Only You

free

Cate tries to stay awake with me as we fly down the highway like a star flung out of space. Her hand rests on my leg, the flashing lights casting fleeting patches of yellow on her skin. But she drifts away to sleep, after making me promise I'll wake her up to drive when I get tired. I smile, knowing this is the only promise to her I will ever break. 

The sky fades into gray as I pull into the parking lot of a diner on the interstate. Cate wakes up with a little sigh as the car jolts to a halt. 

"Oh...why didn't you wake me?" she asks sleepily.

"I wasn't tired. But now I'm hungry--breakfast?"

Cate and I walk to the diner, walking close but not touching, because there are other people around even this early. I want to toss my hair and say defiantly, "fuck you" to the world. Fuck you because you won't let me take Cate's arm as we walk into a warm, coffee scented diner together. Fuck you because you never let people love who they love, fuck you because you have us on a leash. 

"I was thinking maybe we stop at Hanover," Cate says as she sips her coffee, looking at a road map that was on the racks outside the diner. "It's the next town on the interstate. I might have to make a few calls."

She looks grave, so I spear a piece of pancake with my fork and offer it to her. She smiles and opens her mouth, letting me feed her like a child. 

"We'll just follow the 95," I suggest. "I want to get up to Maine, if you have the time."

"I don't give a fuck about time," she declares. The way she swears, so easily and almost as casually as if it would have slipped out anywhere else, makes me smile.

"Tell me about Ruby," I say. "Does she look like you?"

"More like Richard." Cate pulls a worn little photo out of her wallet to show me.

I look at the faded picture, at the little girl squinting up at the camera, the sunlight in her eyes and rising like golden steam from her brown hair. She doesn't look anything like Cate, and even though the picture is too grainy for me to see, I have a certain feeling she has brown eyes, pale and uncertain, watery mud. 

"She's cute," I say, handing it back. 

Cate smiles. "You would like her--she reminds me of you."

"Really?"

"So willful. And stubborn."

"Like a bull," I say, laughing. "I'm a Taurus. Is she?"

She shakes her head, a surprised smile in her eyes. "No, a Leo. But I'm a Taurus."

I am about to say, "no wonder we are drawn to one another", but it touches too close to the thin wall of unsaid words between us. I paint my words onto that wall, saving it like a coating of sugar on my lips. 

Cate's foot presses on mine, which makes me go limp and feel everything so hard and so suddenly I feel I could combust. I catch her eye, flashing a playful gaze at me, and a poem materializes in my head, a poem I will whisper to her tonight, wherever we end up. And the thought that I will be spending the night with her somewhere sends a tremble through me, a shiver of ecstasy that brings me close to tears, so that the streak of pink clouds crashing silently into each other in the sky above the road outside is almost too much for me to bear.

"Cate, we're free," I whisper. "We can go anywhere we want." I say it reverentially, like the words are burning things I've just discovered. 

"Damn right," Cate says, and puts her head back and laughs. "We have to immortalize this moment of our emancipation."

I watch her stand up, her tall and graceful form filling up my eyes like molten gold, and she walks to the jukebox in the corner of the diner and slips some coins in. The music spills through the quiet diner. The old man at the counter, drying the glasses, gives her an approving smile and says, "that's a good pick." Cate smiles back, cordially.

"It's easy to live...it's easy living, it's easy to live...when you're in love...and I'm so in love with you...."

I am at peace with the world at last, I think, because now my world is only Cate. Nothing in the universe matters nearly as much as the way Cate sways her hips to the music.