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Chase laughs, reaching out to put a hand to my knee. Every ounce of my blood leaves the rest of my body to rush to that one spot I refuse to communicate with at this very moment. Heart needs blood? Not right now, it doesn’t. My gaze fixates on his long, tanned fingers as they squeeze at my flesh, and all of my basic functions grab their picket signs and go on strike. I have to remind myself to take breaths in and out and swallow every now and then.
“If I’m being honest, I’m probably used to dealing with average equipment in my day-to-day life,” he says with a teasing smile that makes me feel nauseated.
Oh my God, this would be the perfect time for the bowels of the earth to open right up and swallow me whole. Sinkholes, quicksand, where are you when I need you?
I cannot find words, not in my mouth or my throat or at the bottom of my stomach. Language, for me, ceases to exist.
Chase doesn’t linger in my silence, though, filling it rather with good-natured chatter. “Actually, I’ve driven a motor home two times in my life—or well, for two, one-week stretches, I guess I should say. When I was a kid, my parents always took my sister and me to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Have you ever been there?”
I smile. Holy shit. Myrtle Beach? “Seriously? That’s where we always went too.”
Chase laughs. “I think it was a nineties hot spot.”
“I wonder if we were ever there at the same time,” I muse, thinking back on all the pictures my mother took of Sammy and me jumping in the waves and boogie-boarding. There were always kids all over the beach, and the thought that one of those children might have been this man is almost unfathomable. I mean, he’s so…rugged and manly and masculine. Clearly, men like him had to be kids at one point in their lives, but I’m here to tell you the awkwardness I lived through during my childhood is the kind of thing that lingers. There’s no way he wouldn’t have at least a touch of it left in him if he hadn’t spawned straight into adulthood. Right?
“We probably were.”
A shiver runs down my spine as I remember the video I saw on the internet about spirit guides. The lady talking about them was showing a picture of herself on her first day of college, with her now-fiancé completely unaware in the background. She said the spirit guides try our whole lives to bring us together with the people who are important, and little Easter eggs like that picture are their way of making a cute joke.
Could it be possible that Chase Dawson and I are meant to be? And our spirit guides have been teasing us our whole lives with trips to Myrtle Beach and a love for books? Have they even been brushing us up against each other in New York City?
“I don’t remember what month we used to go, but I think it might have been June,” Chase remarks, snatching me from my fantasy and seat-belting me right back into the passenger seat of this motor home. The Bakers went in July. Always. “I’d have to ask my sister. All I can remember is that we always went to get ice cream at the shop down the street from our campground. Mo got vanilla bean, and I always went for orange sherbet. I never ate the stuff except when we were there, and I don’t think I’ve eaten it since. But we went twice after I got my license, when my parents weren’t really sure what to do with us anymore, and my dad made me drive the motor home. I had to park it in the campsite and everything, and my sister would always be screaming at me not to run into anything.”
“Wow. I think that makes you an expert, then.”
“I don’t know about an expert, but definitely capable of handling large equipment.”
A blush steals across my cheeks once more at Chase’s playfulness—surely induced by pity—and I turn to look out the window in an effort to conceal it. Benji forgets our beef temporarily and takes a rest right in between Chase’s seat and mine. I reach to buckle my seat belt—literally, this time—as we go across a couple of bumpy parts in the road and stare out the windshield at the unbelievable amount of city traffic Chase has to navigate this thing through. I’m stressed just watching it happen, and I don’t even have to do anything.
I can only hope my cortisol levels won’t be this high throughout the entire trip. Benji won’t get to sleep at all, and I’ll never hear the end of it.
“So, after we make it out of this urban deathtrap…where are we heading?”
