Stuck With You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy

Part 22

Bianca

"It's a long story," said Timo. "I'll tell you later."

I didn't know quite how to take that, but since we had the whole weekend ahead of us, I decided to be patient and went back to watching Adam try to fit together our oddly proportioned belongings into the back of Liberty's station wagon like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Normally, if Adam was packing the car, Liberty would be hovering over his shoulder, and the two of them would be arguing about the cubic volume of the space behind the back seats. This might even devolve so far as to require the finding of a tape measure and a calculation of the actual volume, just to prove who was closer to being right.

This was not how things were going today. The station wagon got packed with no input from Liberty, who went back inside to water her plants and make sure Dumas, Poe, and Kipling (her cats) still had overflowing bowls of kibble to make it through the weekend on their own.

As soon as we pulled out of the driveway, I could tell something was off between Adam and Liberty. Neither of them was what you might call super-talkative (keeping the conversation going was my role in our friend group—even if it meant resorting to a monologue), but the lack of conversation between Adam and Liberty was notable, even by their taciturn standards.

They were also being alarmingly polite to each other. Normally, when Adam and Liberty do carry on a conversation, it's this weird mix of hypotheticals (they both love a good hypothetical quandary), obscure literary references, and a liberal sprinkling of playful insults.

During the first fifteen minutes of the drive, the only thing they said to each other was when Liberty asked us all if the temperature was OK, and Adam said the temperature was fine.

The temperature wasn't fine. At least not for Adam, who was sitting in the sun. I could see that he was sweating.

Normally, if Adam were too hot, he would have inquired if Liberty was trying to kill him by recreating Dante's Seventh Circle of Hell and then turned up the air without asking. Liberty would have shot back some smart remark containing a literary reference I wouldn't have understood, Adam would have playfully punched her in the arm, and I would have had to threaten to come up front and sit between them because fighting in the front seat was a driving hazard.

"It's a little warm," I said to Liberty. "Maybe turn up the air a little."

I expected Adam to finally reach over and turn the dial on the AC, but he didn't. Normally, he treated everything belonging to Liberty as if it were his own; instead, he acted like he was riding in a taxi.

For the next half hour, I chattered away about Pure Threads' new spring line, but you can only talk so long about the merits of Egyptian cotton over linen-cotton blends before you get a distinct suspicion that everyone has stopped listening some time ago, so I finally shut up.

For fifteen minutes, until I couldn't take the silence any longer.

"Anyone read any good books lately?"

"Does Thomas the Tank Engine count?" said Timo. "I've read that about twenty-five times in the past week."

There was a deafening silence from the front.

I decided to give Liberty and Adam the benefit of the doubt. Usually, the pair of them each had at least three books going at a time, but, perhaps, none of their current reads-in-progress fell into the "good books" category.

"Anyone read any substandard books, then?" I asked.

More silence from the front.

"I didn't realize I'd signed on for a weekend with a pair of Trappist monks," I said.