I thought he’d pad back to bed, maybe drag me with him, but he disappeared into the bathroom with a towel slung low around his hips, closing the door in a way that said he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, or maybe just with the version of himself that existed behind closed doors.
The rhythm of the shower filled the hush of the room. I sprawled on the sheets, staring at the ceiling, tracing the micro-cracks and yellowed water stains that mapped a slow, inevitable collapse.
I should have felt content, but instead unease began to needle at the corners of my vision, a premonition that all thisbelonging was fragile, contingent, something the world might revoke at any second.
When he emerged, hair slicked back, jaw freshly razored, his eyes wouldn’t quite meet mine. He drifted through the room, packing his duffel, counting and recounting the contents, a man preparing for the next war.
He dressed in silence, black t-shirt and jeans, the old wounds on his hands peeking out from beneath the tight stretch of cotton.
“Ready?” he asked, already sounding distant, the warmth of earlier shuttered off behind some barricade I couldn’t see.
“Sure.”
He disappeared again to return the motel key, and I was alone in the aftermath, the air thick with the ghosts of what we’d done.
We crossed three state lines before Caiden said a word that wasn’t strictly related to driving. He put miles between us and the motel with a soldier’s focus, knuckles bone-white on the wheel, jaw locked so tight I could almost count his molars.
The night before still singed the back of my eyelids but this morning he was different. Not hostile, not cold, but so measured it felt like being benched at your own funeral.
Something had changed. It didn’t happen all at once, but his guarded mask slowly began to crawl back over his face, and his heart.
He didn’t look at me. When I shifted to draw my knees up on the seat, he didn’t even flick his gaze from the road. He asked if I wanted breakfast and, when I said I wasn’t hungry, didn’t protest.
When we stopped for gas, he filled up in silence, standing with his arms crossed so tight the veins in his forearms stood out. I tried to catch his eye through the windshield; he fixed on the horizon, a man who had already calculated every possible escape route from this particular disaster.
By midafternoon, I was so high-strung I thought my skin might split open. There were a thousand things I wanted to say. Casual things, trivial things, anything to puncture the tension.
Instead, I watched the landscape scroll past: the flattening hills, the scattered bales of hay, the chain of sad little towns whose billboards all promised the same three fast food joints and one increasingly desperate antique store. I counted the cars, the cows, the crows perched in military rows on powerlines. I counted the minutes.
I counted the times Caiden opened his mouth to start a sentence and closed it again, defeated. I counted my own regrets, every moment I’d let myself get too close, every second I’d started to believe we were more than just two casualties limping in the same direction.
I thought about what it meant, that he wouldn’t even look at me after last night. Maybe he was ashamed. Maybe he was disappointed, or maybe he’d just wanted to prove something to himself, and now the experiment was over.
I wondered if he’d just done it to get it out of his system. To fuck me until the craving went away, or until I stopped being a mystery and started being a mistake.
The possibility made my chest go cold, a hollow ache carving out a space just below my ribs.
We hit the outskirts of Roanoke around dusk. The city lit up in the valley, neon strip malls and fluorescent gas stations flickering to life as the sun bled out behind the mountains. The interstate was clogged with minivans and delivery trucks.
I counted the miles it would take to get us home and wondered if I’d be able to bear it.
By the time the sun started to crawl down the sky, I’d exhausted every internal monologue. There were no tears left, just a dull ache that made my whole body feel like a used-up scab. I thought about Dante, about the way he’d said goodbye without making it a reckoning. I thought about the look on his face when I told him I needed to see where this went with Caiden, and the way he’d kissed me, gentle and final, as if he knew the ending already and just wanted to savor the middle while it lasted.
I wondered if that was how Caiden saw the world, too. Everything bright and alive, but only for a moment. Maybe that was why he couldn’t stand to look at me now, like if he stared too long, the reality of what we’d done in that motel room would cauterize all the hope he’d managed to scrape together.
The silence in the car was a ticking bomb. It pressed in on me, tried to find a way in through my pores, to fill the empty places that had been hollowed out by years of loss and wanting.
I scratched at the inside of my wrist, searching for any sign of life beneath my skin. If I pressed hard enough, I could feel my pulse tapping out a message: you’re here, you’re here, you’re here.
He took the next exit without warning, slamming the blinker so hard I thought it might snap off. The car dove onto a county road, and within minutes the highway was erased, replaced with two-lane blacktop and the humming chorus of cicadas rising under the canopy of trees.
Caiden drove with a tight, aggressive calm, ignoring the way the wheel jerked whenever the tires caught a rut or a pothole. I wondered if he was doing it on purpose, waiting for the road to jar us into some new arrangement, some honest angle of collision.
We briefly stopped at a fast-food restaurant. He ordered us both a meal, and we sat in the car to eat. Once we were done, he sped back out onto the road.
Our town became closer, and suddenly the whole day had drifted by, and we hadn’t talked about anything that mattered.
I felt that tight feeling in my throat. I wanted to cry, but I was desperately holding it back. Wobble of the lip, heaviness of the eyes.
