heart over brain

Part 8

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That about concludes conversation-time. Max stares back ahead at the road that is turning more unwelcoming by the minute – the rain faded entirely, it is only snow now – and I stare out the window on my side.

Fear and concern nag on me like pesky little fish hang on whales sometimes. I know they are good, they are there for a perfectly valid reason, but they are annoying as hell and I'd really rather not have them.

Another bus stop passes by. Neither of us comments or reacts in any other way to it. At the next one Max at least glimpses at me, but I act like I don't notice. The idea alone that he could really drop me off somewhere and leave me behind knots my stomach more than the existential crisis awaiting me at home.

"We should probably stop before it gets dark," Max says, more thinking to himself than talking to me.

We? 

As in him and me together? Now, that sounds better. That sounds amazing.

That sounds like the beginning of my violent end. Like, by morning my corpse will swim in a frozen pool of its own blood.

No, brain, no. Stop thinking in those horrible extremes. He isn't actually that bad. Quite the opposite, for a criminal he is oddly nice.

But it doesn't matter how it sounds anyway. If the snow keeps coming, soon enough the road will be unpassable. We have to stop. So much for winter being over.

"Let's get something to eat first, then we'll see from there," Max says. My grumbling stomach agrees for me.

He takes the next exit towards a small town, well, village, really just a couple of houses hurdled next to each other with farms in the outskirts and a church with a pointy roof in the middle as the highest building.

I check on my phone what the place has to offer, which isn't much. No motel, hotel, B&B or anything else offering a place to stay for the night, barely the one diner is marked with a red dot.

Max parks the car for good at the side of the street outside of it. He leans over my phone in my hands and taps around on the map a bit to see the surrounding.

I hold my breath. It is the only way to stop myself from doing anything embarrassing like smelling his hair or tasting his neck. Both are very inviting right in front of my face.

ONC: ~ 8.000

When he gets out of the car, I follow hesitantly, half expecting him to make a run for it because "we" means something else in his language. The other half of my brain is screaming at me to run.

I happily ignore it.

We enter the Bieber Bar, which I find an incredibly stupid name, but as the only establishment around, that probably doesn't matter much with the customers.

The diner is all old wooden furniture and bleak pastel colour. Room dividers with fake flowers separate empty tables in an almost perfectly squared room, the one side is bar, the other a window front with greyish curtains. It smells like fish.

Max digs his face into the collar of his jacket as we pass two men drinking at the bar counter, the only customers in the diner, and we sit down at a corner table by the window opposite of each other.

"Hello, hello!" a gorgeous girl in a pink apron startles me. She puts two menus on the table, and gives a charming smile too bright for my taste. "Anything to drink?" she says only to me and flatters her pretty eyelashes.