Chapter Text
The car's air conditioner could manage only wispy coughs of nippy air, doing little to help the sultry atmosphere inside the space. Rolling down the windows offered no relief, letting in a sickly warm wind that felt like lashes on bare skin, so that was quickly ruled out. Coy had been meaning to fix the cooling unit himself—having stubbornly refused professional help, much to his friends' vocal displeasure.
His first car, a forest-green Honda Civic that held an unfortunate resemblance to an electric charging station on wheels, had suffered from a terminal engine shudder. A teenaged-Coy had taken it to a local mechanic and pre-paid for the repairs using a hard-earned bounty of allowance money and wrinkled bills from odd jobs. He’d been too terrified to approach his parents about the breakdown, let alone ask them for cash.
The moral of that story? The car was held hostage in the shop for over two months. When Coy finally got called to pick it up, the vehicle broke down less than three miles into the drive home, leaving him stranded on the scalding Florida asphalt. Eventually, Roadside Assistance had to haul his sorry ass back to his thoroughly displeased parents. Ever since that betrayal, Coy decided that because people generally refused to admit their own incompetence, he would only rely on a trusted friend in absolute emergencies. Otherwise, he’d do it himself.
At the present moment, however, Hanbon's relentless complaining from the backseat was not helping the situation.
"Coy..!" she lamented, forehead pressed dead-weight against Anthony's shoulder. "This is so freaking sticky."
As if to demonstrate, she loudly peeled the bare skin of her thigh off the leather seat with a wet, Velcro-like shhhhack. Will let out a weak giggle from the passenger seat.
"It sounds like when you eat yogurt," he said, offering the observation with the distinct tone of a man who had never reached a conclusion in his entire life. "And, you know... squelch."
A heavy silence stretched after that. Not the jokingly awkward kind that usually followed Will's turns of phrase, but a thick, heat-induced weariness. Coy's hands were clammy against the steering wheel. After a few minutes of staring vacantly at the shimmering tarmac ahead, he checked his mirrors. His friends looked equally blank-faced and thoroughly cooked.
He then heard a sharp, irritated sigh over his right shoulder.
"Okay, so this is clearly not working out," Anthony stated with pragmatic stiffness. "The GoPro has been rolling for the past two hours and we have maybe five minutes of good footage. Will, you were the one who wanted the damn giant lollipop. By all accounts, you should be biting our heads off to get to it by now!"
"I'm sweating my balls off, dude!" Will shot back, looking genuinely affronted as he aggressively fanned his shirt collar. Hanbon muttered a soft, muffled 'ew' into the fabric of Anthony's polo.
"What do you want me to do? It's easy for you to say when your whole thing is just sulking and being judgmental!" Will continued, twisting around in his seat to glare backward.
Anthony spat out an irritated "Oh, fuck off!" before straightening up to meet the other man's gaze with narrowed eyes. "You're always speaking nonsense, Will. Just do that now so we can get the stupid video done and go home."
"Guys, stop it," Hanbon intervened, her voice carrying a rare, firm snap that immediately shut them down.
The silence returned, thickening in the stagnant air as the sun-baked scenery flew past. To be frank, Coy had felt the collective energy turn sour long before their road trip even started in the early afternoon. He probably should've seen the crash coming.
They had spent the morning trapped in the Goffice—or rather, they had splayed themselves across various office surfaces like melting popsicles, pointing desktop fans directly at their faces while staring miserably at a blank whiteboard— trying to come up with an idea. Any idea.
Hanbon had turned up hungover from a late night, looking a ghost-shade of pale but remaining as stubbornly committed to the shoot as her pounding head could handle. Will, who usually ran hot, was harshly knocked out by the New Jersey heatwave.
And Anthony had just been glum. It wasn't just a morning mood, either; he’d been flighty, defensive, and generally unapproachable for a few weeks now. He tended to have these periodic emotional winters, and Coy had figured no intervention was needed aside from a routine, tactical Hanbon check-in. Clearly, he had miscalculated.
After another ten minutes of driving, the heat inside the Toyota reached a tipping point where it ceased to be a physical sensation and became a psychological assault.
"Look," Coy said, his voice awkward, cutting through the thick tension. He flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror, catching Anthony’s stony glare and Hanbon’s flared hair. "The next exit is five miles out. There’s a turnaround."
Nobody answered for a full thirty seconds. The only sound was the pathetic, asthmatic wheeze of the dashboard vents.
"If we turn around," Anthony said, his tone sternly holding onto the last remnants of his businessman-mindset, "there's no way we can get the video ready by Friday. Or we'd have to explain to our fans why next week's upload is just two hours of us slowly marinating in our own juices."
"I will personally write a formal apology to the public," Will mumbled, his forehead now pressed against the cool-ish plastic of the passenger-side window. "I’ll sign it in blood. Or sweat. There's plenty of both."
Hanbon didn't lift her head from Anthony's shoulder, but she weakly raised a single thumb in the air. "I vote for survival. The Goffice has a freezer. We can put our heads in the freezer."
Anthony looked out the side window, his jaw working as he chewed on his frustration. For a second, Coy thought the man’s stubbornness would win out—that they’d end up driving all the way to some godforsaken roadside tourist trap just because they're desperate enough.
Maybe irresponsibly, Coy didn't train his eyes away from his friend's, searching for contact through the mirror. As if feeling the burn of it, Anthony met his gaze and held it, stubborn and challenging. They stayed like that —unmoving and unspeaking— for an indefinite amount of time. Maybe it was hours or maybe a few seconds. By the time the realities of driving forced Coy to look back at the road ahead, he had forgotten why he had even initiated eye contact in the first place. The only thing he'd filed to memory was the way Anthony's irises could melt from ice-grey to the baby blue of his childhood Gameboy Advance SP the exact moment he slightly deflated.
Anthony let out a long, easing breath that seemed to drain the last of his anger, leaving him looking less mad and just profoundly tired.
"Fine," Anthony muttered, slouching back down. "Turn around. This is stupid anyway."
Coy didn't wait for a second opinion. He hit the turn signal the second the green highway sign for an exit came into view. The moment the Toyota eased onto the off-ramp and looped back onto the highway, the collective blood pressure in the car seemed to drop ten points. The silence that followed wasn't the jagged, weaponized quiet from ten minutes ago; it was the soft, relieved hush of a retreat.
This felt good.
Will reached out and decisively slapped the power button on the GoPro mounted to the dashboard. The little camera let out a cheerful, three-tone beep as its red light died.
"Rest in peace, content," Will eulogized, finally pulling his face away from the window. He looked back at Anthony, the previous hostility entirely gone from his eyes, replaced by his usual hazy benevolence. "Hey. Sorry for saying your whole personality is sulking. You also have very beautiful eyes."
Coy secretly agreed.
Anthony let out a dry, involuntary snort, the corner of his mouth twitching upward against his will. "They are normal eyes. But thank you."
"And I'm sorry for saying 'ew' about your balls, Will," Hanbon croaked, finally sitting up straight and unsticking herself from Anthony. "Even though I do not need to know about them."
"Apology accepted," Will said magnanimously. Coy kept his eyes on the road, a small, private smile tugging at his lips. His hands were still sweaty on the steering wheel, and the air coming out of the vents was still barely a suggestion of a breeze, but the air inside the car suddenly felt a whole lot easier to breathe.
Anthony met Coy's eyes in the rearview mirror and gave a brief, tight nod—a silent acknowledgment that Coy had made the right call. His eyes did a little twinkling thing, like ice cracking.
Coy felt his stomach flip. This fucking heat.
"We're stopping at Chili's on the way back," Hanbon decreed, slumping sideways against the door panel. "And Coy is paying, because his car is an oven."
"Hey," Coy protested, though there was no weight to it. "The Toyota is doing her best."
"The Toyota is giving me a stroke," muttered Will, already fiddling with the radio to find a song they could all agree to suffer to. As the highway blurred past, heading back toward the familiar, air-conditioned sanctuary of their home, the heatwave outside didn't falter. They were empty-handed, in dire need of a shower, and entirely devoid of an idea for the week's video—but as Will finally found a cheesy 80s pop anthem and Hanbon began weakly humming along, Coy figured they’d manage to fix that, too. His eyes fought to trail back to the rearview mirror.
That night he dreamed of Gameboys and clouds.