Love at First Fight - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Nineteen

Alice was asleep on Luke's shoulder.

Mom and Macey were up front, navigating their way through the sun streaked countryside. Matt and Scout sat just behind them, not looking at all pleased by the fact that they had been dragged away from their time together at the safe house. That left only three more seats for three more butts. Luke, Alice, then myself, in that order, and Alice looked awfully comfy over there, drooling on his shoulder.

One of the many advantages to pursing a life in the covert arts is that you get to travel. One of the disadvantages? You usually have to travel in really weird ways.

With the Gathering on our tail, we couldn't just book a flight for Rome and call it good. No siree. We had flown on three different planes, landed in Austria, hiked a mile to a small town with a sparsely-known name, purchased a minivan from a pair of farmers who seemed to own a dubious amount of goats, and then started our drive towards Rome.

It was a very long drive.

It felt even longer when Luke looked at me like that.

After about two hours in, I realized that he wasn't going to stop looking at me like that, so I did my best to ignore him. Instead, I watched the mountains and the hills roll past our window. I watched the construction barrels flash bright orange, creating a visual beat that I could lock into. Everything seemed to be moving too fast.

By hour five, the scene outside of my window took on a newfound regal air. Every window in the city looked like it belonged on a church and there were more archways than I'd ever seen in my life. It was a place made up of stone, and stolen time, the whole city radiating from one, golden bell tower, lit up against the falling sun.

"Verona," said Scout.

Matt smiled at him. "The city of love."

"The city of tragedy," I muttered, but either no one heard me or no one was willing to entertain my gloomy thoughts surrounding Shakespeare's most famous star-crossed lovers.

We stopped in the city for a pee-break. A much needed pee-break, if the way Alice ran across the square was any indication. There were enough tourists in the area that Mom gave us all the green light to step out and stretch. I think that she was probably just tired of driving—which was fair, considering the fact that we had been in the car for five hours so far and the upholstery still smelled faintly of goats milk—and she just wanted the chance to hand the keys off to someone else.

Macey was the first in line, but she claimed to be too jetlagged to drive. Matt was next, but he said he had a headache, which meant that Scout would be sitting in the back with him. No one considered letting Alice drive, which left it up to Luke or myself.

Luke grabbed the keys first.

We packed ourselves into the car, sardines in the can. By the time we took off, the moon held it's place in the evening sky, translucent and pink, waiting for the sun to fully retire before it came in and stole the spotlight. I sat shotgun, because everyone else had explicitly stated that they planned on sleeping the rest of the way and Luke needed a navigator.

I, on the other hand, never slept. Might as well put the insomnia to good use.

Stars began to dot the heavens and I got to thinking about lovers and their destinies. I knew that the stars had no alignment with our lives. I knew that. Hot balls of gas that, at the end of the day, had nothing to do with horoscopes or fate, and yet it still felt so impossible to look up and feel indifferent. Stars called to humans, and a part of me wondered if there was a reason for that.