Indigo Road Read Online Free Page A

the road
again?” Alex asked, turning on his side to face me. Our eyes locked
and my breath caught in my throat.
    I yawned once
more. “Probably a good idea.” I paused and listened to the noises,
or lack thereof, coming from outside. “It’s quiet here, can we
leave the door open for the breeze?”
    Alex sat up and looked out the small
curtained window. “There’s no one around, I can’t see why not.” He
lay back down next to me.
    I fluffed the
pillow under my head and turned on my side, facing my best friend
and the person who would be my yearlong travel partner. “We don’t
need anything, do we? I mean, we could live here and want for
nothing.”
    Alex looked back at me, his sleepy blue eyes
filled with warmth. “I have everything I want right here.”
    I was thinking the exact same thing as sleep
took me.
     
     
    WE DIDN’T
travel much farther after our midmorning nap, and although I
couldn’t say exactly where we were, I knew we’d crossed the state
line into Illinois. I knew this only because while I was driving,
Alex ordered me to pull over so he could take a photo of the Welcome to Illinois sign. I asked why he wanted the photo. “So I can
put it on the blog. ” He said this like I knew what he was talking about.
Apparently kitting out Maude wasn’t the only thing he’d been doing
in the week before we left. We were now the proud owners of a
travel blog, which Alex intended to update whenever we hit a spot
with free WiFi. I saw an awful lot of Starbucks in my near
future.
    After lunch,
we drove for about half an hour until we saw an exit sign for a
campground, and because we were still shattered from the restless
night before, we stopped. Our only deadline was to be in San Diego
for Christmas, so it didn’t matter how many miles we drove. That
was the best thing about being on the road like this—if we wanted
to stop we could and if we didn’t, then we didn’t. If we wanted to
head south and spend a month in the Texas summer, we could. But we
weren’t stupid, Texas could wait for winter. The sense of freedom
was liberating, and having Alex with me, I felt we could do
anything.
    The
campground we stopped at wasn’t busy, just a few tents set up
around a small lake. Alex made a fire, grabbed a small frying pan
from the overhead cupboards, and made us grilled cheese for dinner.
And it was the best grilled cheese ever. It tasted of freedom.
    After
we had eaten ,
as we sat in the back of the van, our backs against the
storage/fridge, Alex pulled out another trick. Reaching down the
side of the mattress, he showed me what at first looked like two
pieces of wood, until he folded them out. Three pieces of plywood
held together with two hinges and a center brace made a little
table to rest his laptop on. A smaller, thinner version, with two
holes drilled in the top for our beer, sat between us as we watched
a movie. With the back doors open to the cool breeze and the lake,
it was perfect.
     
     
    THE FOLLOWING morning, I half opened my lids to
find large blue eyes staring at me.
    “ Hey,” I
said, my voice rough with sleep .
    “Horse.”
    “ How was your
first night sleeping in Maude?”
    “You snore,” Alex stated flatly.
    “You already knew this.” Alex and I had been
lucky enough to be roommates during our last year at Purdue and
we’d had a blast our final semester together.
    “ But this is
the first time I’ve been close enough to smother you with a
pillow.” Alex leaned over and ruffled my hair—well, he would have
if I’d had any—before he crawled out of Maude and disappeared
behind the pee tree.
    Alex returned
and crawled back into his sleeping bag beside me. “What did Julie
say?”
    “What did Julie say when?” I was on my back,
my fingers threaded behind my head as he settled alongside me.
    “When you woke her up yesterday morning?”
    “I thought I told you already?”
    Alex shook his head as he rolled onto his
side, propping his head on his hand.
    “She asked if she