"How are we going to get out of this town?" Sleep filled Maple's voice. Her head lay in Staton's lap; slowly his fingers laced every red strand cascading down his thigh. A shallow sigh and a couple breaths later she sat up sitting on his lap leaning...
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Yesterday continued to go downhill. It seemed the deeper into the east we went, the harder it was for us to work through the argument. With Arkansas and Mississippi now in our rear view, it was just Alabama and Georgia keeping us from our destination. We still hadn't picked a town. That's what we were supposed to do yesterday, but the fight had caused us to forget about that.
Staton was seated in the driver's seat. His hands gripping the wheel tightly as he focused intently on the road. This was our of character for us. We would usually solve our problems within hours of having the fight. We definitely never went to bed angry, but last night when Staton pulled himself away from me to sleep as far away as he could, I knew we were in for the long haul.
The thing is I still couldn't really figure out what I had done that was so horrible to him. I don't remember attacking him directly, all I remember was being upset that he had been keeping stuff from me.
We had been driving for a few hours now. Staton got up earlier than I had expected, just to push past me and get on the road. I'd spent a few more hours in bed, trying to give him as much space as possible, but that wasn't really an option in the van life.
"Babe," I paused, waiting to see how he would respond. A slight mumble from him in acknowledgment was all I got.
"Do you want me to make you something for lunch?" I felt like there was nothing else I could do. I wanted to open up the conversation so we could work through this.
"No." Was all he replied. My heart sank, as I sat in the chair next to him. He seemed tense, annoyed, and hurt. His face contouring in a multitude of emotions.
"Listen, I'm sorry, I'm not sure I fully understand why you are mad from yesterday or what I did or say that made everything worse. I'd love if we could talk about it and work through it." Before I could stop myself, the comments were out there. Staton tapped his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment, stopping as if he was going to turn and say something before he went back to just gripping the wheel as if his life depended on it.
Large tree whizz past the van following the freeway. I hadn't felt like we'd been driving for only four days. We were stuck in some kind of time loop and this just felt like normal now, except for the fighting.
"Well, if you don't want to talk about that, then can we at least talk about where we are going to go? I think we should head straight for the coast, find a parking lot on the beach we can sleep in, maybe spend a few nights there before working our way inland?" I searched his face looking for any spark of interest, of any sign that showed I was getting through to him. It was useless though as Staton was like a brick wall.
"That sounds great." He spoke, and his words were shallow and short. I had no clue how I was going to fix this.
I played on my phone. Watched out the window. Attempted to play the punch buggy game, and even took a nap. The hours seemed to click by on the clock but we never felt closer to our destination. Up until our fight yesterday I would have said that things were going really well. But now that we were here, I wasn't so sure anymore.
