Excerpt: Are You Sure

Predawn sky stretched above, familiar miles slid below and anxious thoughts bounced within their cranial prison. Just two hours prior to flight, Amanda crossed the threshold of assumed propriety, leaving behind all vestiges of what her mother termed “common sense” (a thing her mother also deemed to be not so common) and set off towards a place she’d seen numerous times, but was still unknown to her. She gripped the steering wheel to the point it irritated the pressure calluses on the palms of her hands in effort to maintain awareness, reassuring her that this wasn’t a dream. She’d always been spontaneous, preferring improvisation to planning like her beloved Marines, but nothing she’d done in life was as daring as the move she was making on this night. After just six months of acquaintance, she was driving two hundred two miles from the only home she’d ever known towards an uncertain future based on a sense more common to her than any other. Intuition.

Riding music played hide and seek as she drove through multiple cities, each station seeming to shift out of frequency with every tenth revolution of the car’s tires. She couldn’t stand the silence that allowed her thoughts to echo mockingly. She needed the noise to occupy her mind and prevent fear from talking her into the turning the car around and heading back to what was no longer home.

“What if he wasn’t serious? I mean… We both had a lot to drink… Maybe he was just answering out of politeness.”

She shook her head as if this physical act would shuffle the thought to a more uplifting one. Pushing the tuner’s seek button once more she prayed she’d luck up on a tune. Jackpot! Taylor Swift’s “Teardrops on My Guitar” floated through the speakers like a saving grace and almost instantly the sense of dread dissipated. Of course he was serious. This was s serious situation they were entering into. Not at all a time for light hearted, off the cuff answers. Sure there was alcohol involved, but didn’t alcohol only make it easier to say or do the things you really wanted to say or do anyway? He’d had time to think things over. Maybe he’d been drinking for the same reason she has been; to fill the empty space. Whatever the reason, she was realistically too far too turn back now. He was waiting on her, and with no way to contact him until she was inside the city’s limits she didn’t want to keep him waiting.