he reaches between us and slips an arm over my shoulder and pulls me into his side. It’s so natural that my arm winds up around his waist before I think about it.
He smells like heaven - wind, smoke, sun, salt, and man.
He parked the car under a tree to try and keep it from turning into an oven, but when we open the doors, waves of trapped heat escape.
“God don’t close the doors until we roll the windows down,” I groan when the bare skin of my thighs and lower back touch the blazing hot seat and stick uncomfortably to the leather. He cranks the A/C down to the coldest temperature and up to the highest speed, but the few minutes I roll the window down a crack as we pull back onto the freeway.
“You haven’t even asked where we’re going next,” Stone says.
“I don’t care. As long as I’ve never been there, I want to go,” I say lazily as the breeze blows and starts to dry the hair that was sticking to my neck. It feels so good…
That’s the last thing I remember thinking before my ringing phone wakes me up.
“Your phone has been ringing for a while,” Stone says, shouting to be heard over the wind and road noise the open windows are letting in.
“Oh shit,” I say. My mouth is dry and has a sour taste. And my head hurts.
I fumble on the ground for my bag and pull my phone out. The ringing had been muffled by the leather in my bag, but the volume is ear splitting and I curse my uncoordinated fingers when I drop it.
It stops ringing before I can pick it up from the seat between my thighs where it fell. I flip it over and see my mother’s number. My heart drops.
I roll the windows up and grab for my phone, my heart hammering as I press “call back” on the missed call notification.
My mother answers on the first ring. “I was just leaving you a voicemail. Why does Evangeline have her own phone?” She asks in her no nonsense, direct way.
“So that we can reach her when we need to. Marcel’s idea,” I add because I know that always shuts her up.
Stone’s fingers drum the steering wheel, just once
“What’s up mom? Is everything okay? Have you heard from Remi?” I ask cutting to the chase.
“No. And that Rivers woman who saw him last won’t say what it was all about. Anyway, your husband just called, and he says you’re not answering your phone.” My stomach lurches at the mention of Marcel’s name.
“I have bad reception,” I lie and cut her off. I can’t deal with her right now.
“Everything okay?” He asks.
“Yeah, everything is fine. My mother doesn’t have my brother to boss around, so she’s turned her attention on me,” I say and then feel a surge of guilt at how ungracious I’m being.
My mother is a lot of things, some I don’t understand or like. She and my brother Remi have been at each other’s throats for as long as I can remember. She and I not so much because I pick my battles and the ones she's waged against me haven’t been worth it. She’s cold, detached, and she finds disobedience intolerable. But she’s a great grandmother and my children love her. And if I didn’t have someone who I knew loved them back, I wouldn’t have been able to make this trip.
I sigh wearily and correct myself. “No, I didn’t mean that. I called my daughter and I didn’t call Mom, and she doesn’t like that. But everything is fine,” I say and pat Stone’s leg before I put my phone away and turn back to watch the dessert zip by.
“Hey, I thought we were headed away from Cabo,” I say when I see a sign that gives our distance from the city. I sit up and frown, a flare of worry that this adventure is already over.
“We will. I changed our itinerary again,” he says cryptically, and it eases some of my concern, but I want to be as far away from anywhere that people might know us.
“Where are we going instead?” I peer out the window. Not that I would know this from any other part of the Baja peninsula, but I suddenly don’t feel so blasé about not knowing what’s next.
“Thought you didn’t care,” he says with a laugh, but his vague and cryptic answers do more to ratchet up my nerves