This isn't weird.

Peace Offering

Close was apparently a relative term. An hour passed in stony silence before Tess sat up straight and barked out the order, "Take the next exit!"

"Here?" Ben asked. "Are you sure? We're in the middle of nowhere."

She didn't take well to being questioned, and escalated straight to shouting. "Take the fucking exit, Ben, or I'm going to bash your fucking head in!"

"I'm exiting, I'm exiting! What now?"

"Take a left at the next intersection."

"Here?"

"Did I fucking stutter?"

"For fuck's sake, there's nothing but corn for miles! What is the point of this?"

"Take the fucking left or I'll—"

"Bash my head in, yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time. Are you just trying to lure me somewhere remote enough to dispose of a corpse?"

"Don't tempt me."

"If I see any bodies of water, I'm turning around."

"Shut up and drive."

"Which way?"

"Straight!"

Straight was easy—there wasn't a bend in the road for another ten miles. A rogue intersection appeared, and she barked at him to turn right. After another two miles, it seemed the pavers had simply given up, and the road turned into gravel. That was when she began craning her neck, searching the fields, deserted but for a few cows meandering behind a barbed wire fence in the distance. He didn't even bother to ask; he'd long since reached his daily quota for being told to fuck off.

"Hold on, stop. Pull over."

"Here? Why?"

"Just stop the fucking car!"

Begrudging but curious, he pulled to the side of the road. Tess began twisting in her seat, looking around in all directions, then scowled down at her phone. "There's nothing here."

"You don't say?" Ben muttered, unbuckling his seatbelt. "Fuck it, I'm going to stretch my legs." He pushed open his door and climbed out, grunting as he straightened his half-numb knees. The air was thick with the reek of fertilizer and livestock. It gave him a pang of homesickness, a sudden longing for his natural environment, a bustling city where he could melt into an omnipresent throng of strangers and traffic and possibilities. Civilization. How could anyone choose to live in a place like this? Without neighbors, without noise? There was no life to be had here.

Millie. Poor Millie. Trapped for all these months in her own deep South version of this sprawling rural hellscape. He wanted so badly to scoop her up in his arms, whisk her off to a place where it was nigh impossible to be bored or lonely. His heart melted a little to imagine her bundled up for a New York City winter, windswept and rosy-cheeked, holding his hand on the sidewalk—

But maybe all of that would feel as alien to her as all this felt to him. She was nervous in crowds. Hated loud noises and cold weather. Loved quiet solitude, fresh air, sun on her skin and greenery as far as the eye could see. Countless times he'd seen her kick off her shoes and stretch out right on the grass without a second thought, unbothered by insects and painstaking in her efforts to do no harm to the ants she brushed away from her skin. He could never bring himself to join her.

She was uninhibited surrounded by nature, he was uninhibited surrounded by human beings, both in ways the other could never be. For all their commonalities, at their cores, they were fundamentally different creatures. But maybe that was why they needed each other. There were parts of the human experience he could only see through her eyes, and vice versa.