Work Text:
“Alice,” She says somewhere in the middle of Kansas, the name feeling strange on her tongue after all this time repeating it like a prayer or like a curse.
“Hm.”
Alice’s eyes are all the way on the road in front of her, settled down somewhere along the double yellow line stretching for flat miles in front of them. Her hands are clenched to the wheel, even when they shouldn’t be. A tense driver is one with a slower reaction time.
They sit in the cab of the truck together, silently watching the road or listening to the radio, or filling the time with talking but not really speaking to the person next to them. Somewhere, in some place and time, they were the kind of couple designed for peaceful love in a house with a white picket fence and the only fights being over whether to bring chocolate chip or snickerdoodle cookies to the PTA meeting at their daughter’s school.
Keisha is the kind of woman who could have lived that life, but the more they run together or apart, the more they come to the quiet conclusion that Alice wouldn’t be content with their dreams.
It all makes Keisha question the things she thought she knew for certain, makes her madder about everything she’s already mad about. (Somewhere inside, in a time when she’s already forgiven Alice for the crimes of being in love, scared, and wanting more to life, she’s wondering if they’ll adopt or which one of them will carry their daughter.)
If it wasn’t for all the unbelievable things they’ve experienced, Keisha would question the certainty she feels that they will have a daughter until she doubts her own ability to even be a mother. On the scale of unbelievable things they’ve experienced, though, the certain knowledge Keisha feels that they will have a daughter over a son or a child does not even register as abnormal.
Keisha sighs as they drive across miles upon miles of wheat fields, somewhere in Kansas. Alice is still in the driver’s seat. She wishes occasionally that she was the one focusing on the road rather than the radio and the space between them - a wife and a wife, both unsure of the distance they have to cross to bridge the two feet between them. Once or twice she swings a hand out as if to hold one of Alice’s, but takes it back before it can be acknowledged. (She remembers doing the same thing in the front seat of her father’s pickup truck, driving down the small highway outside of a town that felt like only a countryside. In her memory, Alice is still the one driving, taking over the fast beating of Keisha’s heart with a hand reaching between them, even as she tried to let go with the fear that someone would see them.) (Her heart still fears being seen by others, but not like that. Not for being together.)
Kansas stretches on.