The Survivors

Chapter Seven: Road Trip, pt. 1

I smiled, a little embarrassed.

Mark, uncharacteristically, waited until we were about to drive the new car off the lot before he grabbed my arm and asked, "How does a chick who is basically a glorified nomad end up with a checkbook?"

  I looked down and smiled. "I have my ways," I said coyly. I liked knowing that the Winters were as intrigued by me as I was by them.

On Sunday night, we packed up the cars. We crammed in five giant boxes of books I had bought for my family at the Barnes & Noble in Monterey. If even one of them started to think better things about the outside world by reading these things-a healthy mix of classics and contemporaries, thought-provoking literature, to things like Gossip Girl for the young ones-then I'd feel like I had done right by them. I steered clear of the popular supernatural literature, though. They would do best not to know what the world thought of creatures like us unless it became absolutely necessary.

  We sat around the dining room table and planned our route, something I never did. I had a GPS I trusted, and I never had a need to stop. But they didn't travel that way. It would take me only about eighteen hours to drive the 1,400 miles from Pacific Grove to Montana. But the Winters were dedicated to acting human, and they would not drive round the clock the way I would.

  "Where are we going to stop?" Adelaide asked.

  "I hadn't thought about it," I admitted. "I've never stopped before. I always drive straight through. You can go faster in the middle of nowhere at night."

"You drove all the way here without stopping?" she asked. I nodded.

"And she drove to Montana from Tennessee like two days before that," Ginny added.

Adelaide gasped as Mark chirped in, "And she drove from Tupelo to Nashville the night before that."

"And you still can't sleep?" Adelaide asked, her hands on my arms. She was rebuking me the way an angry mother would an unreasonable teenager.

"It isn't that easy for me to sleep," I admitted.

"How many miles was that?" she asked, trying to get a grasp on my stamina.

"I have no idea," I said. I didn't keep track.

"Wait, hold on," Ginny said, holding a finger up to us as she typed furiously into her BlackBerry. "Google says 3,650 miles, give or take."

"In how many days?" Adelaide asked.

I rolled my eyes. "Honestly, Adelaide, if you can't sleep, it's not that big a deal."

She shook her head. "I worry about you, Sadie. I worry, worry, worry about you," she said. I knew what she was thinking. If you don't have a mother to take care of you, I'll do the job myself.

Later that night, after the Winters had gone to bed, I took a walk down to the beach. In the early summer, thick fog covers the shoreline and the hills of Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach. It was hard to see the beach from the Winters' back porch, and it was only just across the green belt in front of the Winters' home.

  I strolled down, pulling up Twitter on my phone as I walked. @SadiesTravels: Looking out at the Pacific in CA, heading to Montana tomorrow. I hoped this would satisfy Corrina for a few days.

  The ocean had mesmerized me since the moment I laid eyes on it days before when I topped a hill in Seaside before I got off Pacific Coast Highway. I was floored by it up close. I had only ever seen the ocean from the window of a plane. It was more powerful and more beautiful than I'd imagined. Alone in the fog, I walked barefoot across the sand, making memories of what the beach felt like, and what the ocean smelled like. It was pitch black, and the cool, damp air on my skin was comforting. As the water crashed up on the beach, time after time, I wanted to touch it. I knew it would be icy, but I wasn't worried. I walked across mushy wet sand before the next cold wave came in and splashed across my feet.

My thoughts drifted to Everett. I had replayed my arrival and our introduction maybe a million times in my head. I let my mind run away. My breathing caught, and my empty stomach tightened. I felt dizzy.

  I imagined laying my head on his muscular chest, in a place where a heartbeat might have been. I imagined my body pressed against his as his arms held me close to him. He would never want to leave me, and I would never want to leave him. I sighed. What would it be like to be next to Everett Winter every day of my life? To touch his skin, his lips? To travel the world with him?

  That thought interrupted my blissful reverie.

  I wondered, Would I still be drawn to the morbid journey I was on if I had someone to love? More specifically, if I had an immortal someone to love? I had obviously never envisioned this as a possibility, since I thought that every immortal in the world was living peacefully inside my family's city walls. And in my three years of wandering, I had imagined falling in love with a mortal or not at all (truthfully, always not at all until I met Cole. The closest I'd come had been Todd and there wasn't anything real or lovey about that.). If I fell in love with a mortal, my quest would only intensify. If love between mortals was like the books described it, then I wouldn't be able to detach from it when the object of my affection grew old and died and I was left alone and no closer to release from this world. I would have to become mortal myself.

  This was, of course, problematic. There was no way.

  I walked farther up the beach to dry sand and dropped down onto it. I let my head fall forward onto my knees and released a grumble of frustration. I had started this conversation with myself about Everett, and now I was thinking about Cole. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. 3:38 AM. It was 6:38 in New York, and I was sure Cole would be getting up soon. I closed my eyes to focus on him. I sensed him quickly. He was sleepy, but he was definitely awake already. I could call...

  No. No. That would not help. I had had my chance with Cole, hadn't I? And I ran. I ran.

  I always run.

  I made new rules for myself. No mortals! What if I killed him? I hadn't even let myself entertain the idea of really kissing him for fear of what I would do! In a moment of love or lust, I could lose my mind completely and kill him-crush him, maybe poison him-entirely by accident. Then where would I be? He was fragile.

  Everett was so different. I thought of the description in Theogony of Eros coming into being out of nothing. I had thought it meant that desire was bigger than us all, and now I could believe that. This thing I felt for Everett was something I could not control. I knew it could consume me the way nothing ever had-save for finding freedom from the chains of immortality. And it was so stupid! I had never even spoken to him alone. Every time he was near me, I became irrational. Even now, I was considering forgoing my fight for mortality if I loved an immortal. If I loved him. The rhythm of his breath, the timbre of his voice, the color of his eyes, and the texture of his skin were a mating call I couldn't ignore, a love letter I couldn't refuse.

  I remembered that I had not thought much of sweet and beautiful Cole Hardwick until we had talked and touched, albeit in the most chaste ways. Did this mean that when I spoke to Everett Winter alone, or when my skin met his, even in a haphazard way, my feelings would magnify? What might I feel if I danced close to him? Joked with him? Felt his hand on my back, his body against mine, his lips against my forehead?

  I stood up quickly, trying in vain to keep myself from thinking about it. It made me squirm uncomfortably in ways I usually did not. I turned to walk back up the road to the Winters' home and tried to clear my head.

  But I couldn't stop! I wanted many things I had never wanted before-things I had never even dreamed of. I wondered if this was what people felt when they fell in love or even what drove them to do stupid things out of lust.

  And so, relenting, I let my mind run free. I laid in a hammock on the Winters' back deck and stared at the cloudy sky. All I could think of was what it would be like to kiss Everett Winter.