after all these years

Eight

Mark watches the trees roll past the car window, blinking lazily in the late-morning sunlight. The three of them - Amy, Ethan, and him - were driving out to some mystery location he'd be let in on later, apparently, for filming, and he revels in the quiet trip away from home for once. It's still for work, of course, but he saw an Instagram caption telling him to find happiness in the smaller things, like the drippy ice-cream with a faint "shutterstock" watermark in the actual post, so he takes what he can get.

The two in front had been humming nonsense for the past half-hour, and at a particularly loud laugh he tunes back in, eager to find out what, exactly, was so funny.

They're making parodies about the dogs and chicken, it sounds like - piggybacking off of each other and the radio - and he has half a mind to record it so he can watch it again whenever he wants. Play it on repeat just to see the way their face would scrunch up in embarrassment, or tease them with the phone as they try to jump up high enough to reach his arm and rip it out of his grasp.

He smiles fondly, probably looking a little dopey if Amy's comments on his "sappy face" were anything to go by, and secretly thanks himself for thinking to sit in the back.

"I knew you were chicken when you walked in," Ethan hums, bringing Mark back to the present, out of his little daydream. He drums his fingers against the steering wheel, and it's horribly off-beat in a way only Ethan can pull off, but Mark lets him continue in silence. "Skin so crispy sweet -"

"Crispy sweet?" Amy snorts. She kicks up against the dashboard, and he can practically see the way her eyebrow twitches up in amusement. "What chicken have you been eating?"

Mark sees how Ethan looks at her in the rearview mirror, and his heart melts at the domesticity of it. Amy had no right to criticize his "sappy face" when Ethan was looking at her like that - all gooey and doe-eyed in his own special way. "The crispy sweet kind, obviously."

"Watch your attitude!" Her hand darts out to smack against Ethan's shoulder, and Mark cranes around the seat to fix her with an amused stare. "Come on, that's no way to speak to a lady!"

The sentence reminds him of Her, obviously, it always fucking does, and he sits back against his seat. If his hands curl around the fabric of his jeans just a little too tightly, well, no one else was there to see it, so it's like it never happened.

"She's right, Ethan," he chastises, hoping they can't sense the thick fog that settles in his head, trickling its way down his throat and into his lungs. "How could you be rude to my girlfriend in my own car? I thought we were friends."

Ethan clicks his tongue, but says nothing until they get to the next red light. He twists around, wincing at the pull on his muscles after sitting for so long, and stares at Mark for a solid five seconds before saying "I'm driving, bitch. My girlfriend now."

Amy makes some joking comment about being property, but it's lost in the loud cacophony of laughter erupting from the two boys.

"Wh - what the fuck, Eth?" Mark gasps, once they've calmed down a bit, "I thought we were cool man - I trusted you!"

"You shouldn't've," is all he gets in return before Amy is intertwining her hand with Ethan's, turning around to look at her actual boyfriend with a smug smile.

"See, Mark? All the boys want me. Gonna have to do better than that to keep me!"

"It's my fucking car!" The three of them burst out into laughter again, and Mark turns to rest his head against the window. The biting cold of the glass helps to clear off any residual eugh he had been feeling, and he closes his eyes to block out the sun. "So where are we going, anyway?"

Amy simply hums and picks up Ethan's phone from the center console, swiping at it for a minute before looking at him through the rearview mirror. "We'll be there in twenty minutes," she says, mouth trembling under the pressure of trying to hide the grin spreading on her face, "better put your shoes on now, kiddo."

"Ew, do you not have your shoes on? In my car?" Ethan glances at him in the rearview mirror, too, before returning his attention to the road. "You better fix that."