughed. “That’s generous. People want to be happy all the time. They don’t know how to handle hard feelings, or being uncomfortable. I’m not great at it either, or I probably wouldn’t go out and get drunk and sleep with a stranger as often as I do.”

She winced. She couldn’t help it. The words were so hard and blunt.

“I have just accepted that there’s a certain level of pain I’ll always have to live with,” he said. “It’s the cost of life. It’s the cost of loving anything.”

She knew that loss—the kind of loss he’d had—didn’t just heal. The finality of it was hard, and it always would be.

She had more of an understanding of that now.

But her mother dying was the natural order of things, even if losing her when she had had seemed way too early. Losing a partner, especially as young as Becca and Logan had been, that was unthinkable.

Maybe accepting that it would always hurt was the healthiest thing he could do. It didn’t seem fair, though.

“Yeah, I… I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have any wisdom for that.”

“You don’t need to.”

She always felt like she did. Like it was her job to smooth over the cracks in things. Though she could remember the night she’d sat around the bonfire with Logan and just told him that loss was shitty. That hadn’t been profound, but it had been true.

She stopped herself from pulling on that loose thread. The memories of all the vacations.

He’d started it last night in the elevator, and she was determined…

She never thought of those.

She certainly wasn’t going to do it now.

“Frito?” He shoved the bag her direction.

She took her eyes off the road for a moment and met his. “Yeah, okay, I’ll have a Frito.”

She plunged her hand down into the bag and grabbed some chips, and he turned the radio up.

“Did you make reservations?” she asked as they neared the town.

“Nope. Figured we’d do a walk-in at whatever is roadside.”

“Oh, excellent,” she said. “I have tacky roadside motels on my bucket list.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“No. I mean, in the sense that I don’t have a bucket list, I guess so, but I genuinely love the idea of it.”

“I didn’t see you as the kind of person who secretly liked tacky things.”

“It fascinates me. The bold lack of sophistication is something we could all learn from.” To prove her point, she popped the whole handful of Fritos into her mouth.

“I guess I’ve mostly seen you in more controlled contexts.”

“Parenting while on vacation?”

“Yes.” He leaned back and settled into the seat, and she tried not to track his every movement out of the corner of her eye. “You were sort of the cruise director for all those trips.”

“I’m very good at that,” she said.

“You are.” She could feel his smile. So profoundly she had to turn and look at him. The corner of his mouth was kicked up, just a little bit. “How does it feel to let someone else direct the cruise?”

“I… You are…” She laughed and shook her head. “I’m not sure. I’ll get back to you once we’ve been through a few ports.”

“I’ll be sure to hand out a survey.”

“Please do.”