Of this, she is right, I see. I try to think of an excuse – any – to why I can't go, but the fact is, would June and Jeff even notice my absence? And if they did, shouldn't they be relieved even, to be able to carry out their evening in peace without me around?

Slowly, because I don't know if she is real still or because I can't remember how to use my muscles properly or both, I extend a hand to the car's door. To my surprise, my fingers come to rest gently on its handle instead of simply passing right through, and through them, the car's engine sends its soft vibrations up my arm, to my shoulders and chest. If this is a hallucination, I think, it's too visceral for me to ignore.

"Well, hurry up."

I do as I am told. It takes all my strength, but I'm able to pull and open the car door. I sit myself on the amber leather seats, instinctively pull the seatbelt across my chest. I try to close the door but fail to use enough force.

"You have to pull a little harder."

"Yeah," is all I say and try again. Once the door is securely closed, she pulls the shift knob down to drive, and we begin our ascent. Her music continues lowly in the background. It serves as nothing more than white noise to dull the silence, and soon, I can barely notice it, its harsh beats becoming as natural as birds singing.

Here in her car, I find myself in the center of her world. Something I've wanted for so long, but now that it's here, now that I'm living it, I realize that I am trespassing and have to remind myself as we drive that I'm allowed to be here, that I've been invited, that it was her idea even, not mine. It is as if I am an outlander, abruptly transported to a new country, one where I do not know the customs nor the language, and at any moment she will realize that I'm not supposed to be here, change her mind and throw me out on the street to continue my walk home alone.

Her car, it tells me secrets that I know she would never share with me out loud. She enjoys a good cigarette -- unfiltered based on the crushed boxes that occupy her floors. She likes to drive barefoot. When she gets in her car after a long day, she tosses her shoes to the backseats and adds a new pair of socks to the pile that grows on the mat by my feet. There are magazines whose pages have been crumpled and bent from mistreatment, small bottles of liquor which hide under her seats, a pair of pink panties stuffed in the compartment of the passenger-side door. Each of these is tied to an experience she has had in this car. For instance, I wonder what I was doing when she stuffed these panties here. Was I in my room, waiting for the sun to start going down, while she finished a quickie with some boy, parked in the forest just past her house, rushing to get back home before the nightly ritual began? What was I doing when this bottle landed on this ground? Putting myself to sleep thinking about her, while she snuck out her window to get drunk with her real friends? When did she buy these magazines? When was the first sock thrown to this ground?

"Sorry, I didn't clean up."

I wasn't sorry. I wanted to know these things about her. "That's alright."

"Ok." I expect her to say more, but she just changes the subject. "I have to warn you, my father is a little haughty."

I turn to look at her. As she speaks, the sun casts its light upon her. The white blonde of her hair is backlit into glowing gold, and when she turns to look at me, her long aurous strands are scattered into the air. Whey they fall, they do it softly and slowly, as if I were looking at her standing under water.

It's a beautiful sight to imagine us drifting in an ocean somewhere. In this daydream, there is no sound. To one side of me, off in the distance, there is land; to the other, only more ocean. In front of me, Saxa. Above us is the sun, the sun that paints the air with its golden dew. We're simply treading in the calm water until the arrival of a wave. Saxa dives under its crest, and I, thoughtlessly, follow suit. I find her under the water, clothes and hair immune to the command of gravity. She's so careless and so lovely. I watch her for some time, but soon, I must return to the surface as I'm out of air. Saxa stops me. Just breathe, her lips read, bubbles of air escaping from her lungs. Irrational as it is, I open my mouth, expand my chest, and to my surprise, the breathing, it's effortless. As another wave passes, we are carried by its current; it lifts us up and pushes us ever so slightly towards the shore. But we're so lost in the uplift that we forget about the riptide, a silent siren pulling us deeper and further away from the land, without us ever knowing, until it's too late.

"It means, like, cocky." She must have confused by silence for ignorance.

"No, I know," and this is not a lie. I do know what it means. A client of Atwood Realty used it once to describe my mother, and she complains about it regularly. ("Haughty? Me? Haughty! The woman wouldn't know haughty if it bit her in the ass!") "Why do you say that?"

She doesn't really answer directly my question. "Just, don't be offended if he doesn't talk. Sometimes it's because he doesn't feel comfortable with his English. Sometimes he just doesn't want to, I guess. It's not personal."

What a nice idea, the man who is self-conscious of his English. As powerful and grand as he was in his home country, here he is just a man who is flawed in his own abilities, who struggles with his own feeling of strength. "That's alright. I don't speak much either, sometimes."

"That's a shame, Jaime," she says. It sounds so nice when she says it, too. My name being spoken on her lips, so calmly so confidently, as if it is the thousandth time. You know me, Saxa. "You should be able say whatever you want to say."

There are a million things I want to say. For starters, she's wrong. It's not that easy to just speak your mind. On top of that, I don't think anyone really cares to hear what I have to say. Most certainly not her, who has lived a life full of experiences far more interesting than any topic I could provide. I want to tell her that I don't like listening to myself speak, that it sounds fragile and subdued, like I've hidden an apology after every word. I want to tell her --

"Like right now. Just say it." She darts her head towards me then back towards the road, her golden hair ever swimming in the air around her.

She keeps cutting me off while I'm trying to think. I can't say what I want to say if I can't decide what it is first. "I don't speak because I don't want to. That's all." A plausible decision.