Romance

by Scribes Stories · 6 min read · 2 views

The Long Way Round Genre: Romance Neither of them had planned to be stuck in the same rental car three years after their divorce, but the airline's cancelled flights and the town's single available vehicle had conspired against them, and now Elena sat in the passenger seat of a compact sedan beside her ex husband Marcus, both of them driving four hours to the same family wedding neither had wanted to attend alone. "This is genuinely the worst luck," Marcus said, adjusting the mirror for the third time in ten minutes. "You've said that already," Elena replied, staring resolutely out the window at the passing countryside. "Twice." "It bears repeating." They drove in tense silence for the first hour, the specific kind of silence that exists between two people who once knew each other's entire interior lives and now had to relearn how to occupy the same small space without either apologizing or arguing. It was Elena who finally broke it, mostly out of boredom, though she'd never admit that later. "Do you still take the scenic route everywhere," she asked, "or was that just a thing you did to annoy me?" "It was never to annoy you," Marcus said, sounding genuinely wounded. "I happen to think the scenic route is objectively better." "We were late to my sister's engagement party because of the scenic route." "We were on time. We were simply not early, which you have always confused for the same crime." Elena huffed something that was almost, against her will, a laugh. "You haven't changed." "Neither have you. You're still doing the thing where you sigh instead of just telling me you disagree." "I don't do that." "You've done it four times since we got in this car." She turned to look at him properly for the first time since they'd left the airport, something reluctantly fond creeping into her expression despite her best efforts to keep it out. "How is it possible we've been divorced three years and you still know exactly which of my noises means what?" "Some things don't uninstall just because the marriage ended," Marcus said, eyes carefully on the road. "I still know you take your coffee with too much milk and not enough courage to actually drink it black like a grown adult. Doesn't mean I want to be married to you again. Just means I paid attention for eleven years. Habits like that don't really leave." Something about the honesty of it, delivered without malice or agenda, loosened something in Elena's chest that had been tight since the airline first announced the cancellation. "I still hum when I'm nervous," she admitted. "You used to tease me about it." "You're humming right now," he said, glancing at her with the ghost of a smile. "Have been since we got on the highway." She hadn't noticed, and the realization made her laugh properly this time, surprised out of her carefully maintained composure. "This is deeply unfair. I was hoping to maintain some dignity for the next four hours." "Dignity was never really our strong suit," Marcus said. "Remember the wedding toast disaster." "Do not bring up the wedding toast disaster." "Your uncle still brings it up at every family gathering. I feel it's only fair I'm allowed to bring it up in the privacy of this rental car." They spent the next hour trading old stories, carefully, the way you handle photographs of a house you used to live in, fond and a little sad and surprised by how much detail you still remembered. The tension in Elena's shoulders eased incrementally with each mile, the old easy rhythm of their conversation returning despite three years of careful distance. "Can I ask you something," Marcus said, somewhere past the halfway point, voice more careful now. "Are you seeing anyone?" "No," Elena said, then, after a pause, "Are you?" "No." Another pause, longer this time, filled with the particular weight of a question neither of them had planned to ask today. "Do you ever think about what went wrong? Really wrong, I mean. Not the easy answer we gave everyone at the time." Elena considered this for a long moment, watching the countryside blur past. "I think we got so good at building a life together that we forgot to keep building us. Somewhere in there, you became my business partner and I became your event planner, and we stopped being the two people who actually fell for each other in the first place." "That's uncomfortably accurate," Marcus said quietly. "I've had three years to think about it," she said. "You get very honest when you've got nothing left to protect." "Do you regret it," he asked, "the marriage, I mean, not just how it ended." "No," Elena said, surprising herself with how quickly and how genuinely the answer came. "I regret how it ended. I don't regret loving you. Those feel like two very different things now, in a way they didn't three years ago." Marcus was quiet for a while, hands steady on the wheel, something working behind his expression. "For what it's worth," he finally said, "I still take the scenic route because somewhere along the way, taking the long way became the only time I let myself actually notice things. You used to tease me for it, but I think you were the one who taught me that, actually. Slow down. Look at things properly. I never really stopped doing it, even after." Elena felt something in her throat tighten, unexpected and warm. "Marcus." "I'm not asking for anything," he said quickly, glancing at her. "I just wanted you to know that some of what we built together, I kept. Even after. It didn't all get lost just because the marriage did." They arrived at the wedding forty minutes later than the direct route would have taken, having somehow ended up on the long scenic road anyway, neither of them quite remembering the exact moment they'd decided to take it. Elena's sister raised an eyebrow at their joint arrival, at the easy, careful warmth between two people who were supposed to be over each other by now. "How was the drive," her sister asked pointedly. "Long," Elena said, glancing at Marcus, who was watching her with an expression she hadn't seen directed at her in three years. "But we took the scenic route. Turns out I don't mind it as much as I used to." "Is that so," her sister said, clearly filing this information away for future use. "That's so," Elena agreed, and found, walking into the wedding beside her ex husband, that she was in absolutely no hurry to clarify exactly what that meant, not to her sister, and not, for the first time in three years, to herself either.