This was just the thrill of competition.
Right?
He jammed the shifter into park, and our doors flew open. We each leaped from the car and full-out sprinted toward the gas station doors, and for once I was a hair ahead of him.
“I’m right at your heels, Glasses,” he said, trying to distract me.
“Shut up.” I pushed the door with both hands, not yielding at all as I ran into the convenience store. The people in line at the counter looked at us as we flew past, but I kept my focus on the bathrooms.
“Coming hot on your left,” Charlie breathed, and the sound of him chasing me was downright predatorial.
“Staying hot on your right,” I panted.
The bathrooms waited for us at the back of the gas station, and we didn’t even slow as we each plowed through our respective door. I flew into a stall, hurried, splashed through the world’s fastest hand washing, and ran back out, ignoring the stares as I sprinted past the Pepsi coolers and blasted out the door.
I had a clear path to his car, and there wasn’t a sprinting Charlie in sight.
I was finally going to control the radio.
I ran all the way up to his car and slapped the hood with both hands—as per the rules—before jumping up and down, even though I was standing by myself next to his car.
Only, after ten more seconds, I wondered what was up.
Where the hell was Charlie?
The couple in the car on the other side of the gas pump was giving me Is she high side-eye, so I gave them a closed-mouth smile and got into the car.
While wondering where the hell he was. Was he okay? Had something happened? Was he in trouble? Just when I was reaching for my bag to find my phone, it started ringing.
“Gah.” I fumbled and fished it out, saw Charlie was calling, and raised it to my ear. “You lost. Come out and accept your shame.”
“I can’t,” he said, and his voice sounded… weird.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Are you sick?”
“No,” he said quietly, then said, “Well, yes, I kind of think I will be soon.”
“What?” My heart sped up at the sound of Charlie sounding… off. “Are you okay? What can I do?”
He sighed and muttered, “I dropped my keys.”
“Um.” What? “So pick them up…？”
He sighed again. “That’s the thing. I can’t.”
“Did they fall down a hole or something?”
Oh God. How were we going to get to the condo before midnight if he’d dropped his keys down a hole?
“Or something. They’re in the urinal.”
“What?” I looked over my shoulder at the gas station. “So… shouldn’t they be easy to grab?”
“I, um.” He cleared his throat, sounding very uncomfortable, and said, “I can’t.”
I sat there for a half second before saying, “Charlie, are you telling me your keys are right there in the urinal, but you can’t grab them?”
It was quiet for a moment before he said, “Yes.”
I didn’t know what this meant, but I knew him well enough to know this was something. I asked, “Is anyone else in the bathroom?”
“No.”
“I’ll be right there.”
I grabbed my purse, got out of the car, and went back inside the convenience store. I felt like an idiot as everyone I’d sprinted past a minute earlier stared at me, but I kept my eyes trained on the bathrooms in the rear of the store.
“Charlie?” I approached the men’s room and opened the door a crack. “Am I good to come in?”
“Yeah,” I heard him say.
I opened the door, and when I got inside, I found Charlie looking miserable. He watched me with one dark eyebrow raised, his hair tousled like he’d been dragging his hand through it. Oh, how I wanted to give him so much shit.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t help the lump in my stomach. Seeing Charlie being… un-Charlie was surprisingly unsettling.
I said, “First things first. Did you pee on your keys?”
The corner of his mouth kicked up the tiniest bit. “Of course not.”
“And they’re…” I gestured with my chin to the urinal beside him.
“Yes.” He moved so I could see his keys sitting in the urinal. It looked clean-ish, and I was surprised he hadn’t just grabbed them. Yes, gas station urinals were beyond disgusting, but I’d pictured it much worse. He said, “I moved too fast when I ran in here and missed my pocket entirely.”
“Oof.” I stared at the urinal before shrugging and committing to the task at hand. “I’m going in.”
“Oh God,” he groaned, his strong nose crinkling like a little kid’s when presented with an unwanted vegetable. “So gross.”
And just then I wanted to hug Charlie. I knew nothing about why he was physically incapable of sticking his hand into the dirty urinal, but I knew him well enough to know that he’d rather do just about anything than have someone witness what he surely perceived as a moment of “weakness.”
“Why don’t you go buy our snacks—because I’m the winner,” I said, hoping to make him smile. “And fill up the car. I’ll be out in just a sec.”
His eyes went serious again. “You sure? That’s pretty disgusting.”
I nodded. “It’s no big deal. Get me Twizzlers and a white Rockstar, please.”
“You got it.”
When I came out to the car a few minutes later, after bathing his keys in hot soapy water and then a follow-up hand sanitizer shower, he still looked conflicted. “Listen, Bay, about what happened—”
“I don’t care, Charlie,” I groaned. “Did you get my licorice?”
He got a crinkle between his eyebrows. “It’s in the front seat, in the console.”
“Sweet. And my energy drink?”
“Same place,” he said.
“Excellent.” I crossed my arms and said, “So, I don’t really want to drive; I just want radio control. Cool?”
He gave a nod. “Cool.”
We got into the car and hit the road, and we were quiet for a solid two minutes before Charlie said, “I feel like I need to—”
“You don’t.” I reached out my arm and stuck a Twizzler into his mouth, and watched his jaw as he immediately started chewing without question. “Never happened, unless you want to talk about it, in which case I’m happy to listen. Now, on to more important things: Do you prefer country or pop?”
“Can I say neither?” he asked, taking one hand off the wheel to hold the end of the licorice. He looked away from the road for a second, his eyes sweeping over my face with a thoroughness that made me feel like he was looking for something.
“You can say it, but it won’t change the fact that those are your choices,” I explained, feeling my cheeks get hot.
He groaned before saying, “Pop, I guess.”
“Pop it is.” I took over the radio, searching for the most annoying music I could find, and time flew by as Colorado gave us a lot to look at. The aspens were bright yellow, dotted across the mountains that our highway wove through, and all of a sudden I remembered why people moved away from Nebraska and never came back.