Chapter Twenty

The sun is so bright through the wax-paper-like motel curtains the next morning, it feels as if I fell asleep in the attic again and the harsh rectangle of sun through the skylight is beating down on me. I think that's a romance cliché: waking up the morning "after" and for a moment, not remembering where you are or who you're with. Except that JoJo's warm back is pressed against my chest and our legs are braided like a loaf of challah, which makes it impossible to forget. I hate to move an inch, but I'm usually a stomach sleeper, and lying curled forward has my spine cramping. I stretch slowly, without moving my arm looped over JoJo's waist.

But she shifts, yawns, and turns over to face me anyway. "Hey."

"Oh, fuck …" I clap my hand across my mouth.

"What?" JoJo's eyes widen inches from mine, awake and alarmed. "What's wrong? Are you … is everything okay?"

"I forgot to put my retainer back in." I drag my tongue across my front teeth, tasting shamefully unlike metal.

"El!" she shrieks, punching me in the shoulder as best she can at point-blank range. "Don't scare me, you jerk." But she's laughing now.

"You should be scared. I never sleep without my retainer. If my overbite regresses, my parents are gonna be pissed."

And that's when I remember my parents. Rolling away, I scoop my phone off the particleboard nightstand, where it's been charging overnight. Now, it's after eight, and no angry, panicked texts from them yet, just a text from Zaynah asking if I'm opening today at Putt by the Pond, which I thumb past—I'll answer her later. Weirdly, even as I let out a breath of relief, my stomach sinks. It makes sense that they haven't noticed I'm gone. Dad heads to the gym earlier than I get up during summer vacation, and Mom has yoga on Sunday mornings. Unless I have an early cleaning shift at Putt by the Pond, they'd have no reason to see me in the morning, or to check in on me.

Except we had that fight last night, probably the biggest we've ever had (we're not a screaming-match kind of family so much as a silent, two-day-freeze kind of family) and I guess they still didn't feel the need to check on me.

Whatever. It's good. It gives us time. Today, we'll make it to Richmond. Today, we'll find my sister, and I'll bring her home. And when I get back to Dell's Hollow with Max—or when Max gets back to Dell's Hollow on the R1, and JoJo and I follow behind on an Amtrak train or whatever—our parents will have to forgive us both. Everything will be okay again, like it was before. Better, even, because Max and my parents won't fight like they did when she dropped out of school, and now I have JoJo.

I roll back over to face her.

"Still in the clear," I say, pasting on a smile that turns real the longer I look at her.

Because I am so lucky, and JoJo is so pretty, her shower hair dried wild, with her eyes golden-green in a slice of pure sunlight that cuts between the crappy curtains, and her leg both soft and strong as granite as she slides it between my ankles to hook around my calf and pull me closer. "We're good, then?"

"Yeah," I say, suddenly feeling shy again. "That wasn't, um, you've done this before, right?"

"Yeah." She's smiling back at me, but there's a quirk between her eyebrows. "Not for a while, though—like months before we moved out of Charleston. And I was always safe, and um, should we have talked about this before? We should've talked about this."

"No, that's okay! I knew you'd dated and everything. I don't mind. Not that it's like, my business to mind. Can you tell I've never done this?" I wedge my arm up between us to cover my eyes.

"Like, you've never had this exact conversation, or never …?"

"Never had sex." Sliding two fingers apart, I peek at her from between them. "Is that okay? I've had relationships, like I said, we just never did … this much. Was I—"

"Eliana Blum!" JoJo grabs my wrist to peel my hand from my face, wrapping it back around her waist. "You were fantastic." She says it like she means it.

My cheeks heat, but not with embarrassment this time. "You too." And she was. Asking where it was okay to touch me and what I wanted, telling me where she liked to be touched and what she wanted. Like, in hindsight, it seems pretty clear I didn't totally know what I was doing, but if she says she had a good time, I choose not to doubt it. I choose to believe this, even as I can feel my inconvenient brain wanting to buzz with questions, with doubts, with what if, what if, what if.

"And you're okay?" she asks.

"Yeah. I'm good. We're good," I echo her words.

We're good.

JoJo grins, sliding her leg farther up, her knee between my knees, and I ignore my brain and our commingled morning breaths completely as I lean in to kiss her again, and this, too, feels like relief.

Day two on the R1 is a whole different game. For one thing, it's a bright, clear morning instead of midnight. While that should make things easier, it means more traffic—a constant flow of cars and big rigs on all sides, instead of the occasional pair of headlights streaking past me like twin stars in the dark. Other drivers were always the most nerve-wracking factor in my brief trips on the highway with Max to reach Pemberly Mill. And now there's no Max to fall back on, no big sister ready to take over if I panic and need to pull onto the shoulder.

With a deep breath, I steer us out of the motel parking lot.

We only put about eighty miles behind us yesterday, stopping in a place called Butner. The short ride to the I-85 on-ramp, which we'll take for the next two hours until the Richmond exit, is mostly fast-food places and the gas station we filled up at. I spot an old hulking water tower in the distance beyond the trees. This isn't super cinematic as road trips go, which is kind of a shame. I've never been to Butner before, even though it's so close to home, and who knows if I'll ever come back?

Still, I'm almost excited to be on the highway again. Because riding gives me little time to think of anything but riding. I can't daydream like I might in the Oatmobile, cruising the backstreets after our traffic lights turn to blinking red late at night. Which means there's no time or brain space to spiral over what waits for me back home. Or what I'll say to Max when we find her. Or whether Jo is daydreaming about a training program in London, even as she clings to me; whether last night has changed any of her plans, or has changed nothing at all.

There's just this: the road ahead, the bike beneath me, and the body in which I'm more rooted than I've ever been, because I need every part of me to ride. I work the clutch and turn signal with my left hand, the front brake with my right. My right foot is constantly poised to work the rear brake, and with my left I shift the gears up and down. I accelerate, I brake, I lean—carefully, with JoJo on the back. I smell everything, the way I wouldn't even in a car with its windows down: the grass and butterfly weed in the roadside ditches, exhaust and hot asphalt. I feel everything, like the slight drop in temperature when we drive through a tree-lined stretch of I-85 and the early sun is off our backs for just a moment, and the rumble of every minor patch in the road, and the warm wind scraping against my throat. I feel awake and alive and afraid.

Which, look, I'm not unused to being afraid of everything all the time, but it's different on the R1, as I'm now remembering that it was different on the Husqvarna. Like I have permission to just feel it, without having to muscle myself back under control.

The 130 miles seem to take forever and fly by at once, but we merge onto I-95 North almost exactly two hours later, as expected. As we cross the bridge over the James River, the skyline of Richmond rears up in front of us. Skyscrapers are gleaming in the noontime sun, and I'm grateful for Max's tinted visor even as I start to sweat, caught in exit traffic. As we take the turn onto East Canal Street—as far into the directions as I'd memorized—JoJo takes over, like we planned this morning. We're going slowly enough that she can lean forward and direct me to a parking garage on the other side of the canal, where we pay for entrance and find a spot on the third level. Hopping off the bike at last, I twist to crack my spine, and strip gratefully out of Max's jacket and helmet. Even in the shade, I'm baking without a constant wind.

JoJo takes off her helmet and rolls up the sleeves on her gray Fast Furious T-shirt. When our eyes meet, she laughs, a little wild.

So do I, giddy with disbelief. "We actually did it!"

She beams back at me. "You did it. You drove a whole-ass motorcycle to Richmond." Jo leans across the cooling bike to kiss me, and I feel like I've just won first in my category at Loretta Lynn's, or something. I feel heroic. Unbeatable.

And then I remember the next part of the plan.

JoJo's already on her phone, checking the distance to Clark's Gold Star Pawnshop and how much an Uber will cost us. For now, we'll leave the R1 in the relative safety of the garage; no sense driving it all over Richmond and trying to find parking at each stop. Once we find Max, we'll all come back for it together. Hopefully she'll forgive me for the bugs and dust now plastered to her previously spotless prized possession.

"There's a car seven minutes away," JoJo announces, "and we can be at the pawnshop fifteen after that." She looks up from her screen and asks gently, "Are you ready?"

"I … don't think I should think about that," I admit, "‘cause I honestly don't know. But we've come this far, right?"

"Right."

We're so close now, either to my sister, or to the helpful coworker that will direct us to her. We're so close.

All we have to do is keep it pinned.