Well, it didn’t matter what was true, she supposed. It felt true.
This felt different. Like theirs.
She had been consumed by what the future might hold. She had been consumed with untangling the past and all of her issues. But she was determined to let this trip be about now. About the two of them.
About herself and this moment.
She could think of nothing she wanted more.
TWENTY-FOUR
Where the other road trips had been about discoveries they made during the day, she found the key part of this trip—The Loneliest Road—happened at night.
When they found each other in new and interesting ways. There was part of her that wanted to tell herself she hadn’t needed this. That it was fun, but that she wasn’t such a cliché that sexual discovery felt like an integral part of her experience and who she was. But it did. It just did. There had been wounds, things that she had tried not to internalize in the past few months about her own beauty. Her own ability to satisfy a man, and he went to great lengths to destroy those insecurities. Just by being him.
But that wasn’t all, or everything. Those parts of herself that had been afraid to step outside of boxes were being challenged here and now with him.
So much of her marriage had been defined by fear, and she would never have realized that if not for these recent events. In addition to that, there was still a lot of shame.
They had gotten married because they’d had sex. On some level, she had felt like there were certain things that she could never ask to have changed. Certain things she couldn’t ask for.
She didn’t know why. It was only that there was a level of feeling like the sex that had brought them there was the sex they had to keep on having. Whether that made sense or not. That any more was a reflection of her…being wrong.
Dirty in some way. Maybe the reason Will had been forced into this life he hadn’t been happy with in the end.
It was so loaded. So shame-filled.
Logan took that narrative and shattered it.
Because there was nothing that she asked for or did that shocked him. She couldn’t find it in her to feel shame. She probably should.
By the standards of everyone who knew them, they were sinners now.
And so was Will. And so was everybody.
She tried really hard not to let those thoughts in. When she did, like now, what she tried to do was identify it, label it, and put it into a box for later.
She and Logan had made it to Colorado, and were literally parked on a mountaintop, kissing, and more in the back seat of the car.
They could go to the motel. They could find a bed. But there was something wonderful about this. There was something giddy about it.
Challenging the ghosts of her old self.
When they checked into the motel, she felt giddy, bringing it all down the mountain with her. It was wonderful. She blushed when he asked for one room with a king-size bed, and when he accepted the upgrade of the jetted tub.
She wondered if the kid working at the check-in counter believed that they were about to have crazy sex in that room, or if he thought they were more like his parents than anything else.
She wanted to tell him there was a lot of life left ahead.
But she didn’t, because that kind of stuff was only ever annoying to hear from adults, and you couldn’t ever really know it until you knew it. They departed from The Loneliest Road and went sharply south, heading all the way to Florida. To Miami, where it was hot and full of neon and brightly colored buildings. They both made the decision to rebook their flights for a week later, so that they could stay on the beach, and do the things they hadn’t when they were in Hawaii.
They still weren’t talking about any kind of future. What future was there to talk about?
She had made the decision to pour herself into this moment. To make it entirely about them. Not about what was next.
But this was also a break in format, this week in a little villa on the ocean.
She got a bikini, because she could see that he liked it, and looking at her own body through the hunger in his eyes changed something. It didn’t feel like a power move, not the kind she had been searching for that day back in the boutique in California. It felt like a game between lovers. If she spent all day out on the beach in the bikini, by the time they got back to the room he was in a state of torture, and she couldn’t deny that she enjoyed that.
