me, I'd, well," he paused, reaching for my hand, "I'd want to know you were safe."
Yeah, except for Ash.
The truth of the matter was, Ash was a yard sale of exceptions. He was every mismatched emotion, every incomplete set of desires, every vintage experience I'd missed out on along the way. And I could have all of it, all of him, for the low, low price of my dusty, old secrets.
"There you go again with the sweet words," I said, affecting a breezy tone I didn't feel. "Much more of this and you won't be able to maintain your reputation as a tyrant."
He kept his focus on the road though returned his hand to my thigh, offering a quick squeeze. "I'd want to know, Zelda, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that."
And because I didn't run away—as much as any thirty-one-year-old single woman with no debts to pay could run away—to cut and shape myself into bite-sized pieces for anyone ever again, I said, "That's nice of you to suggest but I've never had a mother concerned with stocking my pantry."
He shifted his hand to tangle his fingers with mine. "Now you have my mother. Let's give it a few months and then you can tell me how wonderful it is for her to call in the middle of the day, ranting and raving about how much cinnamon we're going through."
"Why are we going through so much cinnamon?"
"Probably all the French toast we eat." He ran his thumb over my palm as he said this, as he allowed us to stop talking about the reasons no one cared to know where I'd gone or why I'd left home. "Seems like the next logical step, no? After the pancakes?"
He continued exploring my palm while I watched the passing scenery. It was different here—I was different here—and it was never as obvious as when I glanced upward only to find a wide blanket of sky. Nothing interrupting the serene blue, not a single mountaintop to be found.
"Here's a story I don't share every day," Ash said after the subject of cinnamon was miles behind us. "My parents are hippies. Flower children in the first degree. Peace, love, and the rest of that bullshit."
"Wait, what?" I peered at him. "I've met your mother. She was wearing Tory Burch sandals. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but Tory didn't follow the Dead, and any true hippie would've gone barefoot before walking around in a luxury brand."
"I don't know anything about sandals but that sounds like my sister's handiwork," he replied.
I thought about Ash's very posh, very beautiful sister. "I can see that."
"From what I've gathered, the free-range parenting approach was out there at the time," he continued. "That's the general thesis of growing up in my family. It was all a bit out there. We had the most random toys and were the only kids at school with homemade almond butter and cherry preserve sandwiches and—"
"Those sound amazing," I interrupted. "Who do I need to beg for some cherry preserves?"
"Offhandedly mention to my mother you like that sort of thing and we'll have a case of jam in the fridge when that season rolls around," he said. "You'll have more than you'll know what to do with."
"If that's my biggest problem, I don't have any problems," I said. "Back to you telling me how extremely difficult it was to have a mother who canned her own preserves for your school lunches. Because I sympathize with that, Ashville. I really do. My heart goes out to you. Thoughts and prayers for your difficult time. I can only imagine the hardships of eating real, unprocessed foods and playing with an abacus or some other wooden instrument because everything at Toys'R'Us was too commercial and consumerist. And clearly, it's had a terrible impact on you. You only have one graduate degree, the refrigerator in your apartment has just a few of the features I'd believed to be exclusive to the space program, and you're driving a car that's older than I am yet fully tricked out with sat-nav and cupholders. I get it. You're struggling big time."
He was gracious enough to look affronted. Good man. "All I'm saying is growing up with recovering hippies for parents is not nearly as amusing as it sounds."
"Yeah, I get it. You have nice shiny things now because you were only allowed to play with sticks and rocks," I replied. "I'm not sure I can allow you