Chapter 13
PROMPT: The most spontaneous thing they ever did.
It was late afternoon on a Friday. The sun was low in the sky, and the wind had kicked up a bit. Raven’s arm hung loosely out of the driver’s side window, her fingers dancing easily in the breeze as she drove the familiar route to the grocery store. It loomed in the near distance, but rather than turn in once they reached their destination, Raven simply kept going.
There was hardly any thought to it, just an impulse—one that made her heart stutter with thrill, jumping and causing a smile to tug at the corner of her mouth.
“Um, wha—” Clarke turned in the passenger seat, looking back at the grocery store as they passed it. She pointed, expression distraught. “That was … there it goes.” She crumpled in her seat. “Goodbye sweet promise of food. I hardly knew ye.”
In the backseat, Lexa gave a quiet laugh. “Care to enlighten us on where we’re headed, Raven? You know Clarke will become violent if you don’t feed her.”
Raven didn’t answer and instead only grinned harder. Cranking up the music, she set her eyes on the road ahead and decided then and there that she would just drive. And she did. She drove and drove and drove, stopping through a random drive-thru to feed them (and quiet Clarke’s very loudly growling stomach and whining mouth). She drove through the night, far outside the city and long past the point in which Clarke and Lexa stopped asking questions.
They reached the ocean around noon the next day, having only stopped a few times for gass, snacks, and bathroom breaks. As soon as the she shifted the car into park, Raven was out of her seat. She didn’t bother waking Clarke or Lexa, both asleep in the backseat, but they startled awake when she climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut behind her. She ran from the parking lot all the way down to the beach.
Lexa rubbed at her eyes and shook Clarke to wake her a little more. “Look,” she said, pointing out from the backseat, and they stared through the windshield together, shielding their eyes from the bright sun.
They knew Raven had never seen the ocean in person before. They watched as she ran toward the ocean, stripping off her top but for her sports bra and nearly falling over as she kicked off her shorts and shoes. The sun was high and bright and beating down, and Raven was awash in the shine, running like she was free for the first time in her life.
Lexa and Clarke climbed out of the car and leaned against one another, watching. When Raven ran into the water and it washed up over her, they glanced to one another and smiled.
“This is wild,” Clarke said, her voice raspy with sleep.
Lexa just nodded, staring back out toward their girlfriend, who was turning in slow circles in the water, arms out and head tilted back, absorbing the moment.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, and Clarke wrapped an arm around her waist.
“Yeah, it is,” she whispered. “She is.” She then kissed Lexa’s shoulder. “You are.”
They rubbed the sleep from their eyes and Lexa nodded toward the ocean. “Shall we?”
Clarke just laughed and took off. “Hell yeah,” she said as she ran, stripping all the way.