You’re sitting an arm’s length away, your fingertips gripped tight around the steering wheel and your eyes on the limitless stretch of road. I can see the muscle in your jaw, tense and tight, your teeth pressing into each other to keep the words in between your tongue and palate. My fingers have been buried in my lap for fifteen minutes or so, caught between my thighs because their fidgeting was starting to make us both nervous. I open my lips, a small sliver that makes my breath sound faintly like the noise of wind escaping a cave—hollow and slithering like the letter s. I catch myself and shut my mouth, though not at tensely as you.
“I told you what I wanted,” is the first slew of words you utter, defense and accusation all laced together into one quick sentence. There is a sense of pride to your tone, pride and admonishment that are firmly pointed at me. I retreat into myself, I start fidgeting again and I’m running my finger over the car window switch, pulling it just enough to make it move but not far enough to make the glass roll down. For a moment, all thoughts escape me as I imagine the window cracking open just an inch and sucking all the air right out of the car like a vacuum. In my trance, we shrivel up like slacks of skin without bones or blood or fluid or muscle. We are just the old skin that’s been keeping us together, limp and empty balloons of what we used to be.
“Are you going to say something?”
I’m brought back to reality, my fingertip lets go of the window switch and goes back to the restraints of my thighs. Suddenly, the car feels tense and warm, maybe it’s all those emotions in me rousing from their deadened state and I need the air conditioning, something, anything, to keep me from sweating through my shirt. I turn it on, the cold air hits my cheeks just in time for you to flip the air back off. You’re cold, you’d rather keep the air off.
“No,” is that first, hot word—one little syllable of a word, a little fragment made from my teeth and tongue and throat. How weird, for a little jagged bit of breath to be packed with such weight and gust. We are quiet again, you won’t pry because you’ve said all you’ve needed to say—you are innocent after all, you had told me what you wanted from the beginning.
Up ahead a sign reads a city name and number, soon we’ll be there and we’ll sit quietly in the car pulled into my driveway. You’ll wait a few minutes to see if I’ve got anything else brewing inside me, any more screams or taunts, anything else to make this more muddled than it already is. I’ll wait for an apology, it won’t come, and after six or seven minutes I’ll get out of the car without looking back. As for now, I’ve never felt lonelier and more afraid in such an enclosed space. I’ve always felt hopeless and uncomfortable around you in a weird way—like you loved me but were I to disappear one day, you wouldn’t worry yourself with a search. Once, you whispered a promise to me from across a pillowcase, your hands resting on my bare lower back while you silenced my fear of dying in my apartment without anybody knowing. You said you would know, you said you would never let that happen.
You’re an arm’s length away, and the loneliness I feel makes a pressure between my two ears strong enough for me to need them to pop. I don’t pop them, I let the pressure build until the world sounds muffled and there is a dull ache. You say something inaudible, we’re in my driveway and I hadn’t even noticed. My ears pop now that the car isn’t moving anymore—I get out and don’t turn back.
