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By the time the night falls, I realize there hasn’t been a single awkward moment of silence between us since we boarded the bus and he decided to sit next to me.
“How long are you staying in Idaho?”
“A few days.”
“And then you’re riding back on a bus?” Strangely, Andrew’s face has lost all of its humor.
“Yeah,” I say, not wanting to go too deeply into this topic because I don’t already know my answers in advance.
I hear him sigh.
“It’s none of my business,” he says looking over at me and I feel the space between us closing in since he’s sitting so close, “but you shouldn’t be traveling around by yourself like this.”
I don’t look at him.
“Well, I kind of have to.”
“Why?” he asks. “I’m not trying to hit on you or anything, but a young, devilishly gorgeous girl like you traveling by herself in the slums of the bus stations of America is dangerous.”
I feel my face break into a smile, but I try futilely to hide it.
I look over at him. “You’re not trying to hit on me,” I say, “yet you call me ‘devilishly gorgeous’ and practically use that what’s-a-girl-like-you-doing-in-a-place-like-this line all in the same sentence.”
He seems gently offended.
“I’m serious, Camryn,” he says and the playful smile on my face dissolves. “You could really get hurt.”
In an attempt to shift the awkward moment, I grin and say, “Don’t worry about me. I’m confident in my ability to scream really loud if I get attacked.”
He shakes his head and takes a deep breath, slowly giving in to my attempts to lighten things up.
“So tell me about your dad,” I say.
The almost-smile flees from his face and he looks away from me. It wasn’t an accident, bringing it up like I did. I don’t know, I just get this strange feeling that he’s hiding something. When he briefly mentioned back in Kansas about his dad dying, on the outside it didn’t seem to faze him. But he’s going all this way, by bus at that, to see his dad before he dies, so he must love him. I’m sorry, but you’re never unfazed when someone you love is dead, or dying.
Sounds strange coming from me, who can’t cry anymore.
“He’s a good man,” Andrew says, still looking in front of him. I get the feeling he’s picturing his dad right now, that he doesn’t actually see anything in front of him except for his memories.
He looks over at me and is smiling now, but it’s not a smile trying to cover up any pain, more-so one washed with a good memory.
“Instead of taking me to a baseball game, my dad took me to a boxing match.”
“Oh?” I feel my smile light up. “Do tell?”
He looks back out ahead, but the warmth in his face never leaves him in this moment. “Dad wanted us to be fighters—” He glances over. “Not boxers or actual fighters, though he probably wouldn’t have minded that so much, either. But I mean fighters in general, you know, in life. Metaphorically.”
I nod to let him know that I understand.
“I sat ringside, eight-years-old, mesmerized by these two men beating each other and the whole time I could hear my dad talking over the crowd next to me: ‘They fear nothing, son,’ he said. ‘And all of their moves are calculated. They move one way and it either works, or it doesn’t, but they learn something from every move, every decision.’”
Andrew catches my eye briefly and his smile dissolves, leaving his expression blank. “He told me that a real fighter never cries, never lets the weight of any blow bring him down. Except that final blow, the inevitable one, but even then they always go out like men.”
I’m no longer smiling, either. I can’t tell exactly what’s going on in Andrew’s head right now, but we share the same sober mood. I want to ask him if he’s OK, because it’s obvious that he’s not, but the timing doesn’t feel right. It feels weird because I don’t know him well enough to be digging around inside of his emotions.
I say nothing.
“You must think I’m a dick,” he says.
I blink, surprised. “No,” I answer. “Why do you say that?”
He backs off immediately and downplays the seriousness of his own question, letting that devastating smile slip back to the surface again.
“I’m going to see him before he kicks the bucket,” he says, and his choice of words shocks me a little, “because that’s what we do, right? It’s a customary thing, kind of like saying ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes, or asking someone how their weekend was when really you don’t give a shit.”
Damn, where is all of this coming from?
“You have to live in the now,” he says and I’m quietly stunned. “Don’t you think so?” His head falls to the side and he’s looking at me again.
It takes me a moment to get my head together, but even then I’m not sure about what to say.
“Living in the now,” I say, quoting him, yet at the same time thinking of my own belief of loving in the now. “I guess you’re right.” But I still wonder exactly what his take on the belief is.
I straighten my back against the seat and raise my head a little to look over at him more closely. It’s like suddenly I have this great desire to know all about his belief. To know everything about him.
“What is living in the now to you?” I ask.
I notice one of his eyebrows twitch for a second and his expression shifts, surprised at the seriousness of my question, or the level of my interest. Maybe both.
He straightens his back and raises his head, too.
“Just that dwelling and planning is bullshit,” he says. “You dwell on the past, you can’t move forward. Spend too much time planning for the future and you just push yourself backwards, or you stay stagnant in the same place all your life.” His eyes lock on mine. “Live in the moment,” he says as if making a serious point, “where everything is just right, take your time and limit your bad memories and you’ll get wherever it is you’re going a lot faster and with less bumps in the road along the way.”
The silence between us is just two minds thinking about what he just said. I wonder if his thoughts are the same as mine. I also wonder, more than I want to admit, why so many of his thoughts already make me feel like I’m staring into a mirror when I look at him.
The bus glides heavily over the freeway, always loud and rarely soft. But after so long, it’s easy to forget how unpleasant a bus ride is compared to the luxury of a car. And when you’re thinking more about the positive aspects of a bus ride, instead of the negative, it’s easy to forget that there’s anything negative about it at all. There is a guy sitting next to me with beautiful green eyes and a beautiful sculpted face and a beautiful way of thinking. There’s no such thing as a bad bus ride when you’re in the company of something beautiful.
I shouldn’t be here …
Nine
I can’t believe she brought up my dad. Not that I’m pissed about it, but I’m surprised that she seemed to really want to know. That she even remembered. She didn’t dive into questions about what I do for a living to calculate how much money I might make, or giggle and blush and look all stupid while reaching out to touch my tattoos, using them as an excuse to touch me. Huge fucking turn-off. I mean yeah, it’s a turn-on when you’re just looking to get laid—makes it easier—but for some reason, I couldn’t be happier that Camryn didn’t do it.
Who the hell is this girl?
And why am I even thinking about this stuff?
She falls asleep before me with her head propped against the bus window. I resist the urge to watch her, noticing how soft and innocent she looks, which makes me that much more primal, more protective.
The pervert seems to have stopped watching her when he saw us sitting together inside the last terminal. In the eyes of men, he probably sees her as my ‘territory’ now, my property. And that’s a good thing because it means he’ll leave her alone as long as I’m around. The truth is though, we’ll only be together until Wyoming and this worries the fuck out of me. I hope the man changes buses before Camryn and I have to depart ways. Two more rest stops between here and Denver—I hope like hell Denver is his last stop and if not, I’ll be watching him the rest of the way to Wyoming.
He’s not going to Idaho. I’ll stop him anyway I can.
I gaze through the dark and stillness of the bus. The man is asleep, his head pressed back against the aisle seat. A woman sits beside him next to the window, but she’s way too old to catch this guy’s eye. He likes them young, probably really young. It makes me fucking sick to think of what he may have already done to some other young girl.
Despite the bus generally being loud, the whistling of the wind pushing against the metal, the fast crushing sound of rubber moving swiftly over the road, the large engine humming as it compels the heap of metal across the freeway, it’s still quiet. It’s almost peaceful. As peaceful as a bus ride can be.
I finger my earbuds in and turn on the power on my MP3 player, setting it to shuffle. What will it be, what will it be? I always let the first song set the mood. I have over three hundred songs on this thing. Three hundred different mood-setters. I think my MP3 player is biased though because the first song is almost always between Kansas’ Dust in the Wind, Zeppelin’s Going to California or something by The Eagles.
I wait for it, not looking down at the information on the playlist as if it’s some kind of guessing game and I don’t want to cheat. Ah, good choice. Aerosmith’s Dream On. I lean my head back against the seat and shut my eyes, not realizing until after I’m in the middle of doing it that my finger is gently pressing the volume down. Because I don’t want to wake Camryn up.
I open my eyes and look over at her, how she clutches that bag of hers so tightly that she must still be completely conscious of it even in a deep sleep. I wonder about what might be inside, if there’s anything in it that could tell me more about her. If there’s anything in it that can tell me the truth about her.
But it doesn’t matter. I won’t know her after Wyoming and she’ll probably never even remember my name. But I know it’s better that way. I have too much baggage and even as a friend, she doesn’t need any of it in her lap. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
The low, melodious droning of Steven Tyler’s voice lulls me to partial-sleep. Except when he’s screaming that high-pitched scream, where I wait for him to let it all out and then I drift off the rest of the way.
“Dude, seriously,” I hear a voice say.
Something is pressing against my shoulder. I wake up to find Camryn pushing me off of her with her little arms. It’s actually kind of funny, that awry look on her morning face and how no matter how hard she pushes, the weight of my body is too heavy to move me completely.
“Sorry,” I say, still trying to wake up. I lift up disoriented and feel the back of my neck as stiff as wood. I really didn’t mean to end up with my head pressed against her arm, but I’m not as mortified about it as she’s pretending to be. At least I’m pretty sure she’s pretending. She’s trying really hard not to break a smile.
Let me help her a little with that.
I grin over at her.
“You think it’s funny?” she says, her mouth partly hanging open and her eyebrows rumpled in her cute little forehead.
“Yeah, actually I do think it’s funny.” My grin gets bigger and finally that smile of hers breaks softly in her face. “But I am sorry. Really.” And I mean it.
She narrows one eye and looks at me sideways, scrutinizing my sincerity, which is also kind of cute.
I look away and reach my arms above my head to stretch and that makes me need to yawn.
“Gross!” she says and that word doesn’t surprise me at all. “Your breath smells like ass.”
A single voluble laugh comes out through my words: “Damn, girl, how would you know what ass smells like anyway?”
That shuts her up. I laugh again and rummage through my bag after dropping my MP3 player inside of it. I pop the cap on my toothpaste and squirt a dab on the end of my tongue, move it around inside my mouth real good and then swallow. Of course, Camryn’s watching me do all of this with a look of revolt, but that’s what I was shooting for.
The rest of the bus seems to have woken up before me. I’m surprised I slept this long and without waking up at least three times to find another comfortable position, which always manages to elude me.
My watch says that it’s 9:02 a.m.
“Where are we anyway?” I ask, gazing out the large window next to Camryn, searching for any freeway signs.
“About four hours away from Denver,” she answers. “Driver just announced another rest stop in ten minutes.”
“Good,” I say, stretching one leg out into the aisle, “I need to walk around. I’m stiff as hell.”
I catch her grinning, but she turns to face the window. Stiff as hell. OK, so she also has a dirty mind. I just laugh thinking about it.
The next rest stop isn’t too much different from the last several, with a series of gas stations on either side of the freeway and two fast food restaurants. I can’t believe this girl has me actually debating whether or not to head inside one like I normally would without a thought otherwise. I just can’t really tell if it’s because I want to prove to her that I can choose to eat better stuff if given the choice, or because I know she’s going to yell at me.
Wait a damn second. Who’s the one in control of the situation here?
Clearly she is. Goddammit.
We file out of the bus, Camryn in front of me, and after walking around the front of the bus she stops and turns at the waist, crossing her arms and looking up at me, pursing her lips.
“Well, if you’re so smart,” I say, sounding sort of third grade and I admit it, “then see if you can find something healthy to eat—that doesn’t taste like rubber dipped in shit—in one of these places.”
A grin tugs one corner of her mouth.
“You’re on,” she accepts the challenge.
I follow her into the gigantic convenience store and she makes her way first to the drink coolers. Like that blonde chick on that game show (I don’t know which because I don’t watch game shows, but everybody knows about that blonde chick), Camryn waves her hands in front of the cooler doors, as if revealing the world of fruit juices and bottled water to me for the first time.
“We start off with a variety of juice, as you can see,” she says in her proper showcase voice. “Any of this is better than soda. Take your pick.”
“I hate juice.”
“Don’t be a baby. There’s plenty to choose from. I’m sure you can find something you can stomach.”
She moves back two steps to let me see the dozens of flavored bottled waters on display behind the next door.
“And there’s water,” she says, “but I just don’t see someone like you sipping on a fancy bottle of water.”
“No, that’s too douchy.” Really, I have no issue with drinking bottled water, but I like this game we’re playing.
She smiles, but tries to keep a straight face.
I wrinkle my nose at her, purse my lips and look back and forth between her and the juice cooler.
I sigh heavily and step up closer, scanning over the different brands and flavors and mixed flavors and I wonder why there’s so much with strawberry or kiwi, or strawberry and kiwi in it. I hate both.
Finally, I open one glass door and settle on plain OJ.
She sort of winces.
“What?” I ask, still holding the door open.
“Orange juice isn’t so good to wash stuff down with.”
I let out a spat of air and just look at her, unblinking.
“I pick something out and you tell me it’s not good enough.” I want to laugh, but I’m trying to lay a guilt trip on her here.
And I think it’s working.
She frowns. “Well, it’s just … well that’s more of a grab-n-go vitamin C boost, really. It just makes you thirstier.”
She actually looks as though she’s worried that she offended me and this strikes me in the strangest way. I let myself smile just to see her smile again.
She grins at me like the Devil.
Oh, she’s good …
Ten
Denver finally flies by and we’re drawing closer to Andrew’s final stop in Wyoming. I can’t lie and say it doesn’t bother me. Andrew was right in saying that it’s dangerous for me to be traveling alone. I’m just trying to understand why that fact didn’t faze me much before I met him. Maybe I just feel safer with him as my company because he does look like he can bust a few jaws without breaking a sweat. Damn, maybe I shouldn’t have ever talked to him in the first place; definitely shouldn’t have let him sit next to me because now I’m sort of used to him. Once we’re in Wyoming and we go our separate ways, I’ll be back to staring out the window watching the world fly by and not knowing where in it I’m going next.
“So, do you have a girlfriend?” I ask just to spark up conversation so I won’t think about being alone again in a few hours.
Andrew’s dimples appear. “Why do you want to know?”
I roll my eyes.
“Don’t flatter yourself; just a question. If you don’t—”
“No,” he answers, “I’m happily single.”
He just looks at me, smiling, waiting, and it takes me a second to understand what he’s waiting for.
I point at myself nervously, wishing I had come up with a less personal topic. “Me? No, not anymore.” Feeling more confident now, I add, “I’m happily single as well and want to stay that way. For about … forever.” I should’ve just left it at ‘happily single’ instead of rambling my way right out of the confident zone and making myself look obvious.
Of course, Andrew notices right away. I get the feeling he’s the type that never misses someone else’s foot-in-your-mouth moment. He thrives on them.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, grinning.
Thankfully he doesn’t probe.
He rests his head back against the seat and absently taps his thumbs and pinky fingers against his jeans for a moment. Secretly, I glimpse his muscular, tanned arms and try to see once and for all what the tattoos are of on his arms, but as usual they’re mostly hidden by the sleeves of his t-shirt. The one on the right side I saw a little more of earlier when he stretched down to tie his boot. I think it’s a tree of some sort. The arm facing me now, I can’t really tell but whatever it is, it has feathers. All of the tattoos I’ve seen so far are colorless.
“Curious?” he says and I flinch. I didn’t think he saw me checking them out.
“I guess.”
Yes, I’m very curious, actually.
Andrew lifts away from the seat and pulls the sleeve of his left arm over the tattoo, revealing a phoenix with a long, flowing beautiful feathered tail that ends a couple of inches past where his sleeve ends. But the rest of its feathered body is skeletal, giving it a more ‘manly’ appearance.
“That’s pretty awesome.”
“Thanks. I’ve had this one about a year,” he says, pulling the sleeve back down. “And this one,” he says, turning at the waist and pulling up the other sleeve (first, I notice the obvious outline of his abs underneath his shirt), “is my gnarly, Sleepy-Hollow-lookin’ tree—I have a thing for wicked trees—and if you’ll look real close …” I peer closer where his finger points within the tree trunk, “is my 1969 Chevy Camaro. My dad’s car, really, but since he’s dying I guess I have to keep it.” He looks out in front of him.
There it is, that tiny glimmer of pain that he kept hidden before when talking about his father. He’s hurting a lot more than he’s letting on and it sort of breaks my heart. I can’t imagine my mom or dad being on their deathbed and I’m sitting on a Greyhound bus on my way to see them for the last time. My eyes scan his face from the side and I really want to say something to comfort him, but I don’t think I can. I don’t feel like it’s my place for some reason; at least not to bring it up.
“I’ve got a couple of others,” he goes on, looking back over at me with the back of his head lying against the seat again. “A small one here,” he turns over his right wrist to show me a simple black star in the center right below the base of his hand; I’m surprised I didn’t notice that one sooner. “And a larger one down the left side of my ribs.”
“What is it, the one on your side? How big is it?”
His bright green eyes sparkle as he smiles warmly, tilting his head over to see me. “It’s pretty damn big.” I see his hands move as if he’s going to lift his shirt to show me, but he decides against it. “It’s just a woman. Nothing worth getting naked on a bus for.”
Now I want to see what it looks like more than ever, just because he doesn’t want me to see it.
“A woman you know?” I ask. I keep looking to and from his side, thinking maybe he’ll change his mind and lift his shirt, but he never does.
He shakes his head. “Nah, it’s nothing like that. It’s of Eurydice.” He waves his hand out in front of him as if to dismiss any further explanation.
The name sounds like something ancient, maybe Greek, and it’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.
I nod. “Did it hurt?”
He smiles.
“A little. Well actually it hurts the most on the ribs, so yeah it hurt.”
“Did you cry?” I grin.
He laughs lightly.
“No, I didn’t cry, but hell, I might’ve if I decided to get it even a fraction bigger than it is. In total, it took about sixteen hours.”
I blink back, stunned. “Wow, you sat there for sixteen hours?”
For such a detailed conversation about this tat, it makes me wonder why he won’t actually show it. Maybe it doesn’t look all that great and the tattoo artist screwed it up, or something.
“Not all at once,” he says, “we did it over a few days’ time—I’d ask if you have any tattoos, but something tells me that you don’t.” He smiles, knowingly.
“And you’d be right,” I say, blushing a little. “Not that I’ve never thought about getting one.” I hold up my wrist and wrap my thumb and middle finger around it. “Thought about getting something here, like script that says ‘freedom’ or something in Latin—obviously, I didn’t think about it much.” Smiling, I breathe out a little embarrassed spat of air. Me talking about tattoos with a guy who obviously knows more about them than I ever could is a bit intimidating.
When I go to set my wrist back down on the armrest, Andrew’s fingers curl around it. It stuns me for a brief second, even sends a strange chill through my body, but it quickly fades when he starts talking so casually.
“A tattoo on the wrist for a girl can be very graceful and feminine.” He traces the tip of his finger around the inside of my wrist to indicate where it should go. I shiver a tiny bit. “Something in Latin, very subtle, just about here would look nice.” Then he lets go gently and I let my arm rest back on the armrest.
“I expected you to say ‘no way’ about ever getting one yourself,” he laughs and brings up his leg, resting it at the ankle on his knee. He interlaces his fingers and slides back further against the seat to get more comfortable.
It’s getting dark fast; the sun is barely peeking over the landscape now, leaving everything bathed in fading orange and pink and purple.
“Guess I’m not a predictable person.” I smile over at him.
“No, I guess you’re not,” he says smiling back and then looking thoughtfully in front of him.
Andrew wakes me up the next day sometime after 2 p.m. at the bus station in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I feel his fingers poking me in the ribs. “We’re here,” he says and finally I open my eyes and lift my head from the window.
My breath I know smells God-awful because it tastes dry and funky, so I look away from him when I yawn.