Page 13 of The Guy Sure Looks Like Plant Food To Me
“He would have taken Chewie if I didn’t leave.” She shakes her head, “Plus, going home was for the best.” She gestures to the duffel bag strapped to her arm. “Now I’m more prepared.”
I take a deep inhale to steady myself, my thoughts, my heart before. I dare ask, “Prepared?”
“Yeah,” she nods, “So, where are we going?”
“Meri,” I whisper, “You’re going to give up everything for this? You don’t even know where I’m going.”
She swallows, “Well. Where are you going then?”
“I have a cabin in the middle of Winchester Forest, my mentor, she left it for me in her will. It isn’t much but, it’s across the state line and it’s practically off the grid so?—”
“It’s perfect,” she interrupts me, taking the bag from my hand, “I’ll load this in my car, is there anything else you want me to take?”
I shake my head, still not fully processing the moment, unable to comprehend how she could so easily just let it all go for me. “I-I don’t think you understand, Meri. I’m not coming back, this isn’t a quick little trip, and I can’t ask you to upheave your life, your wedding?—”
She silences me with a kiss, one that feels like her entire body is somehow in it. The kind where our lips collide with need, they part so our tongues can meet and dance, and with just that I know everything I’ll ever have to know about America.
The rest can come with time.
She will be mine, if I am hers, because we’ve both been waiting for each other to come along. It’s only in that thought that I acknowledge there’s no more pain, only us.
“A wedding?” Meri laughs, “There’s nothing waiting for me in that world, nothing I want anyway. I want this, I want you, I want Chewie, and whatever other fucking crazy plants you decide to give souls to.” She unzips the duffle bag, wads of cash peeking out through the zipper. “I also stole a bunch of money from my dad’s safe so we should probably haul ass.”
“Won’t he come looking for you?” I ask her.
“Not with the campaign so close, there’s too many eyes on him and he doesn’t need the spectacle or negative attention from a runaway daughter. If anything, this might be my only chance to disappear. He’ll probably say I’m doing research in some tropical jungle once I’ve hid myself away. My existence is more of a burden than my absence, catch my drift?” She explains with a goofy grin that tries to distract from the pain in her eyes.
“Your existence is everything, Meri. Do you understand me?” I pull her closer to me, waiting for her confirmation as I scan her face, taking in every aspect of her features into my memory, and sealing her there forever. “We’re each other’s now, okay?”
“Okay.” She nods, a rogue tear slipping from the corner of her eye before I can catch it.
“Let’s go then.”
8
AMERICA
The drive is quiet, I expect to follow Runa in my Mazda, but she ends up hitching my car to the back of her truck instead so I can ride with her and Chewie. I get to sit pressed against her, opting to lift up the middle console and use its seat in the cabin so I can be as close as humanly possible.
I drift off around the third hour of the trip, it’s only when she pulls into a gas station to fuel up that I wake, the rising sun coming up behind us in the rearview mirror.
“We’re close,” Runa tells me, a big smile on her face. “Pick out whatever snacks you want for the next day or so, we’ll come back into town once we’ve cleared out the overgrown nightshades around the property.”
“Probably best to keep them,” I tell her. “We can learn to coexist with them, it’s the intruders who should be wary.”
Her smile reaches all the way up to her eyes. “That’s what Lessa would say, my mentor,” she explains with a sad shrug.
“Seems like she cared about you a lot, to leave it to you.” I squeeze her hand before we exit the car together.
“Hmm,” Runa hums, staring out into the road.
Picking out road trip snacks is the most normal thing we could be doing right now, even though I know there’s likelyalready a small but quiet search team trying to find me. He’ll give up once he realizes I’m too far to chase, and I will gladly stay quiet for the sake of my freedom, but he’ll still try and find me at first.
So I pretend for now that snacks are all that matter, realizing how much you can learn about someone just from their taste preferences. Runa loves ranch-flavored sunflower seeds, but she doesn’t actually like the seeds themselves, she just likes sucking on the shells and spitting them out. It’s adorably gross, but when I think about the environmental impact of her spitting the little seeds out the window as we drive, planting sunflowers on the side of the road like a bird, I almost wonder if this is what love feels like.
I’m sure this must be it.
She squeezes my hand back, like she knows I need the reminder that she’s here, to take me out of all the worries in my head.
