A spitting noise bursts from between my lips followed by laughter.
The couple leaves the aisle.
“You are so bad!” I hiss at him, still laughing. The can of shaving cream clanks against the floor after it falls from my arm and I bend over to pick it up.
“You’re not so innocent yourself.”
Andrew grabs a tube of antibiotic ointment and holds it in the same hand with the Advil and we head to the register. He tosses two packages of beef jerky on the moving belt and a pack of Tic Tacs. I get a travel-sized bottle of hand sanitizer, a tube of ChapStick and a package of beef jerky for myself.
“Gettin’ brave aren’t yah?” he says about the beef jerky.
I smirk at him and put the plastic gray item divider in between his stuff and mine. “Nope,” I say. “I love jerky. If it contained radioactive material I’d still eat it.”
He just smiles, but then tries to tell the cashier that his and my stuff is ‘together’ as he pulls his credit card from his wallet.
“No, not this time,” I argue, laying my arm on the belt next to the item divider. I look right at the cashier and shake my head, daring her to ring my stuff up with his. “I’ll pay for mine.” She looks between me and Andrew briefly, as if waiting for his turn.
When he starts to argue back I turn my chin at a stern angle and say, “I’m paying for my stuff and that’s that. Deal with it.”
He sort of rolls his eyes and gives in, sliding his card through the machine.
When we get back in the car, Andrew rips the top strip off one of his beef jerky bags and pops a jagged piece into his mouth.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive some?” I ask.
He shakes his head, his jaws working hard on that stiff piece of jerky.
“We’ll get another motel and crash for the night.”
He swallows and pops another piece in his mouth and puts the car in drive and we pull away.
We find a motel a few miles out and grab everything and take it up to our side-by-side king rooms. Green checkered carpet in this one with matching dark green, heavy curtains and a dark green flowery bedspread. I turn the television on immediately, just to give some light and animation to the dark and gloomy atmosphere.
He paid for the rooms again, using how I ‘got my way’ with paying for the stuff at Walmart as his excuse to get away with it.
Andrew checks the room out first, just like the last time, and then plops down on the recliner by the window.
I drop my stuff on the floor and rip the bedspread from the bed and toss it in the corner next to the wall.
“Is there something on it?” he asks, leaning back into the recliner and letting his legs splay below.
He looks exhausted.
“No, they just scare me.” I sit on the end of the bed and kick off my flip-flops, drawing my legs onto the bed Indian-style. I place my hands within my lap because still wearing the white cotton short shorts, I feel a little exposed to him with my knees open like this.
“You said: since you didn’t know where you were going,” Andrew says.
I look up and it takes me a second to understand what he’s referring to: back in the car when I mentioned my reason for not bringing more clothes. He knits his fingers together, laying his hands flat over his stomach.
It takes me a moment to answer, although the answer I give him is vague:
“Yeah, I didn’t know.”
Andrew lifts his back straight up from the chair and leans over forward, resting his arms on his thighs, his hands draped together below his knees. He cocks his head to one side looking across at me. I know we’re about to have one of those conversations where I can’t foresee if I’ll accept or dodge his questions. It’ll depend on how good he is at drawing the answers out of me.
“I’m no expert on this stuff,” he says, “but I don’t see you setting out alone like you did on a bus, of all things, with a purse, a small bag and absolutely no idea where you’re going just because your best friend stabbed you in the back.”
He’s right. I didn’t leave because of Natalie and Damon; they were just part of the pattern.
“No, it wasn’t because of her.”
“Then what was it?”
I don’t want to talk about it; at least, I don’t think I do. A part of me feels like I can tell him anything and I sort of want to, but the other part is telling me to be careful. I haven’t forgotten that his issues outweigh mine and I would feel stupid and whiney and selfish telling him anything at all.
I look at the TV instead of him and pretend to be halfway interested in it.
He stands up.
“It must’ve been pretty bad,” he says walking over to me, “and I want you to tell me.”
Pretty bad? Oh great, he just made it worse; even if I did tell him, at least before I wouldn’t have had it in my head that he expected something really horrible. Now that I know he does, I feel like I should make something up.
I don’t, of course.
I feel the bed move when he sits down next to me. I can’t look at him yet; my eyes stay focused on the TV. My stomach swims with guilt and also something tingly when I think about how close he is. But mostly guilt.
“I’ve let you get away with not telling me anything for a long time,” he says. He rests his elbows on his thighs again and sits the way he had been sitting on the recliner, with his hands folded and hanging between his legs. “You have to tell me sometime.”
I look over and say, “It’s nothing compared to what you’re going through,” and leave it at that, facing the TV again.
Please stop prying, Andrew. I want more than anything to tell you because somehow I know you can make some sense of it all, you can make it all better—what am I saying?—Please, just stop prying?
“You’re comparing it?” he says, piquing my curiosity. “So, you think that because my dad is dying that whatever made you do what you did somehow doesn’t live up?” He says this as if the very thought of it is absurd.
“Yes,” I say, “that’s exactly what I think.”
His eyebrows draw inward and he looks at the TV briefly before turning back to me.
“Well that’s complete bullshit,” he says matter-of-factly.
My head snaps back around.
He goes on:
“Y’know, I’ve always hated that expression: Others have it worse than you do; I guess if you want to look at it in a competitive way, sure, give me welfare over blindness any day, but it’s not a fucking competition. Right?”
Is he asking me because he wants to know how I feel, or was that his way of telling me how it is and hoping I get it?
I just nod.
“Pain is pain, babe.” Every time he calls me ‘babe’ I notice it more than anything else he says. “Just because one person’s problem is less traumatic than another’s doesn’t mean they’re required to hurt less.”
I guess he makes a valid point, but I still feel selfish.
He touches my wrist and I look down at it, the way his masculine fingers drape over the bone along the side of my hand. I want to kiss him; the urge inside of me just climbed its way to the surface, but I swallow and force it back down into the pit of my stomach which has been trembling