Once we’re in my car, we just drive. For hours, we just drive, and even though I try to stop at Wal-Mart or something so I can buy Ruby shoes, pants, maybe a toothbrush, she won’t let me.

So I take her hand and just keep going. I don’t have a destination in mind, just take the interstate to a highway to a four-lane road to a two-lane road. We pass through quaint little Southern towns, we pass through fields and fields of soybeans and woods so thick it’s like being in the jungle.

And I don’t let go of her hand. I’ve never been here before, not physically or emotionally, and I have no idea what she needs from me but I know I’m not letting go, not if she doesn’t want me to.

We drive into the mountains, where the trees are half-bare and half-covered in red and orange leaves. When the wind blows, they swirl around my shitty car, and it’s actually kind of beautiful.

At last, Ruby takes a deep breath, then exhales. For the first time in hours she takes her hand out of mine and shifts in her seat, stretching, rubbing her face.

“Do you mind if we stop so I can use the bathroom?” she asks.

“Do you mind if we get you shoes first?” I ask.

Ruby looks down at her feet.

“Oh, God,” she says, and starts half-laughing. “I don’t even have shoes on. Jesus, Gabriel, this wasn’t the plan.”

We’re coming up on a little town, and I turn off the main road and into the downtown area. At one end there’s a drug store, and I stop there, go in, and manage to find her plastic flip-flops. After she uses the bathroom, she wants to get back into the car but I talk her into lunch at a barbecue place where I order at the counter and we eat at picnic tables out back.

“Where are we?” she finally asks, picking up a hush puppy and examining it. She sounds far away somehow, but I don’t think I can blame her after the morning she’s had.

“North Carolina, somewhere,” I say. “We passed the state border but I haven’t really been paying attention, I’ve just been driving. Someone didn’t want me to stop.”

She looks at me, looks at the hush puppy, and looks at me again.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t start again,” she says, her green eyes practically boring into me. “I was afraid if we stopped anywhere near Huntsburg I’d start thinking that I’d made a mistake and I’d want to go back.”

I take her other hand in mine.

“And I don’t want that,” she says, her voice low and quiet and intense. “But it felt like I could, like when I walked out of there I might just go home again instead of moving on, and I was afraid that I’d have a moment of weakness or something and I’d go back because at least I know what to do when I’m there.”

My heart feels sticky in my chest as she’s speaking, like it’s hung up on something inside me. I think I get why she’d feel this way, like she might end up going back whether it’s what she really wants or not, because it’s what she knows.

But if she went back I’d be wrecked. Just fucking wrecked, the kind of broken I don’t know if I’d ever get over.

“You didn’t,” I say softly. “And now we’re in another state completely, and you’re here, and I’m here, and it’s gonna be fine.”

I’ve got no way of knowing that. There’s a few thousand dollars in my savings account, but that’s it, and I very much do not have a job at the moment. I believe it, though, because I can tell that she needs me to.

Ruby looks at our entwined hands on the table, and for a second I don’t know if she’s going to laugh or cry.

Then she laughs, biting her lip a little like she’s trying not to.

“I don’t even have a toothbrush,” she says. “I swear this wasn’t the plan, Gabriel. The plan included a toothbrush.”

“What about shoes?” I tease.

“And shoes and a change of underwear,” she says, still smiling and looking down, laughing like she can’t believe this. “I had them shoved in my purse. I thought he’d want to parade me in front of the cameras, somewhere in public, and I could just leave.”

I raise our locked hands to my lips, my elbow propped on the table, and I kiss her hand. There are other people scattered around the barbecue shack’s outdoor area, and they’re probably staring, but I kiss her hand and couldn’t care less.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and kiss her hand again. “The plan worked,” — hand kiss — “You’re gone,” — kiss— “We’re here,” — kiss— “And your barbecue is getting cold.”

She laughs again and it feels like sunrise, like nothing else could go wrong, at least today.

“Priorities,” she teases me.

“I’m just saying, we can talk about what we do next while we’re eating,” I say.

We eat. We don’t talk about what we’re going to do next, because instead she tells me about the past four days, about how one of the new guards sometimes farted so loud outside her door that it woke her up, how another one seemed terrified of making eye contact with her.

“I think he thought I could take his soul or something,” she says, reflectively. We’ve both finished eating, and now we’re just sitting here, elbows on the rough wooden table, the occasional cloud passing over the sun.

“Can’t you?” I ask.

“I didn’t try,” she admits. “Though I’m not sure why I’d want it. What do you do with souls, anyway?”

“Store them in translucent white rocks, and... give them to Satan?”

“You want to know something?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-six years of fighting a war against the devil, and I still don’t know what he does with souls. I think he eats them?”

“I don’t think I’d want my soul to get eaten,” I offer. “Sounds unpleasant.”

Ruby puts her chin in one hand, looking right at me. The sun hits her, lighting up her blonde hair, and right then she looks like a pleased cat in a sunbeam.

“You know, for the past six months I’ve done everything wrong,” she says slowly. “I got divorced, I disrespected my parents, I lied, I drank, I fornicated —”

I grin, and Ruby rolls her eyes.

“—all these things that I always thought would put me on the miserable path straight to Hell, but I don’t think I am. This doesn’t really feel like the path to Hell.”

I look around: sunshine, barbecue stand, quaint town, and best of all, Ruby sitting across from me and for once not looking over her shoulder to see who’s listening.

Yeah, it doesn’t feel like the path to Hell at all.

“I’m not gonna pretend to be a theologian,” I say, “but Hell might be more for people who try to control their daughters’ lives and lock them up when they can’t.”

“But at least he hasn’t read Harry Potter,” she says, a wicked, ironic smile starting around her eyes. “Shit, I left that behind too.”

“That we can fix,” I say. “At least some problems have easy answers.”

That gets another smile out of her. After a little while we leave the barbecue stand, and I talk her into taking a walk and finding somewhere to get ice cream.

We eat it sitting on a bench, in the park, talking about the size of the spiders in Afghanistan and the time that Ruby got poison ivy in her eye as a kid. She doesn’t mention getting back in the car and driving further and neither do I.

For the rest of the day we do nothing but wander around the town, hand-in-hand, talking about nothing. After a few hours of that she leans against me as the sun dips low over the buildings, and I feel like the dragon-slayingest white knight of all time.

* * *

“Y’all on your honeymoon?” the woman behind the desk of the Conifer Motor Lodge asks when we check in, later that night.

“No, just passing through,” I tell her.

She glances at my ring finger, and I swear her mouth tightens a little in disapproval.

I manage not to roll my eyes.

“We get lots of newlyweds heading on through to Gatlinburg or the Smokies,” she says. “Gorgeous place to go for a honeymoon. Y’all thinking about getting married?”

Holy shit, this lady is nosy.

“We haven’t been dating very long,” Ruby volunteers, turning her sweetest smile on the woman.

“Well, the mountains around here are a great place to propose,” the woman goes on, writing my name down carefully in a notebook. There’s no computer behind the desk, just stacks of paper, receipts, and a credit card machine that might be older than me.

“I heard we missed the really good autumn colors by a few weeks,” Ruby says, smoothly changing the subject. “Any idea where we should go to see the last of it?”

Just like that, she woman whips out a map and a pen and starts giving us obscure directions like turn before where the Johnson’s old outhouse used to be or if you go past a big graveyard, not a little one, a big one, turn around and look more closely for the turn ‘cause you missed it.

Ruby smiles and nods through the whole thing, and then we finally get to turn and leave, map and room key in hand.

“Was she for real?” I ask as soon as our room door is closed.

Ruby just laughs.

“You’re just lucky she didn’t start asking us what we wanted to name our kids,” she says.

“That’s not normal,” I say.

“Well, I’ve got more than enough experience in avoiding conversations I don’t want to have,” she says, and stands on her tiptoes to give me a quick kiss. “You gotta control the narrative, Gabriel.”

I just laugh, my hands drifting down her back.

“How about you control the narrative and I crash cars through gates?” I tease.

“Are we still on that?”

“I almost did it.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“I just figured that if I got arrested, which I would have, then you’d be barefoot on the sidewalk with no one to rescue you at all. Otherwise I might have.”

Ruby rests her head against my chest, shoulders shaking with laughter.

“Thanks for your self-control,” she says.

“No promises for next time,” I answer.

After a little while, she takes a shower while I watch stupid television. I nearly ask if she wants company, but I have a feeling that after being watched for a week, she might also enjoy being left alone for once.

When she comes out, skin warm and hair wet, she crawls into the bed next to me. We’re both half sitting up, her head nestled against my shoulder, and neither of us says a word as we watch some show about people who have to survive in the wild to win money.

I don’t do anything. I’m halfway hard just looking at her, because of course I am, but I just keep my arm around her and sit there quietly, just being with her.

Because right now, I can feel the hours in front of us stretching into days, weeks, and months where she’s next to me. Tomorrow morning I’m going to wake up and her head’s going to be on that pillow right there, so right now we can just sit here, snuggling, knowing that there’s gonna be more time.

Ruby’s asleep before the first commercial break. She barely wakes up when I get up, take off my clothes, brush my teeth, and turn off the lights.

I curl myself around her, and she relaxes into me, murmuring something I can’t understand. I fall asleep almost instantly.