Walk That Mile

Day 7 & 8

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DAY SEVEN

Boise, Oklahoma

Around one in the morning is when Harry finally gives up the ghost and pulls to the dark shoulder to let Louis take over. They both pull on sweatshirts for the next shift as the darkness cools the air in the car and then Harry curls up in the passenger seat while Louis stretches his neck and gets ready to go.

The night is darker than usual as they drive - the winding highway and the desolate emptiness on the edges shrouded by a starless sky. There are thin clouds above that are keeping the stars hidden and everything feels eerie as Louis hums to the Sam Smith record he's put on.

Harry snores softly every once in a while but mostly stays quiet and unmoving. Louis catches himself glancing over to notice the smoothness of his cheeks and rough line of his jaw, the way his lips curve together in a perfect Cupid's bow. It's all things he shouldn't notice and he has to draw his attention back to the road a couple of times before he forgets where he is.

Harry confuses him. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but in how Louis isn't sure how to feel about him. Sometimes he thinks he's developed a crush and sometimes he's so annoyed he could push him carefully out of a slow moving car. He has so many questions and things he wants to know about him - his childhood stories and most embarrassing moment, the one thing he's always wanted to do, his favorite ice cream. Louis wants to make him laugh, wants to make him happy. He wants that for all his friends but every time his mind flashes to the night before, in the bar, when they were so close it was nearly electric - he doesn't think this is the same way he feels about the rest his friends.

That's the other thing confusing Louis - the conversation at the bar; the way they were talking, how open Harry was. If Louis is connecting it right, Matt is the reason Harry started to become so controlling of his day to day life. He's the reason Harry had to try to get his life back on order. He's the reason Harry is meticulous about schedules and not being thrown off course. He's the reason spontaneous is now a foreign language to Harry's ear.

Louis actually manages to sigh out loud in the space between two songs and he bites down on his lip in the hope Harry doesn't wake up from it.

It's just that he wants to know Harry better and maybe that's the double underline of the entire thing. He wants to know him better ; he wants Harry to be as open with him again as he was last night. He likes him. Maybe that's the triple underline. Louis likes him, he wants to know him. He kind of wants to burn the itinerary and make Harry do something he hasn't planned but he hasn't gotten around to that yet.

He thinks it's the last thought that makes him do it. Maybe it's the perfect storm of the safety in the cover of darkness, Harry's soft snores, and that damn itinerary that draws Louis's attention away from the road to a sign directing him to Vogel Canyon, Colorado in just two exits.

"Colorado?" Louis whispers, pursing his lips. As far as he knows, Colorado isn't anywhere in their plan - in Harry's plan. He tries to pull up his mental map of the southwest corner of America but the states closest to Texas just kind of blur in the way they always do for a kid from the north who spends his time on the west coast.

"Fuck it," he says as the next exit comes closer. He accelerates and steers to the diagonal, pulling the Jeep from the Route 66 heading west and going, instead, due North. Harry might just kill him when he realizes.

*

There are a couple of close calls as Texas fades behind them. Louis puts the new destination into his phone and turns it on silent, relying only on the flashing directions rather than the automated voice. It says it'll only take three and a half hours to get to Vogel Canyon as Louis stretches out his fingers from gripping the wheel so tightly.