The Road Trip

by Beth O'Leary

I want to tell him he always says the perfect thing, but it feels too much. I don’t want to give him that. I don’t want him to know how completely he has me already. If he knows that, he has all the power.

I kind of get that, actually. I think. Love as a bargain. Like, giving up your heart is scary, but doable if the other person does it at the exact same moment, like two soldiers lowering their weapons.

But the dread doesn’t seem to know it. The dread just knows that the future is enormous, and awful, because, inevitably, no matter what I do, I’ll fail at it.