ficlets

Four o'clock in the morning and JC's eyes were so road-fatigued that he couldn't tell if the lines stretching out before him were white or yellow. He rubbed his hand over his face and sang along with the Counting Crows on the CD player, antiphonal harmonies, deliberately harsh and haunting.

"You know," Chris said, conversationally, "you can time how fast you're going by the lines on the road. Ten feet of white, ten feet of nothing. Tick, tick, tick."

"Yeah? How fast we going?" JC put his feet up on the dashboard and pressed his toes against the glass. The windshield fogged from his body heat. He dangled one hand out the window and thought of clean white sheets, of waking up in the same city two days in a row and being able to turn his face over and let the pillow swallow it again.

Chris's fingers tightened over the steering wheel and he bit back a yawn. "It's easier to just look at the dashboard. Seventy-eight sometimes feels like thirty."

"It all depends."

"On?"

"Whether you're running towards something, or running away from it."

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