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“It’s not much,” he said apologetically, “but it’ll get us from A to B, I can promise you that.”
Olivia glanced longingly at the cabs again. His gaze followed hers.
“Elena will be upset if I show up without you—worse if she finds out I let you go home in a taxi. Some of them will cheat you.”
Gazing up at him and his pretty dark eyes, Olivia weighed her options once more.Come on, it was a misunderstanding,she told herself. It’s just a ride, not a marriage proposal.
“Fine,” she said in friendlier tone. “You can drive me back.”
Christian answered her with a big grin.
They walked around the van to the trunk.
“Stand back please,” he cautioned and waited for her to take a few steps back before unhooking the latch—which was basically a metal cord wrapped around the locking mechanism—and popping open the back.
Olivia saw the bright yellow luggage sitting on a spare tyre and reached for it.
“Don’t worry, I won’t let anyone else will snatch it from you,” he said and smiled, but she gave him a cold stare and dragged her luggage over to the front.
“How do you open the doors?” she asked after a few futile attempts to open the passenger door. She didn’t wait for his response and tried the large side door behind it; it rattled open.
“She is like a delicate woman; you need to know how to touch—” Christian stopped mid-sentence. “Practice, I mean,” he finished the sentence with a big, embarrassed smile. Normally, Olivia would have laughed the comment away, but, after the day she’d had, she wasn’t quite ready for that. She gave him a cold, blank stare.
Christian put her yellow luggage on one of the empty seats, and they got in and drove away from the airport. Olivia spent the next few minutes fumbling with the seatbelt. Each time she pulled it out, it’d either get stuck halfway or suddenly retract.
“Don’t worry, the police won’t stop us for that,” Christian said.
Olivia glanced at him and wrinkled her nostrils when a cloud of smoke wafted through the window crack and into her face.
“I’m not worried about the police; I’m more worried for my safety. I feel like this van is going to fall apart any . . .” She stopped when she noted a distant, pained look on his face.Not that long ago, you were scrambling to pay the bills too,she reminded herself. There was no point in making him feel bad.Besides, she thought,none of this was really his fault.
Looking out the window, at the long stretches of highway and the tall buildings in the distance, Olivia felt a strange sense of longing. She still had her right hand clasped on the seatbelt, holding it more out of assurance than anything else. Small cars drove past as the van moved along at a steady pace—steady enough to send in much-needed fresh air to blow out the exhaust. Huge signboards displayed words she couldn’t understand, but she saw something which looked like “airport” on one of them.
Gazing into the distance, Olivia wondered if her mother had ever travelled the very highway they were on. While watching a truck with a picture of cattle on it, she wondered if there was something here for her, something deeper than delivering a fair share of the Rusu fortune to the rightful heirs, something more connected to her.
A voice invaded her thoughts, and she glanced over at Christian, who was staring at her with a smile on his face. Had he asked her a question?
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“I said, I bet your flight was smoother than this, huh?” he joked. As he shifted gears, the van creaked and bounced for a few seconds before steadying itself. She smiled at him.
“We don’t have to talk now,” he said with the same neat smile he’d been flashing all day. “But it’s a five-hour drive; might as well kill some time.”
Olivia nodded and moved her eyes to the dashboard. There was an old stereo latched on it with a few wires sticking out. She wondered if that worked. Christian seemed to have followed her gaze and shook his head.
“Hasn’t worked in months. But you lucked out. I’m a tour guide by profession so I’m used to talking all through the drive.”
“I bet,” she said, letting the awkward moment stretch.
“I mean, we can just sit in silence for a bit if you need to digest that incident.”
“I’m just tired,” Olivia excused herself. She didn’t want to be rude. After all, it was the thoughts about her mother, not the earlier misunderstanding, that were causing her silence now.
Christian nodded, still smiling. “Of course.”
The van turned off the highway three hours later, leaving the tall buildings behind and ushering them into a whole different scenery, one not unlike the pictures Olivia had seen on the internet when she’d looked up Romania before travelling. She sat up, having been leaning against the window the whole time, and gaped at the splashes of green and yellow out her window, like paint on a canvas. They were surrounded by farmlands and mountain roads. In the distance, the setting sun added soft oranges and reds to the scene. For a moment, Olivia wasn’t bothered by the occasional bounce or sputter of the van.
“It’s beautiful, my Romania, huh?” Christian said. They hadn’t spoken much in the past three hours, except for Christian’s occasional “sorry about that” when they hit a bump. “Turbulence,” he’d say.
