We could sneak out while they're sleeping
Resculpt the world the way we dream it.
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She nods at lunch one day when they’ve been sitting in one of those silences filled with questions and confessions and secrets. She looks up from her yogurt, her fingers slowing letting her spoon fall back against the plastic rim, she meets his eyes, hers terrified and wide, and then she nods. Up and down quickly four times, causing her spiraling staircases of hair to shake around her shoulders, and he starts making plans.
“Where?” He asks her, hunching his shoulders at reception. It’s delicate, breakable. He doesn’t ask the question too loud because there’s something about low voices that makes her mind unchangeable. So he bends his head down, closer than usual and waits for her answer.
And just because she doesn’t meet his eyes, just because she looks down at the hangnail on her ring finger with something in her eyes that he can’t really define doesn’t mean she doesn’t mean it when she finally, shakily says, “Wherever, um- wherever you want is fine.”
She smiles up at him, but it’s too bright, too wide. It feels insincere or forced so he has to bow his head, his eyes finding hers through her eyelashes and ask her that wordless question. She nods, the same as before, telling him that he’s mistaking fear for regret.
“Okay.”
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So he picks somewhere. Somewhere not too far, bur far enough. Somewhere near water and trees with big, sweeping branches. Somewhere where you can see galaxies at night instead of just a scattering of stars. Somewhere where he can imagine her skin glowing in afternoon sun. Somewhere calm, empty, still, quiet.
In the elevator, he describes it to her, feeling reckless and in love, his heart beating quickly. She says it sounds nice as the elevator doors slide open. She’s walking to her car before he can say anything.
He presses down on the balls of his feet to feel the pavement hard beneath him, wondering if this means he’s going to wake up soon to an alarm clock and an empty bed. But then she turns around as she’s putting her key in the door and smiles at him a little and it’s real again.
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The day before as they’re pantomiming in the break room (pushing random buttons and slipping in fake coins), she asks him if he’s scared, she asks him, “Are you, um, worried? This is just so- Won’t people notice we’re both gone at the same time? What about- I just…Tell me you’re scared, too, okay?”
He leans against the soda machine, his eyes watch her reflection in the glass of the snack machine. “Of course I’m scared.”
She lets out a breath and it fogs up the glass a little.
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He packs bags, shoves them into his trunk, feels lighter than he’s ever felt. For a moment, he’s afraid he’ll float off like a kite and get caught in power lines or tree branches. But he chuckles, always over romanticizing everything, and shuts the trunk firmly.
Mark yawns in the doorway and as they’re saying goodbye, asks him how long he’ll be gone for.
“I’m not sure. A couple of weeks, maybe. As long as it takes.”
And he knows Mark doesn’t really understand what that means, but they hug quickly and pat each other on the back and Mark tells him to be careful and that he’s happy for him and that he should send a postcard from wherever it is they’re going.
“Yeah, definitely. I will,” Jim says as he ducks into his car.
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Driving to her apartment, he presses down on the gas, doesn’t stop for stop signs, rolls every window in the car down.
She’s always been his escape and now he gets to be hers.
So at three in the morning, he’s standing outside her front door, taking her bags for her as she walks around the living room on her toes (with her fiancé passed out right there on the couch which makes him actually bounce on his feet a little, because it’s so-) as she gathers up various things and scribbles down a note she won’t let him read, leaving her ring with it on the kitchen table. She pauses for a second with her back to him, breathes in and out slowly. She glances over at her sleeping (now ex-) fiancé and just watches him for a second before shutting her eyes tight and nodding firmly.
And as she’s coming through the door, he lets out a laugh because he can’t help it and she shushes him with a finger to her lips. This only makes his smile widen even more and he kisses her there as she’s crossing over the threshold and pulling the door behind her. Kisses her in that strange limbo between night and morning as the door closes behind them so he can press her against it. She makes a noise that sounds like a protest, but then her hand grips the doorknob tighter and she’s kissing him back in that same carelessly eager way.
He rests his forehead against hers, feeling her breath still on his lips. He closes his eyes and then opens them again to find hers, “Okay?”
She nods, but stops before she can finish that fourth up and down and presses her hands to his chest and says, “Yes.”
And later, the road spills out in front of them.
