Beyond This Moment

3 Day One- 6:14 P.M.

After my laptop and my kindle die, my phone is on its last breath about to die and I'm going crazy. We've been driving all day, only stopping long enough for lunch and gas breaks and occasionally some bathroom breaks. We've all taken our turns driving and now, I'm taking my third shift and hopefully, we'll be in Buffalo soon. Gabe and Cassie are napping in the back which leaves me alone in the front with Elias.

He's very quiet, I've noticed, and I don't want to play the radio because I'm afraid of annoying him with my music taste in fear of him not agreeing with it so we're just riding in silence. He's looking out the window, I'm focused on the road and he's clearly a lot more comfortable with the silence than I am. It's driving me crazy and I'm so bored with the boring road in front of me.

I should say something.

I don't know Elias well enough to know what to talk about though. What do we even have to talk about? All I know about him is that he's a hockey player and that he's from Finland. I know nothing about Finland, only that it's a country and that it's cold. If I ask him questions about Finland, he'll think that I'm an idiot though.

"Give me pasta," Elias finally breaks the silence before I can think of the right thing to say. I glance over at him in confusion, not understanding why he just asked for pasta.

"What?" I ask him, thinking that maybe I just misheard him.

"Give me pasta," He repeats, definitely asking for pasta. Not the best ice breaker but he doesn't seem to be that great at starting conversations so I'll cut him some slack I guess.

"First of all, I don't have any pasta," I explain to him. "And second, we're going to order pizza when we get to the motel in Buffalo and we should be there soon."

Elias laughs at me with that bright laugh of his. "I don't actually want pasta."

"Are you getting car sick insanity?" I ask him. When he starts laughing, I'm thinking that he's telling a joke that I just don't understand. "Okay, I don't get it."

He points to the car in front of us and I expect maybe a pasta-related bumper sticker or something but there's nothing. I'm at a complete loss here but Elias is still smiling at me in a very amused manner, obviously knowing exactly what he's doing. "The license plate," He continues to explain. "GMP."

The license plate of the car is GMP 1575 so I now understand that GMP could be an acronym for 'give me pasta' and then I get that it's a game that he's creating. To think up phrases that spell out the license plate letters.

"You were looking bored," He explains to me. "You're passing a car on your left. You try."

"Okay..." I decide, seeing the silver sedan on my right and when we get closer, I see that the first three letters are DYT and I just say the first thing that comes to mind. "Do your taxes... that wasn't funny at all."

He laughs though, probably more at me than at my phrase. "No, it wasn't. You'll get it though."

The Give Me Pasta car gets over into the right lane to take the next exit so I get closer to the car that's now in front of us and see that the license plate is MVT and I've got nothing for that one.

"Meille vai teille," Elias comes up with.

"What does that mean?" I ask him, assuming that he's speaking Finnish considering he is from the country and I think that's the language that they speak there. That's a third thing that I think that I know about Finland.

"It's a pick up line," He explains, a small half-smile curling onto his thin lips making him look an equal amounts of adorable and troublesome. All amounts of handsome. "In Finland."