“You said you can only handle six hours of driving,andyou’re worried about the weather,” I remind her. “Seeing a ball of twine will add at least an hour, and who knows if those roads are safe?”
“Who knows ifthisroad is safe?” she asks, hands clutching the steering wheel as snow slaps the windshield. The heater isblasting, but the cold seeping in from the windows is giving a fair fight.
“You’re from Rochester,” I say, studying the slope of her nose for a moment too long. “Are you not comfortable driving in snow?”
“I drive a truck with snow tires. Not a raspberry with bald tires,” she says. “The handling on this thing is garbage.”
“All the more reason to hold the course,” I tell her. I point to the road. “Besides, there are tons of cars on this highway. It’s our safest bet to get home.”
She nods, but she looks worried.
My lungs pinch at her fingers curled so tightly around the steering wheel. I hate that she looks worried. It makes me want to reach over and?—
What?
Pat her back? Brush the hair out of her eyes?
We’ve been cooped up in here for too long.
It just sucks that it’s my fault she’s in this crappy, cramped rental at all. Yeah, yeah, I’m getting her home, too, but who’s to say if she hadn’t waited a couple of hours, there wouldn’t have been a bunch of cars that got returned to the rental counter? She could be driving a Tundra home right now.
Of course, she probably still would have ended up at that diner, and she probably would have eaten that disgusting chicken fried steak.
I shudder remembering every bite. Wanna know how to ruin a steak? Bread it, fry it, and pour country gravy on that slop.
How could she order that just to appease the server? Worse, how could she have planned to eat it?
This girl is too accommodating for her own good. Her driving this matchbox car right now so I don’t have to is further proof of that fact.
Driving this car would be miserable. Probably not impossible, though.
If she gets too tired, I’ll tell her I can drive. I’ll explain I get dramatic when I’m stressed. She’ll have no trouble believing me, because she’s seen it firsthand.
I hate it about myself.
You’d think my granddad would have drilled that out of me years ago.
“Could you put on some music? Or a podcast?” Poppy asks. I watch her long lashes blink hard and slow.
“Are you getting tired?”
“It’s fine,” she says. “I just prefer listening to something over silence.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say. I want to catch up on the latestBeyond Justiceepisode, but Poppy said she got burned out on it. If she works in criminal justice, that makes sense.
I should ask her about her job, but I don’t love talking about the criminal system outside of the message board. Most people don’t know what to say, don’t know how to disagree without being a tool, or they’re not informed. The people on the forum, on the other hand, are hyper informed, hyper opinionated, and have no problem disagreeing … though they’re also usually tools about it. Everyone except Grace.
The built-in media system hooks up automatically to Poppy’s phone, so I’m able to navigate to her music app without using the phone itself.
“You don’t have any playlists saved,” I say. “What do you listen to?”
“I just pick a random station and listen,” she says.
I stifle a groan. She’s even a people pleaser to faceless playlists made by AI and algorithms.
If robots ever take over the world, something tells me Poppy will sign up to serve them motor oil.
“What kind of music do you like?”
