Page 32 of Travis
The door opened again, and it was Travis. He stood in the entrance and found me immediately, like he’d known exactly where I’d be sitting, and something in his shoulders released by a fraction of an inch. I immediately got up and went to him.
“Let’s go.”
The car was at the curb. I got in. He got in. The doors closed and the sounds of the city muffled to almost nothing, and we were enclosed in a space that felt, absurdly, safer than anywhere I’d been all day.
He pulled away from the curb and drove east. Through downtown, past the strip malls, onto the highway. Spokane shrank in the side mirror. The buildings thinned. The sky opened up.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. The road stretched ahead of us, east toward Idaho and then Montana. Five hours of highway, the same route in reverse.
This morning I’d driven this highway in the other direction, angry and done and certain I’d never see him again.
Now I was in his passenger seat, heading back with an over-the-counter inhaler in my pocket and no bag and no phone and no home to return to. Everything I’d built in Spokane was behind me. I couldn’t go back to my apartment. My data was gone. My life, the careful organized structure of it, had been dismantled in the span of an hour.
The only thing I had was the man sitting next to me. The man who was gripping the steering wheel with both hands and staring straight ahead and hadn’t said a single word since we’d gotten in the car.
I looked at him. At the tension in his jaw, the rigid set of his shoulders. At the hands that had been shaking in the drugstore.
His hands were still shaking.
The man who had zigzagged through the streets like it was choreography, whose voice hadn’t wavered once in the hallway or the alley or the drugstore, was gripping the steering wheel like a lifeline.
I looked away. Out the window. At the highway and the trees and the distance growing between us and everything that had just happened.
I didn’t ask about the shaking. I didn’t ask about the bruises or how he’d known about the men in my building. I didn’t ask any of the questions that were lining up in my head, each one sharper than the last.
There would be time for that.
Right now, Travis was driving me somewhere safe, and his hands were shaking, and I owed him at least the grace of pretending I hadn’t noticed.
