[cw.] — a tender, sun-bleached road-trip romance set across the american south and west; themes of escape, healing, and chosen family. references to emotional neglect, implied domestic abuse, and survival after trauma. homelessness and financial instability. intimacy born of proximity, soft kissing and affectionate touch. gentle magical realism, fate, and belief in signs. longing, hope, and devotion without possession. cigarettes/smoking, long drives, diners, motels, and open roads. love depicted as refuge, renewal, and the slow unlearning of fear. 3.1k words

the summer you turned eighteen, america cracked itself open like a peach and let you taste the sweetness running down its chin.

you’d been walking the shoulder of some nameless texas highway for three hours when you saw her—a girl leaned against the hood of a cherry-red pickup truck, the kind your granddaddy might’ve driven to church on easter sunday. her hair was long and dark and curling in the heat like something alive, like spanish moss or the memory of a river, and she was watching you come toward her with eyes so wide and soft you could’ve fallen into them and drowned happy.

you knew her. not really—not her voice or her hands or the particular geography of her laughter—but you knew of her. the matthews girl. the strange one. the one who lived in that big house on the hill where the lights were always on but nobody ever seemed to be home. people in town said she talked to things that weren’t there, that she kept jars of cemetery dirt on her windowsill, that her mama had left when she was small and her daddy followed shortly after in every way that mattered. rich as sin and twice as lonely, they said. witch, they whispered when they thought no one was listening.

you’d seen her once before, at the gas station on route 12, standing in front of the refrigerated drinks with her eyes closed like she was praying. she’d bought a glass bottle of coca-cola and two lottery tickets and hadn’t said a word to anyone. you’d thought about her for three days afterward and couldn’t have told anybody why.

now she was squinting at you through the shimmer of heat rising off the asphalt, and you became suddenly aware of how you must look—clothes torn from the fence you’d climbed getting out of your stepdaddy’s property, sweat making dark maps across your back, nothing but twelve dollars and a pocketknife to your name.

“you’re the one from the yellow house,” she said, and her voice was lower than you expected, soft like something you’d want to press your ear against. “the one they say runs wild.”

you stopped a few feet from her truck. the engine was ticking in the heat, cooling down. a map was spread across her passenger seat like a promise.

“and you’re the matthews girl,” you said. “the one they say is crazy.”

she smiled then, slow and strange, and something in your chest shifted like tectonic plates, like the beginning of an earthquake you’d spend the rest of your life learning to survive.

“well,” she said, “i suppose that makes us even.”

she told you she was going to california. she said it like someone might say they were going to heaven, or going home, or going somewhere that existed only in the honey-colored light of a dream. she said she’d woken up that morning knowing it was time to leave—she couldn’t explain it, just felt it in her chest like a second heartbeat, and she’d learned a long time ago to trust the things her body told her.

“there’s someone i need to find,” she said, but when you asked who, she just shook her head. “i don’t know yet. but i’ll know when i see them.”

you should have thought she was crazy. maybe you did, a little. but you also hadn’t slept in your own bed in three nights, and you had rope burns on your wrists from where you’d tied your window shut against a man who never learned the meaning of a locked door, and california sounded like the farthest place from here you could imagine.

“i don’t have any money,” you told her. “not really.”

“i don’t need your money.”

“i don’t trust anybody.”

she tilted her head, that dark hair spilling over one shoulder, and looked at you like she could see straight through to the soft wounded animal of your heart. “then don’t trust me,” she said. “just let me take you somewhere better than here.”

you stood there on the side of that texas road with the sun beating down like a punishment and a girl you didn’t know offering you the whole wide country in the palm of her hand. twelve dollars. a pocketknife. eighteen years of learning that love was just another word for hurt.

you got in the truck.

her name was lottie, and she drove like she was trying to outrun something. or maybe like she was trying to catch it—you couldn’t tell which. the wind came through the open windows and tangled your hair together, yours and hers, brown and dark mixing like creek water, and she sang along to the radio in a voice that cracked on all the high notes but didn’t seem to care.

you learned her in pieces over those first few days. the way she took her coffee—black, no sugar, like she was punishing herself for something. the way she always knew when it was about to rain a full twenty minutes before the first drop fell. the way she talked to the truck when it started making concerning noises, gentle and coaxing, like it was a living thing that needed reassurance. come on, baby, just a little farther. i know you can do it.

you also learned that she was rich the way people in stories are rich—carelessly, completely, like she’d never once had to think about the price of anything. but she wore her wealth strange, all thrifted denim and bare feet and a truck that was older than both of you combined. her credit card could’ve bought you hotel rooms with clean sheets and air conditioning, but she preferred truck stops and motor lodges with neon signs buzzing in the dark.

“my parents are never home,” she said one night, somewhere in the liminal space between texas and new mexico. you were parked at a rest stop, sharing a bag of gas station peanuts, and the stars were so thick above you that the sky looked like it was dripping with light. “haven’t been for years, really. they send money. that’s their way of saying they love me.”

“does it work?”

she turned to look at you, those doe eyes catching the moonlight, and smiled her strange sad smile. “does anything?”

you wanted to tell her yes. you wanted to tell her that you were already starting to learn her like a language, that watching her push her hair back from her face made something loosen in your chest, that you’d spent your whole life armored against tenderness and she was making you want to take the armor off.

instead, you handed her the last of the peanuts and changed the subject.

new mexico was red and gold and burnt orange, colors you didn’t know the earth could make. lottie stopped the truck at every roadside attraction—the world’s largest pistachio, a ufo museum, a diner shaped like a flying saucer where the waitress called everyone “sugar” and refilled your coffee without asking.

you watched lottie across the table, watched her drag a french fry through a puddle of ketchup with the kind of focused attention most people reserved for sacred things, and you thought about how strange it was to be seen. to sit across from someone who looked at you like you were worthy of looking at.

“the people in town,” you said, “they think you’re a witch.”

she laughed, and it was the best sound you’d ever heard—bright and startled, like a bird taking flight. “do you?”

you considered the question. considered the way she always seemed to know when you were about to have a nightmare and would reach across the cab of the truck to touch your hand before you even started to thrash. the way plants seemed to lean toward her, the way animals went still and soft in her presence. the way she’d known your name before you’d told her, back there on that texas roadside.

“i think,” you said slowly, “that you’re something. i just don’t know what.”

she reached across the table and stole a fry from your plate, grinning. “neither do i. but i’m trying to find out.”

arizona was where you first touched her on purpose.

you’d stopped at a creek somewhere outside flagstaff, the water so clear and cold it looked like liquid glass. the heat had been unbearable for days, your thighs sticking to the vinyl seats, sweat pooling in every crease and crevice of your body, and when lottie pulled off the road and pointed at the water, you didn’t even hesitate.

she stripped down to her underwear without a hint of shame, and you tried not to look but you looked anyway—the long pale line of her back, the soft curve of her waist, the way her hair fell almost to her hips like something out of a pre-raphaelite painting. then she turned around and caught you staring, and instead of looking away, she smiled.

“you coming or not?”

the water was so cold it stole your breath. you gasped and she laughed and then you were both laughing, splashing each other like children, and somewhere in the chaos her hand found yours and held on.

you floated there together in the shallows, fingers intertwined, watching the clouds move slow and lazy overhead. a dragonfly landed on lottie’s shoulder and stayed there for a long moment, iridescent wings catching the light, like it had recognized her as something kindred.

“i’ve never done this before,” you said, and you weren’t sure if you meant the creek or the road trip or the feeling in your chest like your heart was learning to beat in a new rhythm.

“neither have i,” she said, and squeezed your hand, and didn’t let go.

that night you found a drive-in movie theater playing something old and romantic, the kind of film where everyone was beautiful and in love and nothing bad ever happened that couldn’t be fixed by the final reel. you spread a blanket in the bed of the truck and lay there with your shoulders touching, lottie’s hair fanning out around her like dark water, and you watched the movie flicker and glow against the screen.

halfway through, her hand found yours again. you turned to look at her and found her already looking at you, those wide soft eyes full of something you were afraid to name.

“i think,” she said quietly, “that i was supposed to find you.”

“on the road?”

“in general. in life.” she laughed a little, self-conscious in a way you’d never seen her. “i told you, i see things sometimes. feel them. and i felt you coming for a long time before you got there.”

you should have told her she was crazy. you should have pulled your hand away and put up your walls and done all the things you’d spent eighteen years learning to do. but the movie was washing you both in soft light, and her hand was warm in yours, and somewhere along the way you’d stopped wanting to protect yourself from her.

“maybe i was supposed to find you too,” you said. “maybe that’s why i couldn’t stop thinking about you, that day at the gas station.”

her whole face changed—opened up like a flower, like a door, like a window letting in the morning. “you thought about me?”

“for days,” you admitted. “couldn’t figure out why.”

she leaned in and kissed you then, soft and sure, and you tasted strawberry lip gloss and possibility and the beginning of something that terrified you in the best possible way. when she pulled back, she was smiling that strange beautiful smile, and you knew you’d follow her anywhere.

you drove through the night into california, trading off at the wheel, watching the landscape change from desert to mountain to the beginning of something greener. lottie slept with her head against the window and you watched the road unspool in front of you like ribbon, thinking about all the ways a life could change direction.

in the morning, you stopped at a diner somewhere outside barstow. the waitress had a beehive hairdo and called lottie “honey” and didn’t look twice at the way you were sitting so close together your thighs were touching under the table. you ordered eggs and pancakes and too much coffee, and lottie drew patterns in the condensation on her water glass while she talked about the ocean.

“i’ve never seen it,” she said. “the pacific. i keep dreaming about it, though. dreaming about standing at the edge of everything, looking out at all that blue.”

“is that who you’re trying to find? someone at the ocean?”

she was quiet for a long moment, tracing shapes you couldn’t decipher. then she looked up at you with those doe eyes, and there was something new in them—a certainty that made your heart stutter.

“i thought i was looking for someone,” she said slowly. “that’s what the feeling said, at first. find them. go west and find them. but i think maybe i was wrong about what that meant.”

“what do you mean?”

she reached across the table and took your hand, turned it over in hers, traced the lines of your palm like she was reading something written there. “i think maybe i already found them,” she said. “i think maybe i found them on a texas roadside with twelve dollars in their pocket and a look in their eyes like they’d forgotten what it felt like to be safe.”

your throat went tight. “lottie—”

“you don’t have to say anything,” she said quickly. “i know it’s only been a few days. i know that’s crazy, i know i’m crazy—”

you shut her up by kissing her, right there in the middle of that barstow diner, in front of the beehive waitress and the truckers at the counter and everyone. you kissed her until you were both breathless and the coffee was getting cold and nothing mattered except the feeling of her smile pressed against your mouth.

“you’re not crazy,” you said when you finally pulled back. “or if you are, then i am too.”

you reached the coast at sunset.

the pacific was every shade of blue you’d ever imagined and some you hadn’t—turquoise and navy and that soft gray-violet color the sky turns just before the light goes out. lottie pulled the truck right up to the edge of a cliff and you both got out and stood there, the wind whipping your hair into tangles, watching the sun sink into the water like a coin dropped into a wishing well.

“end of the line,” she said softly, and you heard something in her voice—not sadness, exactly, but something close to it. an awareness that journeys have endings, that even the best roads run out eventually.

you thought about the girl you’d been a week ago. walking the shoulder of a texas highway with nothing but desperation and a pocketknife, thinking that love was a trap and trust was a weakness and the best you could hope for was survival. that girl hadn’t known anything, you realized. that girl had never seen the way lottie matthews looked when she was sleeping, peaceful and young and impossibly beautiful. had never felt what it was like to be held by someone who didn’t want anything from you except your company.

“i didn’t believe in this,” you said, the words coming slow like you were learning to speak a new language. “any of it. love, or magic, or people who are just kind for no reason. i thought that was all stuff from movies. stuff that happened to other people.”

lottie turned to look at you, the last light of the sun painting her face in shades of gold. “and now?”

you stepped closer to her, close enough to see the tiny freckles scattered across her nose like constellations. “now i think maybe i was wrong. now i think maybe there’s a lot of things i didn’t believe in that are real anyway.”

she kissed you with the taste of sea salt on her lips, and you pulled her closer and felt something in your chest that might have been the beginning of forever. when you finally broke apart, you were both smiling—the stupid, giddy smiles of people who have just discovered something precious and can’t quite believe their luck.

“so what now?” she asked. “california, coast to coast, end of the road. what comes next?”

you looked at her—this strange, beautiful, impossible girl who had picked you up off the side of the road and carried you all the way to the edge of the world. this witch, this dreamer, this person who had looked at you and seen something worth keeping.

“i don’t know,” you said honestly. “but i want to find out. with you.”

her smile widened, and she grabbed your hand and pulled you toward the water, running and laughing like children, like people who had discovered that the world was bigger and kinder than they’d ever dared to believe. you splashed into the shallows together, the cold pacific water soaking through your shorts, and lottie spun you around and kissed you again under the first stars of evening.

and standing there in the surf with her arms around you and the whole golden country spread out behind you, you finally understood what you’d been chasing all along. not california, not escape, not even love exactly—but this. this feeling of being exactly where you were supposed to be, with exactly who you were supposed to be with. this sense that the universe, for once, had gotten something right.

“hey,” lottie said, her forehead pressed against yours, her voice soft as a secret. “do you wanna see the rest of it with me? all of it—every road, every diner, every stupid roadside attraction? because love’s out there and i can’t leave it be.”

you laughed, joy rising in your chest like a bird taking flight, and pulled her closer. “honey,” you said, “love’s never meant much to me. but i’ll come with you if you’re sure it’s what you need.”

she kissed you again, long and deep, and the ocean sang behind you, and somewhere a car radio was playing something sweet and twangy, and you thought: this is it. this is what i was walking toward all along.

in her pickup truck with all of her dumb luck, pressed against her side with the whole wide world waiting—that was the only place you thought you’d ever want to be.