“Even if you go slightly under the speed limit, we should still keep to the schedule—”
“Are you going to watch the speedometer the whole way to Vegas? Seriously, man? How about you let me get on the highway first?” The car drove exactly as I’d expected it to—wide turns and plodding acceleration balanced by a smooth ride. Unless I floored it, the risk of speeding wasn’t anywhere near what Alden feared. A Ferrari, this thing was not.
“Fine. Jasper can turn up the GPS to help you.” Alden neither promised to not watch my speed nor changed his autocratic attitude. I could practically feel the tension rolling off him, and I got that he was likely uncomfortable about this whole situation, but damn it, so was I.
“No music?” Jasper pouted even as he complied, setting his GPS to bark at me in the weird British voice that he had his set to. “Not that this stereo looks like it can connect to my phone anyway, which sucks as I’ve got the perfect playlist for us.”
“No music yet,” our back-seat tyrant decreed, and my jaw went tight enough to carve ice sculptures, but I didn’t say anything. We didn’t need an argument ten minutes into the drive, even if part of me was itching for the fight.
From Gracehaven’s downtown, we wove our way to I-295, which would take us into Pennsylvania, and lead us to our first tricky section—navigating Philadelphia’s many interchanges, while avoiding as many tolls as we could, and trying to avoid accidentally heading for the city center. I’d driven this part before when going home to Kansas—back when I had both a car and a home—and on other occasions when I had wanted a more happening club scene than the one in our sleepy little college town. With about an equal drive or train ride to Philadelphia or NYC, we had plenty of options if we wanted the whole big-city experience.
But as much as I loved the food and night life, driving around Philly was always a challenge. Not so much the traffic, as I could handle that, but the confusing exits and signs and rapid need for lane changes. And knowing Alden was waiting for me to screw up wasn’t helping matters any. With a car full of friends, we’d miss an interchange, end up circling for an extra fifteen minutes or whatever, and no harm, no foul, but with Alden, I felt new pressure to be perfect, to not get lost.
Which naturally meant that I did screw up. Because of course I did, messing up the part where we were supposed to connect with the outer-belt highway that skirted the city on our way to I-76, instead ending up on a straight shot to downtown—exactly what I’d hoped to avoid.
“Rerouting. Rerouting. Rerouting,” the GPS chided in that stupid faux British accent.
“Hey, how are we headed back into New Jersey?” Jasper tapped away at his phone as we approached signs for a bridge and Burlington, which was not at all where we wanted to be. But traffic was far heavier on this section, and the stupid boat of a car wasn’t exactly nimble for lane changes.
“We’ll turn around. Double back.” I started looking for any possible exit prior to the bridge. In the back seat, Alden was rustling papers.
“Take the U.S. 13 exit,” Alden pronounced. “We’ll hook back up with I-95. Not ideal, but—”
“It’ll do.” I took the exit at pretty much the last possible second, but we made it. “Thanks.”
“This is adding a great deal of time onto our day. If we get too far behind, we won’t make the game store before they close.” Alden sounded more anxious than angry, that earlier tension coming out in faster speech and restless hands drumming on the seat. Mad I could tune out pretty well, but anxious hit me somewhere softer. Away from the game, he really was a big ball of worries—the car, the trip, my driving…
It made me less inclined to bite his head off for his decrees, which, while saving the peace, was also unsettling.
“It’ll be okay. Promise.” The gentle words came out of my mouth without my brain’s permission. I didn’t want to feel compassion for Alden, didn’t want to try to understand where he was coming from, didn’t want to think of him as anything other than an annoying jerk who was also my biggest competition. And I still wasn’t over our argument from the day before, not by a long shot, so I hated this sudden urge to calm Alden down.
As I sorted out the necessary lane changes, I tried to hold on to that sneer of his from the day before, the way he’d judged me. We weren’t friends, weren’t going to be friends, and me feeling bad because he was anxious wasn’t going to change any of that. This whole trip would be so much easier if we could simply stay enemies. The last thing I needed was the complication of suddenly seeing Alden as human instead of as the competition I had to defeat if I stood any chance of straightening my life out.