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Paige found herself frowning. Parker had paid for the hotel room. He'd also paid for all their drinks the night before – she didn’t usually let people do that for her. She had some money, she could pay her own way. She would have to pay him back. Return the favor. Today, she decided, she would fill his car up with gas and -
“Mother fucker!” she suddenly screamed, leaping back as the water hitting her legs went from hot to freezing ice cold in the blink of an eye. The bathroom door slammed shut and she could now hear the telltale sounds of the toilet flushing. She went to step back into the spray, but it had gone from absurdly cold to absurdly hot and she hissed, scooting back out.
Maybe I won't pay him back ...
*
PARKER GRINNED AS THEYcruised down the road. Paige sat in what he'd learned was her usual position – leg out the window, fingers twisting a strand of hair, eyes gazing off into the distance. She hadn’t really forgiven him for the toilet flushing incident, but she seemed to have calmed down for now. She wasn’t speaking, but she didn’t seem to need to speak a lot, so he didn’t worry too much.
They'd gone for breakfast at an IHOP, where she'd insisted on paying. They'd argued for a couple minutes about that; Parker had more than enough money to take care of things, so he didn’t mind paying for her. Her beat up backpack, worn shoes, and joke of a cell phone told him she didn’t seem to have a lot money, and Parker liked taking care of people.
She was also wearing the same leggings she'd been wearing the day before, not that he was complaining. The girl had all the right equipment to pull off wearing leggings as pants, but most girls he knew balked at the idea of wearing the same article of clothing multiple days in a row. She was, though, wearing a different shirt – gone was her all-black funeral look; a nice blue plaid button up shirt in its place. At the police station she'd been wearing the black t-shirt and a pair of cut-off shorts, so this was the most color he'd ever seen her wear. It looked good on her, complimented her tan skin.
Parker swallowed thickly and kept his eyes on the road. Since he'd met her, Paige had “pissed off and closed off” written all over her in capital letters, so he'd made it a point to keep his distance. That was why he didn’t touch her, why he tried not to flirt with her – he tried to keep things on a shallow, joking level at all times. If all she needed was a friend at this point in her life, then he could try to be that, instead of some creepy guy just trying to sleep with her. Though he felt very differently, he tried to make it seem like he just thought of her as another dude.
Which I'm pretty sure means I shouldn't be staring at her amazing rack.
He shook his head quickly and tried to keep his mind out of the gutter. He would just keep his distance and keep everything light, because she also seemed a little nosy – he knew the best way to get her to talk about herself would be to withhold his own story and make her trade for information. That way she could think it was all on her own terms.
He frowned. There were also a couple things in his past he didn’t particularly feel like divulging just yet, anyway, so that worked in his favor. Paige seemed like a cool chick, but he just wasn’t ready to share everything with her.
He hadn’t actually intended on taking a road trip. It was supposed to be a “from here directly to there” trip from Connecticut to Washington state, but he couldn’t seem to head in the right direction. He kept taking different side roads and wrong exits, and when he'd seen Paige standing outside that police station, he'd suddenly known what he was supposed to do next.
Parker had never picked up a hitchhiker before, never wanted to. The idea actually kinda made him nervous, what with all the crazy stories you heard. He didn’t want to get his face eaten off or anything. But he was a pretty big guy, brush six-foot-four, played sports, kept in shape, and though Paige was tall – he guessed she was somewhere around five-foot-nine or ten – she was very thin with a delicate frame. He was pretty sure if it came down to a face-eating-kind-of-fight, he could hold her off.
Once she'd let her guard down a tiny bit and decided to actually speak to him, he'd enjoyed the company. Singing along to oldies by himself was great, but actually talking to someone, and a pretty girl at that, was even better. Her tongue was sharp to the point of being barbed and she cursed like a truck driver, but he actually liked it. He knew she wasn’t pretending with him. She could hide her past all she wanted, but at least he knew he was talking to the real person. TherealPaige. A lot of girls weren’t like that when you first met them. It took a couple times meeting before they would relax, and usually by then he was too uninterested to try anymore.
Paige just seemed different, almost like an old friend he hadn't seen in a long time – that's why it was so easy to relax around her. To joke around with her, let her take liberties he normally wouldn’t let someone he just met.
Though he wouldneverlet her drive his car again.
“You wanna look around the town for a while, or head on?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the wind rushing in the window.
Paige pulled herself upright and grabbed her backpack out of the backseat. He tried to watch her and the road as she began rifling through her stuff. She finally pulled out a well-worn road map, the kind that had to be unfolded multiple times before the whole country could be seen. She expertly unfolded and refolded it a couple times till the state of Mississippi was before them.
“Eh, seems kinda small. You seen one, you seen ‘em all. Wanna keep driving? There’s some bigger towns coming up,” she suggested, her finger tracing the line that represented the road they were on.
Parker smiled. Who looked at print maps anymore?
Screw you, GPS.
“Sounds good to me,” he responded, glancing in his rearview mirror as he switched lanes. Paige folded the map completely up and put it away before throwing her bag back into the back.
“And you’re sure you're okay with this? Like really? With me hijacking your road trip?” she asked, not looking at him. He barked out a laugh.
“Like really. I keep telling you it's okay, Paige, get over it. I really have nothing to do, and doing nothing with someone else is way better than doing it alone. If anything, you tell me when you’re sick of me, and I’ll consider letting you go,” he joked. She snorted – something else she did a lot.
“Okay. I just don’t wanna overstay my welcome, you know? I usually don’t spend this much time with one person on the road. I always inevitably get the itch to be alone, so I’ll probably be gone soon. But thanks,” she said quickly, picking at her thumbnail. He resisted the urge to stop her.
No touching.
“Fo’ get abouddit,” he said in a thick New York accent, trying to ease her nervousness by making her laugh. She cracked up.
Mission accomplished.
“What the hell is that? Is that how they talk in Connecticut?” she managed to get out between laughs.
“Nah, dis is how dey talk in Long Iiiisland,” he continued in the accent.
