Across state lines

 

POV: Simone Liverpool 

The leather of the steering wheel feels cold under my fingers, but my grip on it is so tight my knuckles are turning ghostly white.

Beside me in the passenger seat, Chrysler Davii is doing her absolute best to pretend I don’t exist. She’s leaning as far into the door frame as humanly possible without physically merging into the metal, her head resting against the glass, her dark hood pulled low over her eyes. She looks small inside that massive black sweatshirt wrapped up like a fortress, desperately trying to hide every inch of her soft, beautiful frame from the world.

From me.

Every time her words from the locker room repeat in my head, my jaw clenches so hard my back teeth ache.

“You got stuck with the fat girl who used to write your papers. Feel free to put me in the trunk whenever you get tired of looking at me.”

She genuinely believes I see her that way. She thinks I look at her with the same shallow, disgusting disdain that Williams and the rest of those brain-dead athletes toss around in the locker room.

She has no idea. No damn idea at all.

She doesn't know that a year ago, when she sat across from me in that dusty corner of the library, I barely heard a word she said about macroeconomic theory. I was too busy staring at the curve of her lips when she got flustered, the deep, rich brown of her eyes, and the quiet, brilliant light in her soul whenever she solved a problem. She was lush, sharp, and entirely out of my league. But when she offered to do my assignments in exchange for a connection to Williams, it ripped through me. I took the deal anyway—not because I cared about the grades, but because it was the only way I could get her to sit in the same room with me for three hours a week without her running away.

And then Williams turned out to be the absolute asshole I knew he was, breaking her heart, and Chrysler pulled inside herself completely, building a concrete wall between us that I’ve been screaming behind ever since.

I glance at the dashboard. We’ve been driving for two hours, crossing out of our college town and onto the long, lonely stretch of Interstate heading West toward our first photography stop. The silence in the car is suffocating, heavy with everything we aren't saying.

"You can turn on the heater if you're cold," I say, breaking the silence. My voice comes out lower and rougher than I mean it to.

Chrysler doesn't move for a second. Then, without looking at me, she pulls her hands out of the sleeves of her oversized hoodie and tucks them under her arms. "I'm fine," she whispers, her voice flat, devoid of life.

It infuriates me. Not her—never her—but the fact that she treats herself like a burden that needs to be minimized.

I reach over to the central console and tap the climate control, raising the temperature by four degrees. I pull up a low, ambient instrumental playlist on the custom audio system—soft, low-frequency soundscapes with gentle piano notes. It’s a track list I put together weeks ago, meant to soothe nerves, though I never thought I’d actually get her in my car to use it.

"We need to discuss the project schedule," I state, keeping my eyes fixed on the highway ahead. "Professor Vance wants ten composite locations. The first stop is the old pine reserve at the state border. We should reach it before dusk if we don't stop for long."

Chrysler shifts slightly in her seat, the fabric of her hoodie rustling. "You don't have to explain the schedule to me, Simone. Just pull over when you want to take your shots. I'll shoot my own roll, and we don't have to talk."

"Is that how this is going to be?" I turn my head slightly at a red light near a toll station, catching her profile. Her jaw is tight, her long eyelashes casting delicate shadows against her cheeks. "You're just going to treat me like an enemy for three thousand miles?"

"You're not my enemy," she says quietly, finally turning her face toward me. Her eyes are heavy with an exhaustion that goes way deeper than a bad night's sleep. "You're just a guy who belongs in a completely different world. You're Simone Liverpool. Your family owns half the commercial real estate on the East Coast. You have a track scholarship, status, and girls like Ultraviolet Ross waiting for you back on campus. I'm just Chrysler. I don't fit in your car, I don't fit in your life, and I'm not stupid enough to pretend otherwise."

The raw bitterness in her tone slices clean through my chest.

"Ultraviolet is nothing to me," I say, my tone dropping dangerously low. "And Williams is an idiot."

"Williams is your friend," she counters, a bitter smile touching her lips. "And he said out loud what everyone else was thinking when Vance read our names off the pairing list."

"He doesn't speak for me!" I snap, the volume of my voice cracking through the quiet cabin of the car.

Chrysler flinches, pulling back against her seat, her eyes widening slightly in alarm.

Seeing her shrink away from me feels like a physical punch to my throat. I take a deep, shaky breath, gripping the wheel until my hands tremble, forcing the anger back down into my chest. "I'm sorry," I mutter, keeping my voice soft, controlled. "I didn't mean to raise my voice at you. But don't ever put Williams' words in my mouth, Chrysler. Ever."

She doesn't reply. She turns her head back to the window, but I catch the slight tremble in her lower lip before she bites down on it.

We reach the pine reserve right as the sun begins to dip below the horizon, painting the sky in deep bruises of purple, gold, and blood orange. It’s freezing outside, the autumn air sharp enough to cut through thin clothes. I park the car in the gravel lot near the edge of the forest trail, turning off the engine.

Chrysler unbuckles her seatbelt immediately, grabbing her dad's old, worn Nikon camera from the floorboard. She opens the door and steps out into the cold, pulling her hood up over her head.

I step out on my side, grabbing my own top-of-the-line camera rig, but I don't look at the trees. I watch her.

She walks away from the car, heading toward a high ridge overlooking a sweeping valley of pine trees drowning in golden light. Her movements are slow, burdened, like she’s carrying a mountain on her shoulders. I know her father passed away a few months ago—the whole campus knew, even if nobody talked about it. I know she’s been drowning in grief, and I know how her mother speaks to her; I overheard one of Chrysler's phone calls outside the library last term, her mother's shrill voice screaming through the receiver about her weight and how much of a disappointment she was.

It had taken every ounce of my self-control not to track down her family home right then and burn it to the ground.

As Chrysler reaches the edge of the ridge, she lifts the camera to her eye.

And suddenly, everything shifts.

The moment the lens is at her eye, the defensive hunch in her shoulders vanishes. She lifts her head high, her posture straightening, her focus absolute. The wind catches her hood, blowing it back, freeing a few stray dark curls that frame her face. The golden hour light hits her skin, illuminating the soft curve of her jaw, the richness of her brown skin, the absolute, breathtaking majesty of her presence.

She isn't just taking a photo. She is the picture.

My breath hitches in my chest. My fingers move on instinct. I lift my camera, aim it straight at her profile, and press the shutter button.

Click.

The quiet sound of the lens closing echoes over the rustling pine needles. Through my viewfinder, I look at the image I just captured: Chrysler Davii, framed against a blazing orange sky, wrapped in a sunset, looking like a goddess who doesn't realize she owns the earth she stands on.

She turns suddenly, hearing the click, and catches me with my camera still raised toward her.

"What are you doing?" she asks, her brow furrowing, her defensive guard slamming back up in an instant. "We're supposed to be taking landscapes."

"I took one," I say, lowering my camera, my gaze locking firmly onto hers. I don't hide it. I don't apologize.

"Simone," she says, her voice trembling slightly as she takes a step back. "Don't make fun of me. Please. I really can't take it today."

"You think I'm making fun of you?" I step toward her, closing the distance between us on the rocky ridge until I’m standing right in front of her, my broad frame blocking the biting wind from touching her.

Up close, I can see the pale exhaustion beneath her eyes, the faint lines of stress around her mouth. She looks like she’s about to break.

"I have never made fun of you a day in my life, Chrysler," I say, my voice dropping to a thick, quiet murmur. "Not in the library, not in the locker room, and not out here."

She swallows hard, looking up at me, her chest heaving under her heavy sweatshirt. "Then why did you look so angry when Vance paired us up?"

"Because," I say, reaching out, my hand hovering just an inch away from her cheek, desperate to touch her, but stopping myself before I scare her off. "I was furious at myself. Because I knew if I got stuck in a car with you for two weeks, I wouldn't be able to hide how I look at you anymore."

Chrysler’s eyes widen in utter shock, her breath hitching sharply in her throat as the quiet pine forest wraps around us.