Free Rendezvous by Dusty Miller Page B

reality.
    The logic was simple
enough.
    Familiarity might breed contempt, but
she didn’t think so. Or, she could quit and never do it again. She
could go back to the old way. She could go back to being alone all
the time. The trouble was, she didn’t want to, and so a weekend in
Burlington it was to be.
    She had about a three-hour drive
ahead, but starting at this hour, traffic would be light until she
got close to the Big Smoke. The night was dark, the road was clear
and she had everything she needed in the rented silver Toyota truck
she drove. After pulling over and changing out of the grey nun’s
habit and into something mainstream but unremarkable, she went on,
feeling like a whole new woman. The clothes were like a suit of
armour or a whole new skin.
    Heather could make the shoe store stop
and still get to Burlington by one a.m. or so. She would buy
something that looked good on sheer impulse. It was her birthday
and she had been feeling a bit down lately.
    You could get away with anything if
you were prepared to lie about it. A bit of a blush and a stammer
might be just the thing.
     
    #
     
    “ Aw…shit.”
    If the first part of her trip afforded
a little too much time to think, coming in from the east and going
through Toronto required her full attention. Her wandering thoughts
and persistently racing heart subsided as she refocused. The lanes
were many, the drivers fast and seemingly erratic until she had
driven a ways. Ramps going off from both left and right sides of
the road were unfamiliar to Heather. She was going from a town of a
few thousand to one of four and half million, and that was a big
difference.
    Heather reached over and turned the
radio down, as much as she liked Q107, which was apparently one of
Toronto’s dominant rock stations. She wondered what a submissive
one sounded like, but that was just being catty. She could still
smile at herself, so things weren’t that bad. It was just the sheer
speed and distraction, the complexity. Everything in life had been
happening too fast lately.
    That included Braden. That whole trip,
after a lifetime of fantasizing and months of planning, their trip
had happened almost on a whim. She still hadn’t fully integrated
it. She thought about it endlessly, of course, and it still made
her hot. Otherwise why do it again? Braden had no real rights, no
matter what her fantasy said. Braden didn’t even have Heather’s
phone number. It was blocked and protected. She could change her
phone number or close down her internet accounts in a heartbeat and
that would be it. No more contact. The choice was all
hers.
    The last time down here,
twenty-something years ago, it was her mom and dad swapping the
driving. They always planned to go through at four a.m. in a bid to
beat traffic on the way to one Civil War battlefield after another.
Half her childhood, it seemed, was spent in the back of a car, or
traipsing across one boring national monument or another. Her old
man loved the Civil War. Much of her youth was gone from memory.
But that one was strong enough to persist.
    The tension built in her neck and
across the shoulders. She found a lane that seemed sedate and
comfortable compared to the NASCAR drivers all around. It’s not
like she hadn’t driven at speed before. The problem was that
everyone was doing it and they all seemed a lot more comfortable
with it than she was. A small red car dove across in front from the
left, narrowly missing a large white one attempting to do the
opposite after coming up fast from behind on the right.
    “ Shit. What the blazes…”
The signs, hanging over the road on the reflective green boards,
went by inexorably, one by one and in clumps of three and four,
sometimes more.
    The sheer reading along this stretch
was like a screen-play. They sure jammed a lot of information into
a very short space. It required interpretation, which was just what
she didn’t have time for. She was looking for the 403. The map
indicated she could