by LJ Evans
“Wow, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything in here,” he whispered to me with a sly wink, and I turned a thousand shades of red.
I turned away from him to my parents. I squeezed Daddy, and he held tight, patting my back and saying, “Have fun, baby girl.”
When I went to Mama, she was already in tears. “Mama,” I started and was about to say that I would stay, but she cut me off.
“No, no. I’m just being a silly ol’ lady. I love you.” She hugged me tight. “You enjoy yourself, but don’t get mad at me if I text a lot.”
“I hope you do,” I told her, hugging back as hard as I could.
Derek had my stuff stowed in the back of the car, and I picked up my slouchy bag with the books inside. I gave my parents another quick hug and then stepped off the porch to where Derek already had the door of the Camaro open.
“Make sure you check the oil and water. Jake’s… the Camaro can be temperamental when it gets hot,” Daddy warned.
“I promise. I really will take good care of them both,” Derek said just as he had before. He sank into the driver’s seat. We pulled out, and he honked.
I turned back and waved at them on the steps, wrapped around each other. They looked so alone. God.
We drove in silence for a few minutes while I collected myself. Trying hard not to cry. Trying hard not to demand that he turn around. Then I realized we didn’t have the boys with us. And, really, he was driving after he’d told me that was why he needed me to tag along in the first place. I said as much to him.
“The boys headed out in the bus when I came to get you. They’re just a little ahead of us. We’ll hook up with them for lunch. And I’m driving today, but you’re driving tomorrow before we get to our gig.”
More silence. And it should have been awkward, but it wasn’t. Maybe he understood that I needed to get myself back into a place where I could behave normally. In any event, he waited quietly for me.
He fiddled with the radio going from one country station to the next.
“You’re not going to find much more than country in this part of Tennessee,” I told him.
“What would you listen to if you had a choice?”
“Ed Sheeran.”
He sighed. “That’s so not what I expected of you.”
“What? He’s an amazing writer.”
“I don’t dispute that. But, I’ve come to expect the unexpected from you, and Ed is a little too mainstream these days.”
I didn’t know what to think about that. That he thought I was unexpected. I felt I had lived my life in one big expectation box. But, I could also sense that this was somehow important to him. Probably because his life was music.
“My friend Harry and I used to listen to blues and jazz and ragtime tunes on vinyl. That kinda stuck with me.” I shrugged.
“That’s much better.” He grinned.
I took off my flip flops and curled myself up into the seat of the Camaro. Old muscle cars always have plenty of room in their seats for tiny people like me to curl up. It was an advantage. The disadvantage being that old cars are always loud. Traveling for three weeks in the Camaro wasn’t going to be a picnic.
I looked over and caught him taking me in before his eyes flitted back to the highway and the long stretch of nothing ahead of us.
“You look good like that,” he said with a tone in his voice that made my body turn hot and zingy.
I ignored his comment. I was just in another pair of jean shorts and a t-shirt. Hair in another pony tail. I knew I looked tired as sin after two nights of pretty much no sleep. And let’s not forget that the emotions of the last couple days had been high. Dark eye rings had greeted me in the mirror this morning.
My phone buzzed.
CAM: Please tell me your mama is wrong?
ME: If you mean, am I currently in the passenger seat of Jake’s Camaro driving to Oklahoma with the moron, then I’m afraid she’s right.
CAM: Blake’s literally going to kill him.
ME: It’s not like that.
CAM: Ooookaayyy.
ME: Seriously.
CAM: I’m not your mama. Don’t lie.
ME: Okay. It’s not like that, Cami.
CAM: Ugh. Don’t Cami me.
I couldn’t help but smile.
CAM: Why are you doing this?
I thought about how I could best respond to that question. I wasn’t hundred percent sure I could answer it even to myself. Especially when no one in my family even knew about Hayden’s existence. I looked over at Derek, heartbreakingly gorgeous, Derek, and the closest thing I could think was because I didn’t think I could not do it. So I typed that. Her response came quick.
CAM: I’m worried about you, kiddo.
ME: Don’t. It’s gonna be okay.
CAM: Hmm. Well, at least have fun. But don’t do anything I would do. Do only what sensible Mia would tell crazy Cam to do.
It made me smile again.
ME: I promise.
But I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. Because I wasn’t sure I could promise her that I would be my normal Mia self. Normal Mia wouldn’t even be in the car.
I put the phone down. Derek was still glancing between me and the road. I hadn’t had to look up to know that. I’d felt it the whole time I’d been texting Cam. That intensity he gave off was wafting over me like the echolocation it was.
“Cam?” he asked. I guess that’s pretty much the only person he’d seen me text. In truth, I didn’t text many people more than her. Wynn. Harry occasionally. My mama. Cam’s mama.
“Yes. I’d be careful the next time you see Blake, he might be carrying a gun.”
Derek laughed that belly laugh that made his chin stretch and drew my eyes to his chest and the way it heaved under the muscles. He looked too good to be real. The fact that I was the girl sitting next to him in his car seemed dreamlike.
“She’s not your sister, but it’s like she is. Tell me how that works,” he said.
And surprisingly, I wanted to. I didn’t tell many people Jake and Cam’s story. Our families’ story. In our town, you didn’t need to tell it because it was a legend. In college, I’d wanted to not talk about it. I’d wanted to just be Mia and not Jake’s little sister Mia because I’d thought it would make the guilt go away. But it never had.
So, I found myself telling Derek the whole story. I told him how we had all grown up together in our houses with the shared yard and treehouse. I told him that our families were so close that it was like one family with two sets of parents. And I told him how Jake and Cam had grown up in each other’s pockets and that when you saw them together, it was like they were one person instead of two. Like they were only whole when they were together. And when they were apart, they were still people, but missing something.
I told him about Jake’s time at UTK and how he’d had to give football up. I told him how Jake had followed Cam to Virginia, and how they’d lost it all to Jake’s disease. And I told him, which I never told anyone, about how when Jake needed a kidney, and I was a match, that I couldn’t imagine saying no to him. To Cam and Jake because they deserved to be a whole person instead of the painful halves they would be if he didn’t survive. So, I gave them a kidney but he hadn’t survived anyway… and, well… enough said.
I looked out the window at the flat ground and grass flying by the Camaro when I was done. I wasn’t sure why I had wanted to tell him all of that when I’d kept it to myself for so long. But, for some reason, I’d wanted this BB to know my story. The story of a girl who gave up a body part to save a brother who everyone wanted to survive more than the girl herself. And how that hadn’t worked out.
“Wow,” he said after a few minutes of silence. It was as if he’d really taken the time to absorb my story. Like he seemed to absorb me every time he touched me. And even though I heard him, I didn’t turn from the view outside. I wasn’t sure what I’d see in those expressive eyes of his, and I really wasn’t sure I could handle whatever was there.
/> I felt his hand grasping for mine, and it wasn’t till then that I realized I was clutching the edge of the seat so tightly it could have torn. He forced my fingers open and clasped them in his own. “Mia?”
I looked down at our joined fingers before I finally had the courage to look up at his face. There were no smiles there now. God, I felt like such a depressing twit. One of the things that had attracted me the most about him was all those enormous smiles and less than an hour on the road with him, and I’d wiped it away.
“You know it isn’t your fault, right?” he said with a frown.
“What?”
“Jake rejecting your kidney. That had nothing do with you.”
“Oh, I know that,” I said, but then I looked down from his eyes to his hand. And I did know that. I mean, I did. But then some days the guilt overwhelmed me. I’d thought so many times that if he’d gotten a different kidney, the story would have had a different ending.
He squeezed my hand. “I’m not sure you do.”
I pulled away and lied the lie I always did. “Seriously. It’s not a big deal. We’ve all kind of moved on. But you asked, so I told you.”
“I did ask,” he said. “But I also know what it’s like to live with guilt.”
His eyes were on the road and he wasn’t smiling, but I also couldn’t really imagine the happy Derek I’d seen over the last couple days being weighed down with the guilt inside me. Even though I’d glimpsed a quiet side to him here and there. The guilt that weighed me down was like a whole train, and he didn’t seem to be carrying that much baggage.
Silence filled the car for a little while again while some newbie country singer sang something that was more pop than country.
“I’m really glad I bought the car,” he said, and I couldn’t help but be drawn to his face again. And I saw a gravity there that really kind of wrecked my heart all over again because I knew he didn’t mean because he liked sixties muscle cars. He meant he was glad because now my family had someone keeping it safe that understood what was beneath the red paint and beefy motor.
Suddenly, all of it was a little too much for me. This crazy journey. The responsibility. The serious look on Derek’s face. So I did what I always did when the world was too much, and that was to pull out my book.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I was going to read, there’s nothing else to do.”
He put a hand to his chest. “Ouch. Nothing else to do.”
I ignored him and looked down at the book, only to be drawn back to his face by his question.
“What’s it about?”
“Um. It’s Pride and Prejudice?”
“And?”
I wasn’t quite sure that he wasn’t joking. “You know. It’s Pride and Prejudice. By Jane Austen.”
“Oookaay?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me? You don’t even know who Jane Austen is, do you?” Holy bejeezus, what was I doing in a car with some guy who didn’t even know one of the most famous writers of all time!
“I know who Jane Austen is. The writer chick from the eighteen hundreds. I just haven’t read anything of hers.”
“Do you even know how to read?”
“Ouch again.”
“Okay, musician boy. Who’s your favorite author?”
“Current or classical?”
I shrugged.
“Well, my man Will had a lot to say in iambic pentameter. Which was pretty much music in those days, so he’s gotta be up there?”
“That doesn’t say anything. I mean anyone can throw Shakespeare out there and sound impressive.”
“So I’m trying to be impressive?” he said with a twinkle back in his eye that made him hard to resist, but which I was also relieved to see after the seriousness of before. But it also made me realize he’d done it on purpose. The shift in conversation to shift the mood.
“I didn’t exactly say that.”
“But you did,” he smirked, “if I’m trying to be impressive, I see that I’ll have to say someone more current but noteworthy. Hmm. How about Robert Ludlum? No. He’s still dead. And that really is a spy novel which doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well,” and he twirled a hand towards my Pride and Prejudice.
“So, girls who read Jane Austen are only into romance novels and erotica?”
He swerved, and I clutched the door handle. “Jesus!” I breathed out.
“I swear to God, you’re going to be the death of me. You can’t say things like that and expect me not to react.”
“What?” I frowned trying to think about what I had said.
He burst out laughing. “Erotica. Do you really read that?”
I could feel the red creep into my face because I hadn’t really thought about it when I said it. “I read everything.”
His eyes met mine, and the car swerved again, and I had to put a hand out towards the wheel before he quickly straightened it out.
“Is Pride and Prejudice erotica?”
My turn to laugh. “God no.”
“Thank God.”
“Why would it matter?”
“I don’t think I could drive knowing that you were reading porn,” he said with a look on his face that made me turn pink all over again.
“Erotica isn’t porn.”
“Isn’t it?” He met my eyes with his own flashing something at me. Something that made me all fuzzy inside. Three weeks. I told myself. Holy button holes! I was going to be spending three weeks with this.
And, he was right after all. Erotica was probably pretty close to what was in those PlayBabe magazines. But I hadn’t read PlayBabe even though I’d protested that I read everything.
I shrugged in half-agreement. “Maybe. But Jane Austen is definitely not that. Her work first came out in serials in the English newspapers, so definitely not gonna be erotica.”
He reached over and turned off the pop station that was supposed to be country. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Read it out loud. At least we’ll both have something to do rather than listen to that shit.”
And that’s what I did until we stopped for lunch. Read Jane Austen aloud in my dead brother’s Camaro with a sexy musician behind the wheel while I was curled up in my shorts and another Harry Potter t-shirt. It should have felt like I was on an alien planet, but instead, it felt like I was home.
* * *
At lunch, we met up with the rest of the band. They were driving the tour bus, which was just an oversized motorhome with the name of their band, Watery Reflection, painted on the side. But who was I to tell them that it wasn’t a real tour bus?
They all greeted me like I was already a member of their group with hugs and jokes that put me immediately at ease. I hadn’t been sure what they would think of me tagging along. I got to meet Rob Colt, their drummer, for the first time. He was a lean machine of a man with naturally white blonde hair. He seemed like he couldn’t sit still and was bouncing a knee in the booth as if he needed to be somewhere else. Plus, the guys were still harassing him about his wife, Trista.
“Is she meeting us in Oklahoma City?” Owen asked.
“Yeah, but she isn’t ready to divorce me yet, so you can’t have her,” Rob threw back.
“You’ll screw up bad enough eventually,” Owen grinned.
I was having a hard time imagining this bantering was serious, but they had said yesterday that Owen had a thing for Rob’s wife, so who knew.
“So, Mia, Derek hasn’t scared you away yet?” Rob said turning to me as he shoved his club sandwich into his mouth.
“Is he supposed to be scary?” I asked.
The boys all laughed.
“You’ll see. Don’t let that jovial clown nature of his trip you up. Underneath he’s all emotional drama,” Mitch said and Derek threw a French fry at him.
He was grinning at them, but I wondered. He seemed generally happy. Almost insanely so, but he’d also gotten fairly se
rious with me including that vague reference to understanding guilt.
“Dude, you know that isn’t even true. He just writes that sappy shit so the ladies will throw their panties at him,” Lonnie responded.
“You guys are not helping my cause at all,” Derek said with a sad shake of his head.
“Were we supposed to help you? You should have sent out a text,” Owen joked. “I already sent one to Mia warning her off.”
Derek punched him in the shoulder and then turned to me. “Whatever you do, do not, and I repeat do not, give your phone number to any of these bozos.”
“Well, we’ll need to text her while you’re driving. You know, safety first,” Mitch chimed in.
“She can just answer my phone for me,” Derek said. Was he really worried about the band having my number?
“Are you sure? Maybe some panty throwing lover girl will be texting you?” Lonnie laughed.
“I do not give my number to any panty throwing girls,” Derek said firmly, and then all but pushed Owen out of the booth to stand up. “We gotta hit the road, folks. We’ve got a few more hours till we hit Fort Smith.”
Fort Smith was where we were stopping for the night. I guess the boys weren’t the type to do eleven-hour days in the car which made me wonder why I really needed to be along for the ride, but at this point it was too late to question it. Truth was. I didn’t want to go back. Not yet. I had given myself three weeks to live a different life. To be somebody other than just Good Girl Mia.
Back at Jake’s Camaro, I said I’d drive, but Derek said no way, he wanted to hear more about Elizabeth Bennet. I just shrugged, curled up in the passenger seat and kept reading.
We got to Fort Smith in the early afternoon. It was a decent size town, on the Arkansas River, but didn’t seem to have much in the way of hotels. Derek said we were staying at a Courtyard which suited me just fine. We’d spent the night at plenty of them when we’d traveled for Jake and Cam’s sports events over the years. They were predictable.
When we got to the hotel, I grabbed my own bags, and Derek tried to protest, but I just stuck my tongue out and moved away. He wasn’t happy about it, but after I’d stuck my tongue out, he didn’t fight me. Instead, he stared at my lips. I breathed deeply and headed towards the entrance.