Eachtra

Hold on for Deer Life

 I lift one hand from the steering wheel to rub at my puffy eyes. Dusk has fallen on northern Virginia and the moon paints the highway in front of me in a shiny luster. I'm ready to go to bed, but instead of my dorm bunk bed, a motel room awaits me. A motel room, in fact, that I have to share with the one and only Liam Callaghan.

"Y'alright there, Keidy?" Liam asks from the passenger seat.

I blink the exhaustion away. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just a little tired." With only a few hours of sleep on Liam's couch, I think I'm going to start hallucinating tiny elves all over the road if I don't get some sleep soon.

"If you'd had some hot chocolate..."

"Stuff it with the hot chocolate already. I'm fine." Coffee is what I need. Coffee with several shots of espresso. Or maybe just a cheeseburger. On cue, my stomach grumbles. "You didn't pack any food, did you?"

I glance at Liam and he tilts his head. "This trip was just as spontaneous for me as it is for you, Keidy. I barely remembered to pack enough underwear."

I jerk my gaze back to the road. I refuse to talk to Liam about his underwear choices. We are not that close. "Okay, so what are we going to eat?"

"Do you always worry so much?"

"Do you ever think ahead?" I return.

"Not if I can help it. I prefer to take things as they come," he answers blithely. "We can order dinner once we get to the motel."

I can't believe I'm staying in a motel. I wouldn't call myself high class, but I've managed to avoid staying in motels for the first 20 years of my life. Will there be bedbugs? A dead body in the tub? Ten years' worth of mold? It's possible. Sadly, both Liam and I have very limited budgets for this roadtrip so we can't even afford the local Hampton Inn. I'm praying the motel at least has a cable TV, but I can't get my hopes up.

"Are we almost there?" I whine a few minutes later. This road trip seemed like a great idea when Liam was holding my hands, but in the darkness of night with only about four hours of sleep to sustain me, it's lost some of its luster.

"Aye. The motel is just on the other side of Hagerstown."

"Remind me why we had to drive all the way to Hagerstown?"

"What kind of road trip would it be if we only drove a few hours away?"

"Just answer the question," I grumble. Any Christmas cheer I gained via osmosis from Liam has long evaporated.

"North of Hagerstown is one of the places I want to see," Liam answers vaguely. "But I can't ruin the surprise. You'll find out tomorrow."

"Let me guess, it's something Christmas themed." I roll my eyes.

"This is a Christmas road trip, Keidy."

"No, it's a pine tree road trip. For my class. I just happened to pick up a hitchhiker along the way."

Liam laughs and leans back in his seat, one leg propped on the dash. I don't know how he's so relaxed all the time. I have a thousand things to worry about that weigh on me constantly, but Liam wanders through life totally free of its worries.

"How are you so chill all the time?" I ask after a few minutes of comfortable silence. "Like, don't you ever get stressed out or worry? Or is your life just so fantastic that you don't have to?"

Liam adjusts in his seat and sits up straighter. "I have plenty of things that I could worry about, but I try not to. I can't control them. I'm probably going to run out of money sooner versus later. I might have to work a minimum wage job to keep myself afloat, but what can I do to change that right now? Nothing. So I want to enjoy where I'm at now, with a pretty girl on a Christmas road trip."