ROAD TRIP

Clare woke suddenly and abruptly. For a moment she had no idea where she was and then she saw the rows of hills rising and falling as they fell away from the car window. A sign for Route 52 shot by and she remembered. They were making their way North West, up to Chicago, Illonois…to her father.

Clare glanced at her watch – 5 P.M, they'd been on the road five and a half hours – and then looked at Elijah. She shifted so that her stiff legs were tucked underneath her.

"Are you sure you don't want me to drive?"

A small smile tugged at the corner of Elijah's lips. He looked cool and utterly calm as usual – relaxed back into the seat, hands gripping the steering wheel firmly yet comfortably. "People with medical conditions aren't supposed to drive."

"It doesn't affect my driving skills."

"And what if you black out at the wheel?"

"I –" She stopped and pressed her hand to her forehead. "Okay. Fine. But you can't drive like this for twelve hours straight."

"I'm not. We're going to stay the night at Ohio."

She blinked. Something about that plan unsettled her but she didn't voice it aloud. "Sounds a plan."

A medical condition.

She'd lived normally all her years, and then two days ago she'd woken up with brain damage and couldn't remember her life. How did things like that happen? Why had that happened to her?

Blacking out was a lot like going to sleep. Like going to sleep and waking up again – except you knew that you'd been moving around and doing things. You come to, where were you? A hotel roof? An anonymous room? A forest floor? How long had you been there? How long had you blacked out for? It could be a few seconds, a few minutes – hours. Clare worried that one day, that time period would stretch to a life time, and she would be gone.

She touched the spot on her stomach where the bullet had torn into her chest – missing her liver by inches – and then ghosted her fingers over the side of the neck. How could you be shot, and not remember? How could you just remember the pain, and lying on a merciless, cold, concrete floor, bleeding out to death?

She stared out of the window to distract herself. It was winter, and the sky was already sluggish with dusk. "What did Sheriff Forbes and that cop tell you?"

He didn't look at her, just kept this eyes on the road in front of him. "What do you think they told me?"

"Something important that I'd like to know."

"What if it was?"

"What if it was what?"

"Something important?"

She smiled despite the infuriating answer. Elijah gave off this air of elegance. Of being educated at Cambridge or Harvard and of being utterly in control. It was inexplicable.

"Then I guess I'm getting out of the car right now," she said. "I don't like secrets."

"Don't be melodramatic."

"I'm serious – what did they tell you?"

His face tightened. He shot the cuffs of his suit to stall for time. Clare didn't take her eyes off of his face. "You don't want to know. You just want to know where you stand."

"With what?"

"This situation. If you're totally in control."

Clare thought she might already know the answer to that: she wasn't. Her decisions were being made for her. By that Sheriff. By Elijah. By a different part of herself she couldn't access. It was the strangest feeling, like being swept along in a rip-tide. All reaction and no action.

The after-work traffic was building up on the highway, the going was slow and it was almost another three hours before they reached Columbus. Elijah picked a place on the outskirts of the city, at a place called Trail Motel that had a seedy looking diner connected to it.

Clare didn't wait for Elijah, just got out the car and walked the flat expanse of the tarmac car park and went in.

Inside, there were synthetic ferns in each corner of the empty lobby; the white paint on the walls were peeling and there were brown splodges on the ceiling that looked like coffee stains.

Clare felt Elijah close behind her and grimaced, pausing by the door.

"Not exactly your style, is it?"

The receptionist was scrolling through her Facebook behind the desk. When Elijah and Clare approached, she looked up and stared. Neither of them were carrying any bags and Clare had discovered that she shared Elijah's affinity for tasteful, precise clothing, so not only was he wearing a suit, but she was also dressed in a knee-length dress of midnight blue. They didn't look like the types that stayed in cheap motels for the night.

"Do you have a room?" Clare asked, politely, taking charge.

"I got more than one," replied the receptionist. "How many do you want?"

"Tw-"

"One, if you would," interrupted Elijah. The receptionist stared at him once more, taking in his entire profile, before nodding. Clare stiffened but didn't argue. He wanted to keep an eye on her, she wasn't stupid. Somehow it felt like an insult.

"If I could just ask you to fill out your name and address here, sir…and your profession?" Clare was sure the last question wasn't standard procedure, but the receptionist was understandably quizzical in their purpose for traveling – certainly, Elijah's demeanor did not preclude that they were tourists wandering aimlessly across the east coast.

"I'm a historian," he said, signing her form with a few impatient scribbles.

The receptionist's eyes turned to Clare. "And your wife?"

"Archeologist," replied Clare, not bothering to correct her. She could feel Elijah's eyes on her, like a breath on the back of her neck.

The woman still didn't look convinced but handed over their room key anyway.

"How do you feel about food?" Elijah asked, barring Clare's way as she turned to head for the stairs.

She grinned. "Generally positive."

They decided to forgo the next door diner and he drove her into the city. It was dark, and the streets were filled with shadows and lights and tram-lines and candy-cane colors. They found a small but exclusive Italian restaurant and Clare once again found herself watching Elijah over her chicken-and-pesto-and-sun-dried tomatoes. He fit in better here, than he had in the motel.

"I don't think," she said, finally, taking a mouthful of wine, "that I've met anyone quite as polite as you."

"Polite?" he asked, less than radiant with joy.

"Respectful polite. It's a good thing." She looked around to see if they would be overheard. "It's not what you'd expect…from a vampire."

"You carry certain…traits with you, from your human life to your life as a vampire," he admitted. "Things are enhanced." Clare looked at him and found that she could easily imagine him as some French or English lord, with a sword and a title and a host of servants at his disposal.

She skewered some more meat onto her fork and chewed thoughtfully, glancing out the window. She was surprised to see bats swooping round in the dark outside under the glare of street lamps.

"Creepy," she muttered.

Elijah followed her gaze and raised an eyebrow. "Really? I quite like them. They remind me of when I was younger; they used to nest in our stables and would swoop down at you if you visited too early in the morning or too late at night. Curious, that they are so successful urban dwellers."

"You lived out in the countryside?"

"South West England. I believe the city built upon the land we lived on is called Bath, now."

"It must be strange, for your old life and footprints to be systematically erased behind you. Decrepit and failing with age as you stay eternally young."

"No odder than your experience of the loss of your own past."

"I guess."

She toyed around with her napkin for several seconds, making a swan; a hat; a boat, before standing from the table and excusing herself for the bathroom.

When Clare came back, she paused by the bar for a second, her gaze fixed on the TV behind it. She watched the screen as a man stood at a podium, giving a speech, and she felt the niggling certainty that she knew him. Was he a relative? A friend?

"Excuse me," Clare said, attracting the bartender's attention and struggling to conceal her excitement. "Who is that man? On the TV?"

The bartender looked at the screen and then at her as he cleaned out one of the glasses with a dish-cloth. "What?"

"The man on the TV," Clare repeated, impatiently. "Who is he?"

"Lady, that's the president." He looked at her carefully and suspiciously. "What's wrong with you? Have you been living under a rock?"

Clare felt her shoulders sink and the butterflies in her stomach still. "I have this condition," she explained, ruefully.

The man continued to watch her warily and she glanced once more at the screen and then turned round and went back to her and Elijah's table.

She was more shaken by the encounter than she realized, she discovered, abruptly. She felt sick, her brain deadened.

"I don't think I recognize the world around me," she said, slipping back into her seat opposite Elijah. "I don't think I recognize myself anymore."

"Of course you do," he dismissed, curtly, throwing his napkin back onto the table as he finished his meal. He signaled for the bill.

"No. I know the facts. I know who I was. But the facts are irrelevant with out the memories - what's the point in knowing I was an archeologist when I don't remember any of it? To me, I'm not an archeologist, because it never happened to me. The me now. I know who I was. I know I have a father. But how can I have a father that I've never met, that I've never known?"

"You'll know him tomorrow."

They left. When Clare checked her watch – something she'd found herself doing impulsively now, she'd developed an obsession with time and it's movement – she realized they'd only been in the restaurant forty minutes.

The night was relatively cool outside, and she found that goosebumps bloomed on her arms as they walked back down the street to the car. They walked side by side, past numerous other couples walking side by side. She folded her arms to try and contain as much body heat as possible.

"I could have just slipped off when I was in the lady's room," she said, the thought occurring to her suddenly. "I could have just left you sitting there."

He smirked, his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers. "I just paid for a lovely meal for the both of us, and that would be how you would have repaid me?"

"I could have had another black out. I wouldn't know that I was sneaking off."

The comment seemed to strike a chord with in him. The muscles in his jaw tightened. "It's a risk - an irritating one, admittedly - but one I can't eliminate."

They paused on a bridge over the Olentangy river. A police boat moved through the water, it's red and blue lights beautiful.

Clare breathed in the crisp, clear air for a moment, allowing herself to experience the noise of the city, that it was her that was experiencing it. After a while the cold became unbearable and her breath began to fog in front of her and they went back to the car and drove to the motel.

Their room was small, with an even smaller bed and a dingy bathroom. Elijah went out and bought her some pajamas and she slipped into them gratefully, not wanting to think about what she would have had to sleep in if he hadn't got them for her. She was too tired to take the tags off.

The raw glare of the vapor lamp outside penetrated the room through the threadbare lace curtains, turning it a bluish grey in the dark. One corner was bathed in gold: Elijah was stretched out on the bed with the lamp turned on next to him. If Clare squinted she could make out the book he was reading across the room.

"War and Peace. How is it?"

"Long."

She walked closer and sat on the left hand side of the bed on the turn-of-the-century chenille bedspread. "What's it about?"

"Why things happen the way they do."

She smiled and lay down on her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. "And why do thing's happen the way they do?"

The question seemed to grab hold of him for some reason. He tore his eyes away from the book and looked at her. She often found that brown eyes were never penetrating, but his somehow managed to be. "In my experience," he mused, "it's because of the usual human emotions: lust for power, greed, love…"

He hesitated, and Clare found that her rapidly beating heart filled the silence between them. She wasn't sure why she was so nervous until she voiced her question: "why did you help me?" she asked, very quietly. She rolled onto her side to face him more fully, red hair falling down her back. "Why did you come with me now?"

"You needed to see your father."

Clare swallowed heavily. "But I could kill you."

Saying it aloud was sickening. An admission of guilt. An acknowledgement that she was a murderer. Until she'd said those words, she had managed to convince herself that none of that was real, that that hadn't been her.

But it was her, and it was her body and she'd killed.

She suddenly realized that her cheeks were wet with tears and she diverted her gaze from Elijah.

"You won't kill me," she heard him say.

"You don't know that." Clare hiccupped, choking down a sob. "For God's sake, I don't know that."

He grabbed her chin, forcing her to look into his eyes. She was reminded dimly of the time he'd try to compel her. "You won't kill me," he repeated.

Very suddenly, he grabbed her by the throat – tightly enough that it was a struggle for her to breath – and rolled on top of her, gathering both her wrists in his other hand. She tried to move, but found she couldn't – she was utterly pinned by his body weight – and terror and fear and something akin to gratefulness and understanding mingled with in her. He was too strong. She couldn't fight back. She couldn't hurt him.

Their breathing mingled and his hand round her throat loosened and rested lightly against the side of her neck. "I don't want to hurt you," she gasped out, her breathing coming out sharply staggered thanks to her rapidly beating heart and his choke-hold and her tears.

She could feel his thumb brushing along the side of her throat at the pulse point.

"You won't."

She stared up at him and felt, for the briefest of moments, implicit trust.

He allowed her to hold on to the moment for a few more seconds and then he leaned down and kissed her hard.