“You just do annually recurring sex appointments.”
That huff again—though I can’t tell if this one is moreamusement or frustration. “I really wish you’d stop referring to it that way.”
“Hmm. Wait a second. You said ‘anymore.’ So you used to do relationships? And then you stopped. Oh. Is it because someone broke your heart? Is that why you’re so grumpy?”
He bangs his head against the headrest,thump thump thump. “I’m grumpy because you refuse to mind your own business.” But as exasperated as he sounds, I think I catch an ever-so-slight lift to the corner of his mouth. Like maybe he’s enjoying this back and forth between us as much as I am. “Shit,” he says, suddenly sitting up straight in his seat and staring out of the windshield to the road ahead.
And as I tear my eyes away from his profile, I see what he sees and slam on the brakes.
•••
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many emergency vehicles in one place. Their lights flash obnoxiously out of sync for what looks like miles. We’re part of a short caravan creeping toward the scene of whatever happened. Something massive, apparently. I don’t know what else would draw this kind of response.
“Seriously?” Hollis says.
“What?”
When I look over, his face is illuminated by his phone screen. “Found a local traffic Twitter account. Says it’s an olive oil spill.”
“Is that... something other than what it sounds like?”
“No, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Apparently, a truck was hauling a metric fuckton of olive oil and sprung a leak. The road’s covered in the stuff on and off for miles.” He shows me the pictureincluded in the tweet, though it’s hard to make out any details since it was taken in the dark.
“Guess the road heard about the purported benefits of the Mediterranean Diet.”
“It caused two accidents, Millicent.”
Whoops. “Oh. Shit. Well, what should we do? Wait it out?”
“Checking,” he says, his fingers tapping at his phone. “Navigation’s still telling us to go straight through. Guess it doesn’t know about the road closure yet. The time stamp on the tweet was only a few minutes ago. Let me switch to no highways.” Hollis changes the settings, and his phone dings before announcing that it’s calculating the route. “Drive up the shoulder to that exit up there, then follow the signs for 501.”
The detour leads us through an area of illuminated fast-food restaurants and not much else, then we take a turn onto US 501 and go through a town that’s mostly banks, funeral homes, and churches long since closed for the night. The streetlights end as the buildings become more spaced out and are soon replaced by alternating tracts of fields and woods interspersed with the occasional one-level prefab home set way back from the road. This is the sort of place people must mean when they talk about the boonies.
Hollis’s fingers play on his leg like his jeans are made of piano keys. But he has regular, boring, non-musical pants, so he’s only generating barely audible repetitive thuds that are starting to get on my nerves.
“Why are you fidgeting so much?” I ask.
“Helps distract me from how likely it is that you’re going to wreck my car on this dark country road.”
“Ah, not concerned that we’d be injured or dead. But the car! Thecarmight get a scratch on it. I see what’s important.”
It’s hard to tell because it’s basically pitch black with the moon now hiding behind a cloud, but I’m fairly certain Hollis’s mouth has the same tight shape as a Lucky Charms marshmallow rainbow.
“Here, I’ll put on the high beams,” I say as if I’m doing it as a courtesy to him and not because I’m getting nervous without the extra light. Except as soon as I do, a car heads toward us from the other direction and I need to turn them off again. “Gah. So much for that.”
“Let’s switch,” Hollis says. “Pull over.”
“No.”
“Yes. It’s my car, and I’m more comfortable driving in areas like this at night. I say we switch.”
“And I say we don’t. You need to sleep more so you can take over in an hour or two. Then I can sleep a bit, and we can drive through the night and get to Miami by breakfast time. Which means you can make Yeva belated sexiversary waffles as an apology for being late, and I can still get to Key West as originally scheduled.”
Hollis grumbles. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his hand slide from near his knee to his hair. “As if I can sleep while I’m worried about you running us into a ditch.”
“I can drive in the dark just fine, thanks.” I turn on the high beams again, but they seem to be cursed because another car comes toward us. Off they go again. “Dammit.”
“Stay right at the fork,” Hollis’s phone, now balanced on his thigh, says. Except there is no fork; it’s only the single road stretching out ahead. “Calculating route,” it announces.
