Chapter 178: I Love You

Chapter 178: I Love You
Del woke up to the sound of the road underneath them and Oliver humming something.
She didn't open her eyes right away. She stayed where she was, reclined slightly in the passenger seat, her body still warm and loose, carrying the faint echo of his fingers and the things he'd done with them thirty minutes ago.
She opened her eyes.
The road was flat and long ahead of them. The sky was doing its enormous Texas thing. Oliver was driving with one hand, the other resting on his thigh, and he looked relaxed in a way.
She sat up slightly and adjusted her seat.
"Hey," Oliver said, glancing at her. "Good nap?"
Del looked at the road. "How far?"
"Forty-five minutes. Maybe less."
Del looked out the window. The landscape was the same as it had been for hours, the same as it had been for days.
"What did you want to be?" she asked suddenly.
Oliver frowned slightly. "What?"
"Before any of this." She looked at him. "When you were like really young, what did you want to do or become?"
"I don't remember," Oliver then said after a moment.
"Nothing?"
"No. I mean, I drew. You already know that. But I don't remember wanting to be anything.”
Del thought about a boy who had never gotten to the part where you figure out what you want because someone had already decided what you were going to be before you had a chance to get there.
"That's sad," she said.
"Is it?"
"Yeah, Oliver. It is."
He looked at her briefly. "I've never really thought about it like that."
"I know you haven't."
He looked back at the road. "It just was what it was. My father had a vision for how the world worked, and I was part of that vision, and by the time I was old enough to have my own version of things, his version was already installed,” he said it simply, without self-pity. "I don't feel sorry about it."
Del looked at him and felt something move through her chest that she hadn't been expecting. It was something closer to grief, but for a person who had never gotten to exist. The version of Oliver who might have kept drawing might have become someone entirely different.
She wanted to say something about that. About the man, he might have been. But there wasn't a way to say it that didn't sound like she was trying to save him, and she wasn't.
She looked at Oliver. Something in his face opened up, and for a moment, he looked like the version of himself she'd met in the coffee shop, the one who had sat down across from a girl who didn't want to talk and had made her talk anyway.
"I'm glad you were there in that cafe that day, Del," he said.
She looked at the road ahead. The guardrail ran along the right side now, a long metal strip following the curve of the highway where the ground dropped away on the other side. She could see it stretching out ahead of them.
Oliver briefly looked at her.
"I love you," he said.
Del looked at him.
"I love you, too," she said.
She meant it. And she didn't mean it. Both of those things were true at the same time, and this was the last real thing she was going to give him, and she knew it as she was giving it.
Oliver smiled. Not the charming one he used on people. The real one. The one she'd only seen a handful of times.
He turned back to the road.
Del looked at the guardrail again.
She had less than an hour.
Then the guardrail came closer. And the road curved.
And Del made her decision. She was not crossing that border. She would rather be dead than cross that border and start a life on the other side of it that she hadn't chosen and couldn't leave and would have to spend however many years pretending she'd agreed to.
She'd rather be dead.
Suddenly, her hand moved to the wheel, grabbed it, and yanked it hard to the left.
Oliver's reaction was immediate. His whole body snapped into it, hands slamming back onto the wheel, trying to pull it right again.
"Del, what the hell are you doing?" His voice was loud with pure shock. "Del!"
She didn't answer. She held the wheel and pulled. He pulled back.
They struggled over the wheel with the car doing eighty and the road narrowing into a curve, and another vehicle somewhere ahead was blasting its horn in a long, continuous sound that filled the whole car.
Oliver was considerably stronger than she was, and he could have hit her. She knew that. His right elbow was right there; he could have driven it into her face or her shoulder, and she would have let go reflexively. He could have ended this in two seconds. He was built for exactly this kind of situation, and there was no version of this where she was a physical match for him.
But he didn't hit her. He didn't even try.
He just fought her for the wheel with both hands while shouting her name.
Then, the car went sideways.
The tires screamed, and the wheel kicked hard in both their hands, and then the guardrail came up on the right side, and the impact was nothing like she expected. It was a sound that went through the floor of the car and through the seat and through her spine all at once.
A crunch of metal meeting metal, and then the world tilted.
The car went over the edge of the guardrail at an angle, the front dropping and the back lifting, and then it stopped. The guardrail had caught the undercarriage on Oliver's side and held it there, half on the road and half over the drop below.
Del's ears were ringing. The horn from the other vehicle had stopped.
She moved her arms and legs. They worked. She looked at the windshield. Through the cracked glass, she could see the road at a wrong angle and below it, through Oliver's side, nothing. Just the drop.
She turned her head.
Oliver was pinned. The front of the car had compressed inward on his side, the dashboard pushing back and down into the footwell, and his legs were somewhere in that and not coming out. There was blood moving down the left side of his face from somewhere in his hairline. His hands were still on the wheel.
He looked at her.
"Del," he said.