Page 25 of Exit Lane
I have so many lines, I think,and I don’t know if I have the right to say any of them.But here and now, it can’t be about us. “Can we figure out how we’re getting to Iowa City, and then we can talk?”
He must hear the pain in my voice because he nods, almost imperceptibly, and bites his lip. When he finally turns to me, the sight of him makes my breath lodge in my throat. Blueish-purple bags under his eyes and thinner eyebrows than I remember. Quiet reminders of all he’s faced over the past few years. An ambush of guilt for every single day I wasn’t by his side.
Teddy points me to the unruly customer service line. “This is your penance. I’ll go try to rent us a car. Keep me posted.”
Alone in a mob of angry Midwesterners, I try to catch my breath. “No flights out of O’Hare means no flights out of O’Hare, folks,” shouts an impassioned customer service rep over the din.
There he goes, the one that got away, on his way to rent us whatever vehicle, ideally with four-wheel drive, is left. The rehearsal dinner starts in hours, but it’s hard to remember it’s my primary concern. To think past Teddy’s lips, the suitcase he’s carrying that I last saw on my bedroom floor, the way he keeps moving forward somehow and all the ways I’ve let him down by being stuck in my past.
My phone vibrates from my coat pocket, and I realize a half hour has passed and I’ve moved up three feet. On my screen, a photo of Teddy and me kissing that he must have set as his contact when he was in Copenhagen—the two of us rosy-cheeked walking home with cardamom buns. My eyes prick, and I press at them with the heel of my hand. He’s calling me. Something that I never thought would happen again.
“Hi, yes, hi,” I struggle to answer.
“Meet me at rentals. Spot H31.”
I find him in the parking garage with crossed arms and the satisfied smirk he gets when he pulls something off. I take anything other than a grimace as a win. “Options were extremely limited,” he starts, popping the trunk on a traffic-light-yellow BMW hatchback. “I had to beg therental guy to give me anything at all. He seemed to think it’s too dangerous to be on the road, but I assured him I’m a very careful driver.”
“When’s the last time you took a road trip?”
“Not sure the ATVs at Carter’s bachelor party count as a road trip. Maybe not since we did Iowa to New York. As I’m sure you’ll recall, I got both of us there in one piece.”
Yes, it’s me that broke us. I duck my head and pull my coat tighter.
Sliding into the passenger seat, our initial encounter floods back to me. The silence of the broken radio. His arm propped up against the window in a way that made me notice muscles I’d never bothered to see before. That jukebox. That kiss.
“We have to call Cart and Sloane,” he says, pulling his phone out of his pocket.
“Absolutely not, Teddy. They’re getting married. They don’t care about our canceled flight. I’ll text Violet, and she’ll take care of it.” It’s the most myself I’ve been with him since we spotted each other.
He tilts his head, and my heart races. He drops his phone in the cup holder, and my gaze falls to his hand.It’s just a hand, I chastise myself.A mere appendage.But my head swims with memories of those hands on me, the way he pressed them against my breasts, how he dragged them across my hip bones, opening me up before making me come. His hands circling my wrists above my head while he stared down at me. His hands tilting my chin up to kiss him while he was on top of me, both of us lost inthose seconds before orgasm when our brains emptied of everything but a single syllable: you.
“Do you mind? Pulling up directions?” he asks, clearly not for the first time.
I shift my focus to my own phone. Our drive to Iowa City should only take three hours on a normal day, but the sheet of snow outside the parking garage predicts we’ll be lucky to get there in six. Turning out of the airport, Teddy wipes his palms on his wool overcoat.
“We’ll take our time,” I say. He nods and looks straight ahead.
We merge onto the interstate in slow motion, careful to avoid the snowbanks newly formed on medians and the other cars whose forms we can barely make out.
“Can you tell I’m nervous?” His blinker has been on for the last minute, and we’re going roughly eighteen miles per hour.
“Yes,” I whisper, “but so am I.”
XX
Teddy
There’s something eerie and comforting at the same time about being one of the only cars on the interstate. Semitrucks sit lined up at gas stations, waiting out the storm, through snow that shows no signs of letting up.
Marin’s quiet. I’m glad. I focus on the road in front of us and any still-visible markers that might help me stay on it.
After Copenhagen, there was a part of me—the part that put Marin at the end of every best-case scenario—that couldn’t go on. Getting better was for me, for my parents, for Romy, for Carter, and for a hypothetical someone who would stand by me through remission. Getting better meant letting go of every version of my future that included Marin. I couldn’t believe how many iterations—us in Denmark, in New York, in Iowa—I was willing to consider for her. And yet her imagination couldn’t stretch past me being sick.
It was easier to dismiss her as callous and detached when we weren’t just a center console apart. Being near her reminds me of both the reasons I held a candle for her for so long and why I extinguished it with suchforce. Her stupefying blend of tough and tender, inscrutable and obvious, impenetrable and open. The astonishingly high standards and steadfast rules she clings to, for better and for worse. The deeply tender and bruised heart at the center of it all.
She’s had a terrified expression plastered on her face since the moment she spotted me at the gate, but underneath the weight of it, I sense a spark—the same rush I feel at being in each other’s presence again.
The last time I felt this confounded by her presence was on this same stretch of highway. We’re right back where we started, and I still have no idea where this will go.
