Page 24 of On the Way to You

I should have put it down, should have closed the journal and vowed never to pry into his private thoughts again. I should have had more respect for him, for the words meant only for him, but I was selfish. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know everything.

My fingers fell from my lips and flipped through the pages, all the way to the entry from last night.

Grams told me when I took this trip, I needed to keep my eyes open. She said part of the journey would be doing things I’d never done before, taking chances, exploring. She wanted me to invite adventure into my heart.

So, I picked up a hitchhiker.

I scoffed.

Okay, not really a hitchhiker, but a girl who needed a lift.

I don’t even think she realized it, not until the moment I asked her to come with me, maybe not even until we were two hours away from Mobile where I picked her up. But I knew the second I saw her.

She was a caged bird, and when I opened the door to let her out, she didn’t know whether to fly or molt.

Her name is Cooper and she has a dog. The dog came with us, which I thought would be annoying since I hate anything that is adorable, but surprisingly this dog doesn’t bother me. Her eyes are crossed a little bit and her fur is out of control, like she’s never been to a groomer. I like that about her. She’s the ugly kind of cute.

I don’t know if I like Cooper yet.

I chewed my lip, heat crawling its way up my neck.

She talks a lot. She’s naive. She’s young. Her glasses are too big for her face. She’s religious, but I don’t know that I can blame her since she grew up in the Bible Belt. Mostly, I’m just perturbed because under all that, she’s beautiful, and I find myself insanely curious about her.

I wonder how she’ll be on my bad days.

She was my waitress at the diner in Mobile and I asked her my question. She couldn’t answer. But unlike everyone else, she didn’t tell me a bunch of stupid shit. She could have said her dog made her happy or her boyfriend or something else surface-level.

Does she have a boyfriend? I didn’t even ask.

Actually, I really don’t care, so I won’t be asking.

But the point is she didn’t look at me like the question was absurd, or like there were plenty of things in the world that made her happy, or like I was weird for asking. She looked at me like she couldn’t answer because in order to list what made her happy, she had to know she was happy in the first place.

She also looked at me like I was serial killer when I asked her to come with me, not that I can blame her.

Still, she came. And now I’m on this trip with a girl and a dog.

Maybe this was what Grams was talking about, or maybe I’m just fucking stupid. Either way, I’ve got someone to talk to.

Poor girl.

I smiled a little at that, yawning as I closed the journal and gently placed it where I’d found it. I tucked my legs under the sheets, gently removing my prosthesis once I was covered and moving it off to the side. Stretching my arms over my head and pointing my toe, I let exhaustion wash over me, closing my eyes just as Kalo moved to curl up by my side. I rolled over, one hand petting her long, soft fur as the other propped the pillow up under my head.

“You really are the ugly kind of cute,” I whispered to her, and she licked my hand in agreement before laying it down on her paws.

I closed my eyes, thoughts still racing as his handwriting filled my mind. I shouldn’t have read his journal, and I swore to myself then and there that I wouldn’t read anymore. We were on a road trip together. If I wanted to know something about him, I should just ask.

That is, if it’s a day where he’s talking.

I wondered if he’d wake up after our nap in a better mood, with the smile I’d seen a few times the day before. I wondered if tomorrow would be another silent drive, if I would annoy him even more than I already do.

He’d called me a caged bird.

No one had ever pinpointed exactly how I’d felt my entire life until that moment, that sentence, that truth scribbled out in messy, honest, almost impossible to read letters.

I imagined Mobile as my cage, Emery’s hand on the door of his car, holding it open for me to escape. And just before I drifted off to sleep, my breaths even and steady in my chest, I found myself wondering if the nest from his dream really was me, after all.

A few hours later, Emery and I were both rested and cheerily stuffing our faces with the most delicious barbecue pulled pork sliders in the world.