Deep End

She comes across the parking lot with a neon orange duffel bag slung diagonally across her body, a lime green backpack looped loosely over one shoulder, and a rather non-descript brown leather messenger bag dangling from her other shoulder. He raises an eyebrow at her as he raises the hatch of his SUV and reaches to take the backpack from her hand to lift it into the trunk.

“My luggage never gets lost in the airport.” She tells him, tossing the blinding orange duffel bag haphazardly into the back of his car. She points accusingly at his overly large black bag, adorned with a suitably glaring Penguins logo.

“Like that’s really so much better?” she challenges and he concedes with a half shrug and a nod.

She’s so short that she has to grab a hold of the handle in the doorframe, jump a little and sort of throw herself into the passenger seat of his car. It’s not at all graceful, but she laughs as she struggles to slide her way into the middle of the seat. Bridget had always insisted that Kris help her into the car, lest she look foolish. Skylar doesn’t seem to care, in fact she has already slapped on her seatbelt and pulled off her runners to pull her feet up onto the seat and sit cross-legged.

By the time he shuts the hatch and climbs into the driver’s seat, she is already fiddling with the radio, settling on an easy rock station and turning it down low to background noise.

“You don’t think they saw me getting my bags from the bus do you?” she says suddenly, turning her body to face him as he turns his key in the ignition. “I mean, that would look kind of weird wouldn’t it?” He is already searching the parking lot for Adam’s car.

“I don’t see their car.” He tells her, “They must be parked around the other side.”

Sure enough, when they pull out of the spot and move around to the front of the building to exit to the road, a Red Envoy pulls out of a spot and slides in behind them with a friendly honk. Kris beeps back and Skylar turns to him with a grin he can’t quite interpret.

“Let the games begin.” And he pulls out onto the road.

----

“So,” she speaks again before they reach the end of the block, “I know you’re Kris and you know I’m Skylar, but other than that I think we’re kind of in the dark on each other.” She pauses, waiting for him to pick up on something. He turns onto the freeway on ramp and nods absently.

“Well, I’m pretty sure that generally people who are in relationships know more about each other than first names.” She elaborates for him, “So we should probably work on that.”

“I know you are Canadian.” He smiles, “But where from exactly? You do not sound French.”

“Ontario. Sleepy little town with a sleepy little name – Lion’s Head, population 500.” She leans forward to pull her hair into a high, messy ponytail. In his peripheral vision he tries to catch all the colours of her hair – it’s coffee and caramel and butterscotch.

“Very sleepy.” He says, “500 people? Do you all know each other?”

“Pretty much.” She confirms with a laugh, tugging her ponytail tight, “You’re from Quebec, right?” He hums a ‘yes’.

“Do you still live in Lion’s Head? Is that where you were visiting Pittsburgh from?” he finds that he genuinely wants to know and he likes how easily things seem to be flowing between them. When she speaks, it even distracts him from checking the rearview mirror every three seconds to see if Bridget and Adam are still following along.

“Um, sort of.” She answers, “For the past four years, I’ve spent most of the year at school in Rhode Island. I go to Brown,” she elaborates when he raises a questioning brow, “or went to Brown I guess. I just graduated. I’m back in Lion’s Head for now, but I’m not sure how long that will last. But it’s always going to be home base, you know?”

“Brown is very impressive.” He says first then, “Your family still lives in Lion’s Head?”

“The whole town is my family. You played in the Quebec junior league right? So no collegiate hockey for you?” he is impressed her with knowledge, especially because he gets the feeling like she knows because she enjoys the game, not because she enjoys the players.

“You are right.” He confirms, “I played junior, then spent some time in the AHL before I got called up.”

“Good call.”

“So if you just graduated, you are how old? 22?” he makes an educated guess.

“I’m 20 actually.” She corrects, “I graduated high school a couple years early.” She explains when she sees his brow wrinkle in confusion, “So I went to university earlier than most, which means I graduated earlier than most.”

“Now that is very impressive. Are you a member of MENSA?” he laughs.

“Actually,” she grimaces, “I took the test once as a joke, so I was actually a card-carrying member for like a year, but then my membership expired.”

“No way!” he barks a laugh.

“You better watch it.” She warns, “I’ll get my membership back and take you down. The members of MENSA are widespread and powerful, I probably have all kinds of connections.”

He briefly lifts both hands off the wheel in surrender.

“So why were you in Pittsburgh?” he asks and he can practically feel the mood in the car evaporate. Everything about her tightens and coils protectively inward.

“Just a thing.” She says dismissively, “Seed?” she rips open the bag rather violently and offers it to him in a blatant attempt to change the subject. He shakes his head no, but he is wise enough not to push so he does consent to change the subject.

“What did you go to school for?”

“I have BA with a concentration in literary arts.” Again, he looks confused, “Basically, I wrote a lot of fiction and read a lot of books.”

“So you are a writer?”

“I like to think so.”

“Have you ever published anything?” he wonders what she writes about. If her writing is as engaging as her presence, it is something he will have to read.

“A few pieces, short stories mostly. But I just signed a deal a few months ago to publish a book.” Her smile gets so big he is reminded of the little kids he sees pressing their noses up against the glass during warm-ups at every NHL game he has ever played.

“You will have to tell me the title.”

“Only if you get me tickets to a game.”

“Deal.”

“So you and Bridget, what happened there?” she asks, tossing a handful of sunflower seeds in her mouth.

“Just a thing.” He mimics her dismissive phrase from earlier. She regards him silently for a moment while she swallows the seeds in her mouth. Then she decides to be wise herself and abruptly starts talking about something else.

“Chocolate or vanilla?” She asks. He taps his fingers absently on the wheel and grins. “Hey, no thinking in the question game. You have to answer the first thing that comes to your mind.” She demands, poking his upper arm, “Chocolate or vanilla?”

“Chocolate.”

“Black or yellow?” and he can tell that she is proud of herself for that one.

“Yellow.” He is enjoying this game, but he wants to be on the asking side of things, “Green
or orange?”

“Orange.”

They go on in this back and forth way until he knows that her favourite flavour of ice cream is rocky road, her biggest fear is snakes, she got detention once in third grade for punching a boy in the nose after he put sand down her shirt and Christmas is her favourite holiday. She knows that his favourite colour is blue, he likes comedies and horses, he hates wearing socks in the summer and if ever does allow himself to splurge, it is always McDonald’s fries with a chocolate milkshake.

He pulls off the road several hours after the sun has dipped below the horizon. The road is starting to curve before his tired eyes, but he won’t ask her to take over. Instead, he pulls into the parking lot of the first motel he sees and figures it will be good enough. He is too exhausted in too many different ways to care about where they stay tonight, so long as it has a bed he can fall into.

“They only have one room left.” Skylar tells him over her shoulder after he has locked the car, caught up with Bridget and Adam and followed her into the lobby. “And,” she turns around to face them, “he says there’s some kind of concert or convention or something in town, so pretty much everything in town is booked solid all weekend.”

She tries to keep the incredulous look off her face. Fate or karma or whatever higher being does or does not exist in the world must have it out for them because there is no other explanation for this luck.

Kris really doesn’t want to sleep in the car and he definitely doesn’t want to drive another
town over to find alternate sleeping arrangements.

“How many beds?” Bridget leans around Skylar to ask the desk clerk. This time Skylar cannot stop her eyes from widening.

“Two.” The clerk answers shortly, tapping in an annoyed way at his keyboard.

“Well, there you go. We’ll just room together.” She turns to eye the group, looking entirely satisfied with her solution. “That’s okay, isn’t it?” and the look in her eyes when she turns to Skylar and Kris is almost daring contradiction.

“That’s fine.” Skylar says at the same time as Kris forces the words “No problem” past his lips.

Bridget and Adam retreat to the car to get their bags while Kris hands his credit card over to the bored desk clerk.

“Are you sure...” he starts, turning to Skylar, but she cuts him off.

“You have seriously got to stop asking me that question.” She tells him as she regards a bowl of mints sitting on the desk, “If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t.” She says definitively and the look in her eyes say this will be the last time he asks her.

The clerk hands over two room keys and Skylar decides against taking a mint and follows Kris back out into the night sky.

“And so the plot thickens.” She says in her best evil sorceress voice as they meander across the parking lot to grab their own bags.