She asked me to leave with her before summer touched down in earnest. The grass was still tufted with new growth and tickling my bare ankles when she tipped her head at me, sunlight licking her cheeks from low on the horizon, and gave me the look I never could learn to ignore.

Got wind of a place out west, she said simply. I’d snorted at her, unable to stop myself.

To live?

She shook her head like I was something charming, something small and easy to handle. The chuckle that kicked its way out from her nose in a sniff had brought a jolt of ardor from somewhere deep in my belly. A place, she repeated, as though it clarified anything. Her eyes flashed—she already knew I would come along. Somewhere I can stay. For good.

Permanence has always been her thing. She likes the feeling of being rooted, something holding her to the earth. She wears her heavy denim coat with the fraying sleeves, plays little spoon to yours truly; it's as though she’s afraid the sky might swallow her up if she forgets to weigh herself down. I realized pretty soon after we began orbiting each other that floating without someplace to call home is the only thing that scares her—I’ve called her a tree more than once, with her long-tall frame and those strong legs like a split trunk. If she’s a tree, I’m a bird in her branches. 

I give a nod to the old man behind the shop counter as the bag crinkles in my fingers. “You driving in this?” he asks, by which he likely means You’re fucking nuts if you think you can drive in this. I shake my head, peeking into the bag to make sure I’ve got everything I wanted.

“Nah, riding it out.” I nod my chin up as though the room we’ve managed to find in the middle of this diluvian fury is right above the convenience store instead of a quick and sopping-wet dash across the half-empty parking lot. The old man hums and passes me my change with a dry, knobbled hand. I think for a moment he might have more to say, but a clap of thunder shakes the windows and seems to change his mind.

“Helluva storm,” he hums as farewell, turning back to the yellowing crossword booklet bent in half in his hand, “but we’ve needed it.”

The door chimes behind me as I stuff the receipt into my jacket pocket and turn up my hood. Roaring as it drives down, smashing into the street in a flat wall of wet, the rain greets me like a crowd cheering at the pale white rectangle of the minimart in its storm-dark. I turn my face down, hunch my shoulders, and hustle across the pavement with my shoes splashing over potholes and clusters of drowning weeds. As if I might walk on water—I’ll bet Jesus didn’t need to worry about his soles being damp tomorrow morning.

I sidle into tonight’s shitty shoebox room and she looks up at me with a crow’s smile, cross-legged on the floor as the muted television paints hectic ecstasy across her face.

“They were out of orange.” The plastic bag hisses softly when I extend it to her and toe off my wet shoes onto the scuffed linoleum. My drenched jacket follows, and I wonder idly if the broom-closet bathroom has a hairdryer. The door thuds shut behind me—hammering rain mutes to a thin bleed through the flimsy window, the buzzy ceiling light hums louder in the clutch of quiet, my heart thuds softly in my ears from the run over. I nod at my hand. “I got you the blue one.”

She unfolds, limbs seeming to slot into themselves joint by joint, and rises with a rangy stretch. The riot of her long braid shrugs over one sharp shoulder, a black snake slipping away to boney safety, and she covers the two steps over to me in a blink of my rain-smattered eyes.

“You’re good to me,” she hums, her familiar refrain as we hurtle over highway after highway. You’re good to me, muttered without looking at me in the empty midnight Waffle House outside of Richfield as she poured rivers of syrup over her shortstack; You’re good to me, a whisper in the dark of the first ragged motel we found when we could still hear the Atlantic hissing in our ears; You’re good to me, her murmur against the join of my shoulder as I held her in the truck bed and the West Texas nighttime sang around us.

She’s had a dearth of good things, and it curdles something deep in my guts to think too hard about that. She of all people should have a place that loves her back.

I shrug. “You deserve it.”

She takes the bag from me with another little grin, every angle of her face a mirror of itself to reflect her boundlessness a million times over whenever I look at her. No wonder I’m smitten. 

The too-sweet sports drink twists open with a crack of its cap—the bag hangs from her hand, the tiny pack of gum and a bundle of hair ties I’ve sorely needed for three days left inside barely even weighing it down enough to tug on her grip. She sips deeply to let unearthly blue slip into her like cartoonish fresh air. I almost forget we’re as good as lost in Nevada as I watch her.

“What?” She’s smiling again when she licks her lips. She hands the bag back to me, and it’s a moment past a comfortable pause before I look away from her shimmery mouth to take it.

“Nothing,” I say with a shrug. The hair ties are a welcome distraction, the plastic fluttering like a husk of some other snake’s sloughed skin as I reach in and dig for them. Everything, I want to shout into this strange room in a strange place, you’re everything.

She tips her head to the side like she had when she first invited me on this hapless flight, understanding some unsaid language I can’t ever hear in my own bone conduction. “Funny girl,” is all she leaves me with before she sits back down in front of the television. I wait for two seconds, three; “Thanks again,” she says, right on cue, holding up the bottle in her hand as though toasting me.

I think she has to know what she does to me. She has to know only she could manage to pick me out of our hometown like a skipped stitch, guide me across more than half of this godforsaken country, pull me into shithole after shithole to help her find what she thinks she’s lost: that ground where her roots might finally drink deep on the electric-blue water of belonging instead of whither and drown in loneliness. 

I think of the weeds in the parking lot, how too much of a good thing has killed them. A small part of me wants this hop-skip-jumping through our own puddles of wandering to go on forever on the off-chance this Eden she’s chasing ends up just as hellish as home.

Whenever she tells me we’re almost there, I find myself wondering if she'll ask me to stay with her once we finally stop to breathe.

Almost there, another one of her favorite lines—Almost there, as fitting on her voice through the passenger-side window when she’s poring over the map at a Chikasha gas station as it is on a soft gasp when I let her hands find me on nights like this beneath threadbare sheets for just a few moments of quiet indulgence.

“Any time,” I settle for lying, but I don’t think it’s entirely a lie. I would like to think I could break from her at any moment, leave her at any pissdirt gas station along the way, but I know I can’t.

Bird. Branches. Some of us are weak, need to roost more than others.

She said it best when I was watching the Georgia border disappear in my rearview mirror: You’re better, I think, with me.

I slip one of the hair ties onto my wrist and rake my hair up into a knot as I sit on the foot of the bed. I've got one ankle tucked under me and am about to move the other up beside it when she sighs lightly, so lightly, and shifts over to lean against my knee.

I wait for just a moment before I relent—I let her lean and I sink one hand down to the crown of her head, petting at the soft twist of her hair, before I’m entirely aware of it. The television is still on mute.

You’re better, I think, I can almost hear her say around the doubt that fizzes around the struts of my brain, with me.