“Thought I did, too.” The scent of her got to me again when I lay down, and sleep was out of the question. I was about two seconds from jacking off when my phone pinged with a text from Theo to hop online for some video games, if I was free.
I’d told him my Xbox was broken. Not a lie: if it’s not inoperable from its dunk in the lake, it will be once the Sprinter gets crushed into a cube.
I haven’t told my cousins about my travel situation, or Juniper. They’ll assume we’re fucking, the only plausible explanation for why I agreed to this deal, in their minds. I made sure everyone who met Juniper the month she lived with us knew I hated her once she left. I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her.
More importantly, I didn’t want anyone blaming me.
Yeah, that was a nice kick in the nuts: knowing everybody thought she skipped town because of me. They still thought she was the sweet, mysterious little miracle she’d been at the beginning. Of course too-horny-for-his-own-good Van chased her away and broke her heart.
They’d never believe the truth was just the opposite.
In summary: no, I didn’t jack off to thoughts of her instead of napping, and I’m damn proud of it.
Of course, watching her bend over in those shorts to put more string cheese in the fridge could convince a man pride is utterly useless.
“Did you take your antibiotic?” She grabs the bottle and waves it at me without looking.
“It hurts my stomach.”
“Pneumonia will hurt your lungs a whole lot more.” After passing me a dose and some cheese, she gets up and preheats the convection oven on the counter. “Speaking of which, I think it’s insane you smoke cigarettes when you’re asthmatic.”
“Agreed.”
She reels, mock horror on her face. Maybe real horror. “Wow. You actually agree with me on something?”
I pass her a spoon from the wall when she reaches past me. “I quit at the start of my road trip, but then....”
Juniper blushes all the way down her body. “But then I came along?”
“I was going to say, ‘But then I had a near-death experience,’ but your wording’s pretty accurate, too.”
While she seasons the chicken she picked up, I start on some rice and steamed broccoli. I tell myself it’s not for her benefit, or even general politeness. I just miss cooking.
“You’re being way too stingy with that garlic,” I tell her. “Add more. And...” I rummage through the cabinet. “...ginger. Here.”
From the corner of my eye, I catch her biting back her smile. “I forgot how much you love bossing people around in the kitchen.”
“All that Argentinian blood. Can’t be afraid of flavor.” I grab a bunch of stuff to add to the rice, while I’m at it. “I’d say that’s the biggest downside of traveling: most roadside food is so fucking bland.”
I pause. “Wait, I take that back. The biggest downside was shitting in the woods.”
Her laugh rings out between us. It’s a real one, full and rich and almost loud, instead of kept on a leash like everything else she does around me.
Instantly, I know I’m addicted to it.
Like cigarettes, I wish I wasn’t.
We plate our food and sit in the open doorway to eat, watching the sun go down behind the grocery store. Passersby linger, and a few point.
“People seem to enjoy your setup.”
“They enjoy the idea of it, but most would never actually live in a van. It’s like...well,” she laughs, flicking some dropped rice off the running board, “like living on a farm or ranch, actually. Everyone romanticizes it. Few actually do it.”
This makes me nod. When Mom and Dad bought the ranch, all their friends went apeshit over it, adoring the idea of a quiet, easy life outside the city. “We should do that too!” they kept saying.
And yet, not a single one ever did.
“It’s way harder than I thought it’d be,” I confess. “I mean, I did the absolute bare minimum outfitting the Sprinter, which didn’t help—”
“Don’t sell yourself short, the whole ‘mattress on the floor and clothes shoved into milk crates’ look is very in, right now.”
“—but still,” I finish, tapping her Powerade so she dribbles, “life on the road hasn’t been what I expected.”
She wipes her mouth with her arm. “What did you expect?”
“That living a different lifestyle would equate to having a different life.”
I laugh in my throat, hearing myself sum up the truth so quickly. While I scrape the last bit of rice off my plate, I feel her stare linger on my face.
“That’s why people think they want RVs and tiny houses, and farms, and year-round cruises,” I say. My eyes fall to her feet, bare over the blistered asphalt. “We think all our problems are in our locations, but they’re not. They’re inside us. Wherever we go, they go.”
Juniper sets her plate behind us and pulls her knees up, resting her chin there. “Maybe some of them.”
“All.”
“Most,” she counters, a compromise. I accept it by shutting up and shoveling more chicken in my mouth. “Changing locations and lifestyles is still helpful, though. We get a clearer picture of what our problems are.”
“Did you?” I feel her look at me again. “When you started living in the Transit, I mean.”
“I think so. You?”
“In the Sprinter? No way. Living in that thing was so rough, it piled a whole bunch of new problems on top.”
“What about since you moved into Eloise?” Grinning, she slaps the outside of the Transit.
“It’s only been two days.”
“That’s plenty of time to see your problems.”
“Besides being stuck with you?” I ask, and let her shove me. I grab her plate and take it to the sink with mine. “I already knew my problems. The anger issues, how I talk to people...the fact I don’t really like being around anyone, these days. Even Wes managed to piss me off back in Brooklyn, and he’s the easiest dude to live with.”
“Knowing what your problems are is different from knowing why you’ve got them.”
“People just piss me off. It’s not rocket science.”
Juniper sighs like she wants to add something, but I refuse to turn around and find out what it is. I probably wouldn’t like it.
“Wow, your van is amazing!”
I glance behind me. A girl’s got her boyfriend in a death grip, dragging him closer to us. Juniper agrees when they ask to look inside.
They stay way too long; they even sit on the bed and give it a test bounce. I grip the scouring pad almost hard enough to pierce my skin. I’d better not smell their knockoff Hollister cologne and perfume when I get in that bed, later.
They stay almost twenty minutes, marveling at every little thing and asking Juniper a thousand questions, all of which she answers with the sweetest smile.
“Sorry to kick you guys out,” I announce, after the dishes are done, the cargo is secure, and my patience is thinner than water, “but we have to leave. Long trip.”
“Oh, of course.” The girl gets up and shakes my hand, then hugs Juniper like they’re already lifelong friends or some shit. “Thank you again. As soon as I saw this in the parking lot, I told my boyfriend we just had to look inside. I’m so jealous. I mean, God, how romantic!” Her energy-draining smile swings to me. “Just the two of you in your own little place, totally ignoring the rest of the world.”
“Yep. You guys should get yourselves one of these things. It’s a super easy lifestyle.”
They laugh. Juniper gives me a look that might be a scold.
As soon as they’re gone, I slam my way into the driver’s seat and crank the ignition.
“See,” I tell her, “that’s exactly the kind of shit I can’t stand—how clueless people can be. You’d never walk up to a stranger’s actual house and ask to look inside, so why do it with a vehicle?”
“You might if it were a classic car or something else unique,” she points out,
buckling up. “They were just curious.”
“Let them be curious on Pinterest or Google Images like everyone else.”
She puts her hands in her lap and shrugs. “The girl did subscribe to my Instagram.”
“Which,” I breathe, pointing out her window, “apparently isn’t stopping her from taking photos of your car. You tell her she could do that?”
Juniper hesitates. “No. But it’s fine.”
“Why? Because letting her do it is easier than calling her out?” Without waiting for her answer, I roll down her window with my controls and shout, “Uh, bye?!”
The girl starts. The guy gives me the finger.
Juniper shouts an apology just before I slam the gas and tear out of there.
“That was really rude, Van. What happened to controlling your temper?”
“Oops.” I dig my cigarettes out of my pocket and pull over in a high school parking lot. Whether her long, dramatic groan is for my cavalier attitude at being rude to strangers, or because I’m smoking, who knows.
When I return, she’s stretched out on her bed with a book, string lights glowing overhead.
“What, you’re not sitting with me now?”
“Why on earth,” she says, turning a page hard enough to tear it, “would I want to sit with you after what you just did?”
“And what was that? Standing up for you, because you’ve got no backbone to do it yourself?”
“No, for doing that…thing again.”
My gaze meets hers in the rearview. “What thing?”
“Where you’re nice one minute, then a huge jerk the next. It’s been two days and I’m already sick of it. I’m tempted to tell you to just pick one and stick with it.”
“Little advice: don’t give me an ultimatum. You won’t like my choice.”
Silence greets me. I crank the engine and start back for the highway.
I sense her move closer, until she’s standing in the aisle between the seats. Having her hand so close to my shoulder, but not touching me, just annoys me more.
“You say you did all this to have a different life.” Her breath winds down my neck. I scratch it off me. “Maybe start with a different attitude. That’s your problem, Van.”
Rage hits me like a sucker punch.
As in, I can’t believe what a sucker I was to let one ounce slip away.
“You know what I’m already sick of?” I ask, mimicking the nauseatingly cheery tone she uses for her Instagram stories. “Your ‘let’s live off sunshine and shit rainbows’ attitude, acting like life is so beautiful underneath the garbage. It’s not. Underneath the garbage is more garbage.”
Rubbing her temples, she spins the passenger chair around and sits. “Seriously, why are you so jaded about the world? I know you’ve had some bad things happen to you—”
“Look in the mirror for Exhibit A.”
“—but you’ve also had a very good life, Van. You still do.” She taps the armrests with her nails. “Really: tell me. Tell me why you get angry like this.”
“Tell me why you don’t.”
I expect her to sigh at my deflection, but she sits back and spins a little, actually considering.
“I guess,” she says finally, “my outlook on life—staying positive, finding the good in everything I can—is the only one that makes sense to me.”
“Exactly.” My palms sweat against the wheel. Discreetly, I wipe them on my pants one at a time. “Being jaded makes sense to me. Though I think a more accurate term would be ‘being awake.’ Actually seeing things the way they are. And you know what? I would think you, of all people, would get where I’m coming from.”
She laughs. Poor thing thinks I’m kidding.
“Whatever you ran away from,” I tell her, ignoring the way every oxygen molecule leaves the car at once, “had to be pretty bad. You were underweight, beaten up, sick as hell…. And that was just the physical side of the coin. You couldn’t even speak correctly, Juniper.”
“Not knowing slang doesn’t mean I couldn’t speak correctly.”
“You were sheltered from damn near anything remotely modern. Anything real.” Bringing all this up puts an image in my head I haven’t thought of in years: a strict, weird family I never met. Hell, I never even got confirmation they existed. But the more I learned about her that summer at the ranch, the easier they were to imagine. I figured her father was abusive and delusional; her mother, a brainwashed little mouse. Maybe she had siblings. She sometimes muttered “Rebecca” during her nightmares.
“Wherever you came from,” I finish, “must’ve been truly horrible to send you into the woods of North Dakota looking for something better. So I find it weird as hell you don’t agree with my point of view that this world will fuck us over any chance it gets, without so much as buying us dinner first.”
This time, her silence isn’t a relief. I really want to hear her answer.
Part of me might even want to know how she does it—how the hell she wakes up every day convinced it’ll be a good one. Determined to make it one, regardless.
“I really don’t want to talk about any of that, right now.” Her voice is tight, like a string pulled until, one by one, the fibers start to snap. She stands.
I put my arm across the aisle, stopping her.
“Ah, see? There it is. One ugly spot that no amount of positivity can pretty up.”
With a sigh, she folds her arms.
“We’ve had a nice trip, Van,” she says quietly. “Let’s not ruin it.”
“This isn’t a trip. It’s a transaction. And just because the last two days have been slightly tolerable doesn’t mean a thing.”
I drop my arm to let her pass.
Then I reach for the radio and turn it up, to fill the silence she gave me instead of a real answer.
Shifting her weight as the Transit sways, she steadies herself against my seat. This time, her hand does touch my shoulder.
“Do you still hate me?” she asks.
It’s practically a whisper, but screams through my head like a siren.
Correction: a siren’s call, luring me to a place I don’t want to be. Someplace inside that remembers how it felt to have her in my life, better than it remembers how it felt to lose her.
This really isn’t good for me: close quarters with no one but her. Grudges started fading. Nostalgia has been getting the best of me.
Never again.
I try to summon my response. Yes. Short, simple, destructive. A lie that I wish wasn’t a lie.
“I haven’t forgotten what you did,” I say instead.
I can’t let myself forget what she did.
Slowly, she starts for the back. Her hand trails off me like silk.
“Thought so,” she says.
Thirteen
Today will be a good day.
Very rarely do I have to tell myself this explicitly. By now, the mindset is built right into my morning routine of yoga and enjoying whatever view I’ve got.
Of course, when that view includes a stone face halfway scowling at you for hours on end, positivity is hard to come by.
“What?” I snap, when Van and I switch drivers after breakfast, and he plants himself in the passenger seat, spins it to face me, and simply stares.
Maybe he’s not even scowling. Sometimes that’s just how his face looks, like it’s become the default position. Ready to go whenever he needs it.
But I’m tired of that, too: never knowing when the switch will flip, and our uneasy peace will fissure. Our shared past simmers underfoot at all times like the lava it is—warm at a distance, deadly up-close.
Forget walking on eggshells. This is a rope bridge, burning a little more each day.
“You said my name in your sleep last night. Twice.” His voice is too calm; it hikes my guard. “Why?”
“Uh, if I was asleep, how on earth would I know?”
Oh, you know.
The space between my legs still aches because of it, in fact.
After
our argument, I curled up in bed with a book and faced the wall. His stare in the rearview sent chills up and down my back, until I shielded myself with the blanket and drifted to sleep.
I dreamed he devoured me. That crass mouth and poisoned tongue, filling me until I held his head in place and demanded more. Fuck me, Van. Get up here and fuck me.
Very rarely do I curse in real life, I suppose because I never got enough practice. I was told it was a sin, especially for women—something that would cheapen me and mark my soul. No man would have me.
But in my dream, I knew that would be the language Van understood best. My frustration fueled him. Every breathless, furious curse that fell from my lips charmed him.
He didn’t mind the marks on my soul, because it wasn’t my soul he cared about. Because his was so covered by now, not a single ray of light could shine through.
Because he didn’t want to have me.
I was a conquest. A jump on a winding trail, meant to elevate him briefly to god status—then swiftly left behind in the dust.
I woke before I could finish. That seemed most fitting of all: that I woke with tension coursing through me, irritable and unfulfilled.
“You dreamed about me.” Funneling a handful of spearmint Tic-Tacs into his mouth, Van mumbles, “Tell me,” before crunching them like ice. It’s deafening.
“Maybe I dreamed about this van.” My palm slaps Eloise’s dash. “Let a little air out of your ego.”
Forget anger. That’s always been his biggest problem: arrogance.
Unfortunately, he kind of deserves some of it.
Van is handsome. No—Van drips with sexiness, the kind that breaks your heart before you even get within a few feet of him, because you know he’s about to set the bar where few other men can reach.
It’s that impossible-to-read face, and muscles forged on mountains, and the dirt that paints him at all times.
It’s that deep, rich voice, zapping your heart like coffee. Strong as can be, and hot as hell.
Confidence radiates from every torn cell. He even walks the way gods would: feet barely touching the ground, knowing it’s only a matter of time before he’s back in the sky.
Seven Sins: Durham Boys, Book 2 Page 9