Page 157 of Fake As Puck
I laugh, pulling away. We both have tears in our eyes.
“We’re going to miss you down here. Visit when you can.”
I nod, touching Charlie’s pigtails. “I promise I will. The kids grow too fast.”
David appears with Emma on his hip, and she immediately reaches for me with chubby arms.
“Liv Liv!” she babbles, which is about as close as she gets to my actual name.
I take her and kiss her cheek, breathing in that perfect baby smell that makes my ovaries do stupid things.
“Be good for Mama and Daddy, okay?”
“She’s always good,” David says. “Unlike this one.” He ruffles Charlie’s hair. “Charlie, what do we say when someone we love goes on a big adventure?”
“Good luck and come back soon!”
“That’s right.”
“Good luck, Auntie Liv! Come back soon!”
“I will, baby. I promise.”
After another round of hugs and promises to call when I get there safely, I climb into the U-Haul and stare at the dashboard that looks nothing like my car’s.
The mirrors show me a view of my entire life packed into a truck, my car trailing behind like an afterthought.
This is insane.
I’m driving a moving truck seventeen hours to surprise a man I’ve been officially dating for a few weeks now.
I’m quitting my life in LA to move to Seattle for a hockey player who I’ve been obsessed with for a very long time.
I’m making the kind of romantic gesture that either ends in happily ever after or complete disaster.
But as I pull out of Tessa’s driveway and head toward the freeway, I can’t bring myself to turn around.
Because staying in LA and continuing this long-distance torture, pretending I don’t want to build a life with West feels worse than any potential rejection.
The first few hours are the hardest. LA traffic is brutal even at night, and I white-knuckle the steering wheel through downtown, terrified I’m going to side-swipe someone or forget about my car trailing behind me.
But once I hit the open highway, something settles in my chest.
I-5 North stretches ahead of me, empty and dark except for the occasional truck or late-night traveler. The radio plays soft rock from the ‘80s, and I sing along to songs I haven’t heard in years.
My phone sits in the passenger seat, silent. West hasn’t texted me back since I told him not to come to LA. Part of me wants to call him, to hear his voice and make sure he’s not actually mad at me for shutting down his romantic gesture.
But the bigger part of me wants to preserve the surprise. Wants to see the look on his face when I show up at his door with everything I own.
I stop at a motel outside Sacramento around 2 AM, exhausted from the stress of driving something I’m not qualified to drive and the emotional weight of what I’m doing.
The room is generic but clean, and I lie in the too-soft bed staring at the ceiling and wondering if I’ve lost my mind.
Tomorrow I’ll drive the rest of the way to Seattle. Tomorrow I’ll show up at West’s house and either get the romantic movie moment I’ve been dreaming about, or I’ll get the awkward conversation where he explains that moving in together wasn’t exactly what he had in mind.
Tomorrow everything changes.
But tonight, I’m somewhere between my old life and my new one, and for the first time in weeks, that feels exactly right.
