Page 104 of How to Say I Do
It startedout as a romantic idea, but, as usual, it turned to twenty-four-carat shit fast, because that’s me.
It was supposed to be poetic. Me with the grand gesture, the declarative statement, proclaiming to the universe my bold intentions. My heart and my soul and my future, all aligned. I was slamming shut the door on my New York life—good fucking riddance—and it was time to begin anew.
But how did I get from here to there? I had my five boxes of my belongings, Wyatt’s cowboy hat, and a pallet of raw ivory silk I’d bought in Chinatown for Tessa’s wedding stacked up in my matchbox of a studio. Flying seemed anti-climactic and not enough after everything. I needed something bigger. The Hollywood ending.
It was shockingly easy to rent a car. I thought for sure I’d have to prove I knew how to use it, which I wasn’t at all certain I could do, but, nope. I forked over a credit card and an indulgent smile, and the attendant at the Hertz Car Rental passed me a set of keys.
All of my belongings went into the backseat. Tessa’s silk filled the trunk. I picked up a box of cheese pizza from Original Ray’s to get me through the drive, filled a bottle of water, and popped my aviators on, shoulder-shimmying to Beyoncé as I pointed my rental toward the Holland Tunnel.
The shine wore off in Pennsylvania.
By Kentucky, I was in tears.
Who thoughtthiswas a good fucking idea? Why hadn’t anyonestoppedme? What waswrongwith the attendant at Hertz? Didn’t she realize I had no business being behind the wheel of this thing? Couldn’t she tell I was in over my head? A cross-country road trip, I’d told her. Me, who had never driven farther than upstate New York,ever, and that was in a borrowed Prius. What the fuck was Ithinking?
And why did I have all this shit anyway? Did I really need the entire Dior spring line from two years ago? Or my collection of Gucci sneakers? Or the twenty-five different Prada shirts I had shoved into the footwell of the passenger seat? And Tessa’s silk? There had to be a Michael’s or a fabric store somewhere in Texas. I could buy new silk inside the state lines.
It was a classic Noël move: impulsive to the max, heedless of consequence. Leap, then peek through your hands covering your face. You’d think I’d have learned my fucking lesson after the past six months, but no. This was hardcoded into my DNA.
I was also so focused on where I was going that I couldn’t see anything except my goal.Wyatt. Get to Wyatt.
Of course, I’d picked the slowest way possible. And wouldn’t you know, the distance between Texas and New York was a lot larger than it seemed. I thought those three-hour flights took forever? Hilarious. This drive was going to take me three days.
I was hungry and exhausted, but too terrified to pull over and sleep that first night. The motels on the side of the highway looked like set pieces from Hollywood horror films.
Kentucky faded from my rear view. The drive was like a plunge through a rabbit hole, Alice going very fucking far indeed into Wonderland. Every five hours, I was pulling over to hunt for a service station. I gorged myself on fried chicken, Diet Coke, Reese’s Pieces, Sour Patch Kids, and Cheetos. I had the caffeine shudders, and my bladder felt like it had shrunk to the size of a walnut. I shrieked at the semis that passed too close, and the steering wheel had permanent indents from my fingernails thanks to all the white-knuckling and screaming I was doing. I was a fish out of water, trying to hurl myself from one ocean to the other.
Tennessee was nothing but heartburn. Arkansas came and went, and then Mississippi. Louisiana was a woozy, head-spinning place where alligators chilled on the side of the highway and live oaks bled Spanish moss like bridal veils. When I stopped to pee—again—a mosquito the size of my cell phone tried to impale me.
Finally, fucking finally, I crossed the Texas state line, two and a half days after setting out from Manhattan.
Purpose filled me again. I turned up Beyoncé, slapped some lip balm on, and puckered up in the mirror. I wasn’t winning any modeling contracts anytime soon, but Wyatt had seen me far worse. It would do. I was almost there. There wasn’t time to stop.
Wrong.
Texas, as it turned out, was fuckingmassive.
Another five hours passed, and I cried at a truck stop outside Houston into a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. This state was endless, just unbearably endless. I’d never make it. I’d never get to him.
It was just my luck, of course, that right then, the sky cracked open and a deluge of rain poured down, cutting off my visibility past the hood of my car.
Like I needed any more problems.
Still, I kept on. The miles ticked down, teasing me with how tantalizingly close I was getting. I blithely ignored the truck stop outside San Antonio. Who cared about Kerrville? Wyatt was only two hours away. I floored it.
So I had no one to blame but myself when, eight miles outside of Wyatt’s ranch, the fully-electric Tesla I had rented in Manhattan moaned its way to a final, pitiful, battery-drained sputter on the side of the country road, leaving me alone and stranded in the pouring rain.
Not caring about Kerrville had been, in hindsight, a super shit idea. The last charge I had topped up on was outside of Houston.
When someone asks me how I know I love Wyatt, I think back to those last eight miles. Sure, other people have done far more impressive and inspiring things for their loves. They’ve climbed mountains, painted works of art, or achieved feats of ingenuity I could never, not in a million lifetimes, comprehend. I, Manhattan born and bred, dragged my tattered pride and my withered self-esteem together, and I stepped out into that torrential rain to trudge those final eight miles to Wyatt.
My Gucci sneakers and my Ralph Lauren chinos and my Burberry trench coat were not made for real weather, or anything beyond the distance from the backseat of a limo to the shelter of an umbrella. I needed a scuba suit. What I had was me: all of my ineptitude and my sarcasm and my flippancy, and my total lack of real-world preparation.
I didn’t want to call Wyatt. That seemed like admitting defeat. I’d set out three days ago to go to him, and go I was doing. I didn’t want him to rescue me or collect me or pick me up. I wanted our Hollywood ending, our love story’s finale, and the romantic forever after. I wanted him to know that I would go the distance, that I would brave the odds, that I would rent a car—okay, a luxury Tesla—and drive to him, and if my piss-poor planning meant I broke down in the final few miles, well then—
I’d seen Olympians crawl across finish lines. I would do the same to get to Wyatt.
I must have looked like a wild animal coming down that tree-shrouded drive, so soaked I was nearly drowned. I’d been sobbing for the past two miles. My jacket was toast. My shoes were ruined. I could feel every rock from the Triassic pushing up through the ground and into the soles of my feet. I was stumbling, near delirious with anguish and woe, and I started shouting Wyatt’s name like a lunatic as I came down his drive. “Wyatt!Wyatt!”
