Wanderlust

And I thought, what could have been so bad to make him avoid all human contact?

He was not so unlike my mother, and that thought should have made me hate him, but instead just made me sad.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” he continued. “I know a lot of people. People who live along some of the main lines. I’ll stop by for dinner or even overnight. I know the other truckers, and I can talk to them over the radio or my cell phone, if I wanted to.”

My heart beat a little faster, although I struggled to hide it. A radio? A cell phone? Methods of communication, means of escape. There was no obvious device on his dashboard, just a high-tech panel of flat screens, currently bl

ack, and buttons. Where would he keep his cell phone? His pocket? Somewhere else? Luckily he didn’t seem to notice my frantic plotting.

“Besides, I have you to keep me company now.”

Something about the extra emphasis on the word company raised the hairs on the back of my neck. He grinned, and I closed my eyes against the lust that glimmered there. But even with my eyes closed, I could feel the charge in the air, setting off little sparks against my skin, strumming awareness into body parts that had been well handled recently.

“If you’re going to stay up here, you might as well make yourself useful and keep me awake. Tell me something new about you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said caustically, “I haven’t had a very interesting life so far. That was what I was trying to do before you—”

“Fine. What’s the deal with your book? About Niagara Falls.”

I didn’t want to tell him what it meant to me, how it had been my goal for so long and how it tore me up inside to be battered off course.

“I can tell you a story from the book,” I offered. “It’s called the Maid of the Myst. A Native American myth. Have you heard it before?”

“Why would I have heard it before?”

“Right. Well, the people used to listen to the thunder, and it would teach them about the world, how to grow food and be kind to each other. But then they stopped listening, and the god of thunder grew angry and went to live under the waterfalls.”

“So he just left them. Kind of immature for a god, huh?”

I ignored him. “The people suffered and they decided to sacrifice this girl, but she ran away. She takes a canoe down the river, but the rapids take over and she can’t control it. As the boat fell over the waterfall, the god of thunder caught her in his arms and saved her.”

“Very romantic.”

“Yes, it was romantic. They fell in love and lived together underneath the falls.”

“Hmm. Happily ever after, just like that?”

“Well, not exactly. She wanted to see her home one last time, so she convinced the god to let her go. There she realized how much she missed it so she decided to stay. In his anger, the god of thunder destroyed his home, flooding it with water from the falls.”

“Anger issues. He’s really not much of a catch, is he?”

“Back with her people, the girl realized how much she had changed and could no longer live among them. So she returned to the god of thunder. Since their home under the falls was destroyed, he carried them up to the sky where they watched over their people.”

“And you believe this bullshit?”

Anger simmered inside me. “Why are you doing this?”

The words immediately meant more than his antagonism over the story. They were about taking me, keeping me. About hurting me when he could have simply walked away. Part of me wanted the truth, however cruel, while the other part hoped that my words had been swallowed by the hum of the motor, the quiet rush of the air outside the window.

“I don’t know,” he muttered.

Not much of an answer, but the raw honesty I heard in his voice felt like an opening, a crack in the veneer. Not that he would let me go with apologies or anything that extreme just because he’d displayed a moment of doubt, but that I could learn something about this man who held me, see around the thumb that pinned me down, see beyond the walls that always penned me in. What made someone like him tick? Why did he do something like this? Had this moral ambiguity always been inside him or was it learned, evolved—forced upon him just as it was me?

“Who gave you that?” I asked softly, gesturing to the beads swaying from the mirror.

He scowled. “A man who will no longer speak my name. Does that make you happy?”

“What did you do before you became a truck driver?”