Page 38 of On the Way to You

“Sounds like a boring way to spend a day.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s calledbeingresponsible.You should try it.”

“Nah.” He winked at me, tugging on Kalo’s toy until it was freed from her jaw before throwing it again.

“Should we hit Vegas?”

Emery paused then, Kalo nipping at his hand still holding her toy. She’d actually returned it to him this time. “Fuck yeah, we should go to Vegas. And we’re staying right on the strip, too.”

I chuckled, marking it down on the list. Once we had everything wewantedto do listed out, I made us a driving route, calculating eight hours of driving max per day, though most days would be less.

“If we go this way, it’ll take us…” I did the math in my head, pulling up the calendar on my phone. “Eleven days to make it to Seattle, but that’s if we’re driving every day. So if we end up wanting to stay more than one night somewhere—“

Emery coughed. “Vegas.”

“Like Vegas,” I repeated, laughing. “Then it might be a little longer.”

“So, about two weeks?”

“About two weeks.”

Emery tossed Kalo’s toy before smiling at me from where he sat on the edge of his bed, his hair still messy from sleep, muffin crumbs gathered in his lap. “Let’s do it, Little Penny.”

We weren’t in New Mexico very long before we cut right across the Colorado border, and finally, it felt like fall.

Actually, it almost felt like winter.

We didn’t have the top down anymore, and I was bundled up in one of the two sweaters I brought, my arms tucked tightly across my stomach to keep the warmth in. I’d never seen anything like that before — the mountains stretching up in the distance to our left, the prairies flat and dry to our right as we crawled our way to Colorado Springs. I didn’t know how Emery was keeping his eyes on the road with everything so beautiful around us. There was snow on the tips of the mountains, and I traced the outline of it in wonder as we drove.

“I’ve never seen snow before,” I said absentmindedly, petting Kalo’s head. She had crawled into my lap somewhere in New Mexico.

“Ever?”

I shook my head. “I’ve never been outside of Alabama.”

Emery glanced at me then, watching me for a moment before his eyes found the road again. “It’s pretty, if you don’t have to shovel it. I stayed with a college buddy once over winter break. His family lives in Pittsburgh.” He shook his head. “It was awful. We had to shovel so much snow, and you have to put on so many fucking layers when you go outside, and then peel them all off when you’re back inside. And everything iswet.” He grimaced before a soft smile found his lips. “But it was something, to see it fall from the sky. And it’s so soft at first. It’s pretty. Andquiet, everything is so quiet when it’s snowing.”

“That sounds magical,” I said in awe, closing my eyes and trying to picture it. “I don’t think I would mind shoveling, if it meant I got to see that first fall.”

Emery scoffed. “You say that now. But if your feet were frozen numb and your hands raw and red from the shovel, you’d change your mind.”

My thigh started to tingle under where Kalo was resting, and I moved my hand under her fur, rubbing my thigh in small circles, my eyes still on the scenery as we passed.

“Do you have something for that?” Emery asked, nodding toward my leg. “For the pain?”

I shrugged, still working the muscle under my fingertips. “I used to. They gave me pain meds, but they just… they took all the light out of me. I started looking up more natural remedies when I was fourteen. That’s kind of what lead me to Bastyr, actually.”

“That makes sense. I don’t think I would want to be doped up all the time, either.”

He said it like he knew, his eyes softening under the weight of his brows, and my mind flashed to his journal entry, to the hydrocodone he took to try to end his life.

I swallowed.

“I was basically a zombie when I was on them. Pain relief is a hard thing to study when it comes to naturopathic medicine, though. I tried acupuncture, and that didn’t really work for me. I brew willow bark in my tea and that helps sometimes, but other times the pain is so severe that it almost feels like nothing will help.”

“And you just ride it out?”

I nodded. “Usually. I figure it’s my body’s way of reminding me what was once there, and sometimes I don’t mind having that reminder. Even if it is painful.”