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The sun is hot overhead, Chris only just notices. He squints up at it accusingly; he’s going to burn. Perversely, he thinks, “Good. It’d serve you right. Idiot.”
He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking along this frontage road, but it doesn’t feel like enough time has passed for him to stop berating himself. He trudges along, feet beating in time with the ticking in his head, as flashes of the morning recur like images in a poorly edited music video: Zach answering his door; Chris kissing him; Zach kissing back. And then…
And then Zach had pushed Chris away as if repulsed, as if he’d never said what he’d said the night before.
“I wanted every single one of those people to be you. Including Miles.”
“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?” Chris practically shouts, addressing the sun in its cloudless sky, the vastness of the Texas panhandle surrounding him, the dead armadillo in the drainage ditch.
“Ew,” he says, recoiling.
He’s an idiot, that’s what he is. He’d spent years, literal years, wanting something he was always too chicken shit to ask for, and when he’d finally done something about it, he’d failed miserably. It’s unfair as fuck, that’s what it is.
“I should get out of the sun,” Chris observes out loud. He looks around and realizes there’s nowhere to stop. He remembers a gas station a while back, but he can no longer see it. To his left, traffic is beginning to pick up on I-40. If he gets desperate, he’ll climb up to the freeway and flag someone down. He’s not that desperate. He keeps walking east.
“Miles left me because of you.”
“Because of me? Because of me.” Chris scoffs and kicks at a bleached-out, empty Powerade bottle. “Who lays that on a person?” He catches up to the bottle and kicks it again, viciously. “And then pushes said person away when they kiss you?” The next kick sends the bottle into the drainage ditch, and Chris stands over it, breathing heavily. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials.
“Hello?”
“What do you mean you didn’t like the way he looked at me?”
“Who is this?”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”
“Oh. Pine.”
“Yes, Pine.”
“Why are you calling me? Zach told me about the texts. Are you trying to sabotage our relationship?”
“You don’t have a relationship, you dumped him, remember? Broke his heart?”
“That’s really none of your business, Chris.”
“Of course it’s my business! I’m the one who kept him from flying apart on set. And by the way, breaking it off during a film shoot was pretty shitty, Miles.”
“I didn’t realize there were protocols.”
Miles sounds sarcastic and pissed off, and that pleases Chris on a certain level. “How about protocols of human decency?”
“You’re the arbiter of that, are you?”
“Maybe today I am.” They breathe at each other for several long seconds.
“Was there a point to this call?” Miles asks.
“I asked you a question. What did you mean? How does Zach look at me?”
“What kind of narcissist are you, Pine?”
“Every kind. Answer the question.”
“Why should I?”
“Because he says it’s why you broke it off, and I need to know.”
“You need to know.”
“Yes.”
“OK. Fine.” Miles pauses. Chris can sense him weighing his answer, though he’s doubtful he’ll get anything like the truth. Besides, his righteous indignation is melting in the hot Texas sun as the sweat marks from his armpits seem to be making an attempt at meeting in the center of his chest.
There’s a beeping sound coming from Chris’s phone; he pulls it from his ear to look at it.
Battery low: 5% the phone warns.
“Shit,” Chris says under his breath, pressing the device to his ear again.
Miles’s hemming and hawing has apparently ended however. “He looks at you like you’re the sun in his sky, Chris, and he would gladly be blinded if it meant one more moment with you,” he finally says.
“What?”
BEEP
Chris looks down at his phone in time to see the call drop and the little Apple symbol fade away to nothingness.
“SHIT!”
He shakes the phone as if that will do something, then stops short at the sudden appearance of a very large tractor trailer passing from behind him. He jumps back from the edge of the road into the soft dust of the shoulder. The brightly-colored logo on the side of the truck catches his eye.
Deep in the Heart Circus, it says, and he quickly realizes from the sudden smell that the truck is transporting animals of some kind. He looks back and sees an 18-wheeler, and another, close to half a dozen of them, all with the same logo emblazoned on their sides. Behind them, a caravan of smaller vehicles—rec vehicles, mini busses, trailer homes, pickup trucks—bring up the rear at a slightly slower and more brightly-colored pace.
It’s a measure of just how dehydrated Chris must be that he stands and watches, slack-jawed, as the procession of vehicles makes its way past, clearly heading for the freeway entrance a mile ahead. It takes him several seconds to realize one of them has pulled to a stop right in front of him.
The ancient Winnebago looks barely road-ready, with rust spots all along its fenders and wheel wells. The entire vehicle is painted in reds and yellows, Miss Ruby Sees All—Learn Your Fortune it says. It’s got a large—possibly racist—rendering of a sloe-eyed gypsy woman gazing into a crystal ball. The windows are rolled down, and at the wheel is seated the woman herself.
“Well howdy!” she calls cheerfully to him as she opens the passenger side door. She’s dressed in denim capris and a sleeveless blouse, with Keds on her feet and a scarf tying her thick, dark curls at the nape of her neck. If it wasn’t for the large diamond glinting in one of her front teeth, she’d look like a suburban mom picking her kids up from soccer. “Are you lost?”
Chris gapes at her.
“You look a little lost,” she suggests, “or maybe just dehydrated, but I’m here to tell you that neither of those is a winning combination out here, son.”
“I suppose not.” Chris gestures vaguely back the way he’d come. “I came from that way.”
“And are you headed that way?” Miss Ruby asks with a smile, pointing east.
Chris follows her hand with her eyes, thinking about the journey that got him this far. He remembers heading out with Zach, filled with excitement at the beginning of their trip, the discomfort of the things that remained unsaid between them, the stress of dealing with his own betrayal when he’d deleted the text messages, the kiss, Zach’s rejection. This trip was supposed to have been his way to de-stress after a long shoot, to forget about the business of being Chris Pine for a while and just commune with the open road and the open sky. When Zach invited himself along for the trip, Chris had convinced himself it would be fun. Now he feels like it was the worst thing for their relationship ever. He regrets ever leaving LA.
He looks once more in the direction of the way he’d come, toward the motel he’d lost sight of hours ago and farther west still, to his home, and his life. He turns his head and looks east once more, thinking it still held some promise, though he’s damned if he remembers what it was.
He looks back at Miss Ruby, and thinks she looks kind, and he makes his decision.
“Yep. I’m headed your way,” he says as he climbs inside.