Page 68 of Freedom
In some ways, it would have been easier to drive if he didn’t give a damn about himself, if Jake had been the destination and not the companion. Easier still in the bad old days, when the only thing at stake for a task was pain or no pain. Now it was Jake, Jake’s happy smile, Jake’s sad smile, Jake’s hurt look, Jake’s wild eyes. Tobias’s life now had shades of good and bad, success and failure; everything was an Impressionist painting of colors and emotion where once it had been only black-and-white, cutting angles and the flat of a blade.
Most of the time, Tobias reveled in that difference because Jake made him safe enough to feel, safe enough not to miss the days when only the Rules (and obedience to them) had stood between himself and agony. Other times, the welter of variables and ramifications and everything he had to lose terrified him.
Turning the key in the ignition with Jake already sound asleep next to him was one of the hardest things he’d done yet because he had to believe Jake was right to trust him.
The engine jumped and purred under his touch like it did for Jake, just like it had for him every time Jake had him practicing stop and go and drive. Tobias forced his breathing and his heartbeat to slow. He was okay. They would be okay.
Driving wasn’t hard, except that Tobias worried. He worried about the brakes giving out. He worried about animals (or another swamp beast, they had probably gotten them all but you never knew for sure with freaks) running into the road even though Jake had said it would just be bad luck if it happened while Tobias personally thought it would be fate. He worried about all the things he couldn’t imagine reaching out and sending this car and her cargo careening off the road and into bottomless chasms or unyielding surfaces.
Jake laughed at his worries, though there was that broken edge in his eyes while he did it, as though he too thought about these things. He told Tobias that he worried too much, that Jake had been driving for a decade with no accidents (sure, he’dhitthings, but that had been on purpose), and that Tobias shouldn’t sweat it.
The echo of Jake’s steady reassurances steadied him. Sure, his hands were clenched so hard he was surprised he wasn’t leaving indentations on the wheel, but he could do this. He had done this. And just because Jake was asleep beside him—trusting Tobias enough to sleep while Tobias drove his precious Eldorado through empty backwoods roads—instead of awake with a hand on his shoulder, didn’t make Tobias any less capable. Jake was still there.
Dawn was surely only minutes away, but Tobias couldn’t see any hints of it through the pounding rain. Those same thick, black storm clouds had dogged them through the entire hunt, had threatened to dump on them a hundred times but had never quite managed. But now the water came down like a sheet, a waterfall, as though the tension of the hunt had been released (or, as Jake would probably joke, the universe was taking a petty vengeance pissing on the Hawthornes).
Tobias slowed to a crawl, wipers going at top speed, waves curving away from the Eldorado’s wheels.
He had driven in rain before, but never rain like this, when sometimes the only reason he could see the road was lightning outlining the trees in a jagged electric halo.
Tobias, shaking from the adrenaline and the thunder and the fear, would have pulled over in a heartbeat to let the storm pass them by, but there was nowhere he could stop and be sure they wouldn’t sink into the soggy ground or get hit by an unwary driver who couldn’t see the black Eldorado in the greater blackness of the night.
And Jake was still asleep beside him, limp and exhausted with his mouth slightly lax. Even over the rattle of the rain, Tobias could hear his easy, deep breathing.
Tobias’s hands ached from his grip, but he could not stop and could not fail.We must be following the storm,he thought.
They had reached better roads—paved and gentler, more visible in the waning dark—before the rain began to slake, and Tobias found a gas station at the side of the road and pulled off. The shop and bathrooms were closed, the station run-down enough that Tobias wasn’t positive it was even functioning, but the battered awning above the pumps offered some shelter.
Tobias turned off the Eldorado and forced himself to breathe, to listen to Jake breathe. He listened to the rain and massaged the tension out of his hands. He thought of how good it was to be alive, to have Jake alive, and to have brought them through that mess of wind and rain and lightning with nothing more than a new skill he hadn’t had even a few weeks ago. Simple, easy, terrifying.
How strange his life had become, to be filled with small triumphs instead of bare survival. To cautiously look forward, every day, to a good day—a day in which he had the power to make decisions that would leave them safer, happier. To live a good day every day. He didn’t know if it would ever stop surprising him.
The rain was a mere trickle, more a half-hearted splattering than a solid sheet, by the time Jake finally yawned and rubbed his face. “Where are we, Toby?”
“Twenty miles from Lafayette,” Tobias answered. There had been a sign on the road right before he’d turned into the gas station’s parking lot. He still remembered these things.
Jake blinked at him. “Damn, weren’t we near Houma before? That’s...” Tobias could see Jake trying to do the math in his head and the sleepiness getting in the way.One hundred and two miles, Jake. “A heck of a long way.”
Tobias had just enough time to have a flash of anxiety (Should they not have driven that far? Was there another destination Jake had had in mind?) before Jake scooted across the seat and pulled him in close for a hug, his chest solid against Toby’s, breath warm against his neck.
Only an hour past dawn, with no sleep, barely escaped from a storm from hell, and it was already a wonderful day.
Then Jake glanced over his shoulder and grinned even wider. “Would you look at that, Toby.”
“What?” Tobias twisted around.
He didn’t have to ask again.
The gas station was in the middle of nowhere, the bog and trees stretching endlessly around them. The view splayed out the withdrawing storm, the cliff of cloud moving slowly, darkly into the distance. It was a powerful force, like the monsters they hunted, but clean in a way that monsters could never be. Alone, the retreating storm would have been enough to awe Tobias.
But the double rainbows made it beautiful.
One was vividly bright against the dark clouds, its jewel tones more pure, more honest than representations in any television program. Its paler twin arched above it, half-buried, half-consumed by the monstrous storm.
Tobias knew, scientifically, that a rainbow was nothing but light refracting off water droplets in the air and splitting into base colors. The same effect could be achieved with a garden hose and a light source or a correctly angled mirror. He’d been fascinated the first time Jake had tilted his compass back and forth beneath bright sunlight, sending thin stripes of color dancing across the Eldorado’s ceiling.
But this was so much more, the colors and the beauty even more striking, resonating, after the rain and the storm and the worry. It was like some cosmic award for believing—and doing—what Jake had always said he could.
As though aware of his thoughts, Jake wrapped his arms around Tobias, his smile and a day’s worth of stubble rubbing into Tobias’s neck where the camp collar used to be.
