You both stay silent in the car. You don’t know who’s idea that was, but you’re grateful because you get to ignore it for that much longer.

It occurs to you that he might not know what to say and after several minutes of silent work on phrasing, you realize that you don’t either.

He pulls into Ft. Stockton for the night and gets a single room again. He’s still in the shower when you crawl into the window bed, hunched on the side furthest from the other bed, the blankets in a small tangle around you. Only your hair sticks out. You fall asleep before he gets out so you don’t know that he slept in your bed until the next morning when you wake up with his arm over your chest and his breath in your ear.

You turn over to look at him. His eyes are open and you wonder how long he’s been watching you sleep. You’ve never had anyone watch you sleep before, unless you count Justin who used to like to pull back the curtains on the bus because he thought you looked peaceful when you slept.

You’re still remembering the petulant look on Justin’s younger face when Chris leans in. All thoughts flee from your mind and because you’ve loved him for so long, because you’ve just woken up and can’t tell a bad idea from a good one, because you recognize something in his eyes that you’ve seen so many times before in the mirror, you let him kiss you despite everything that tells you not to.

“Morning,” he says after he pulls back. He slaps your ass on his way to the bathroom and you think that things are as normal as they’re ever going to be.

The Pecos River is severely disappointing. Your only exposure had been from the “Tall Tales” you sometimes watched on PBS when you were little. One had been about Wild Bill Something-or-other. Texas had seemed special then, exotic somehow in a way that Maryland wasn’t. A land of cowboys and Indians and cows and dirt and tumbleweeds, and a raging river called the Pecos.

You know enough now to know that most of the “cowboys” had never ridden a horse in their lives and shuddered at the thought of dirt in their pick up trucks. And that though the Indians were mostly long gone and the cows didn’t range quite so freely as they used to, there was still lots of dirt and tumbleweeds.

This didn’t, however, prepare you for the Pecos. You made Chris stop when you saw the sign for it, thinking it had to be further off the road. It wasn’t.

It was largely disappointing. A little trickle of water and you’re sure you could get more out of the faucet on the bus, which has horrible water pressure.

You pick up a rock and throw it in because that’s always your first impulse when seeing water: to touch it, disturb it somehow.

This time, you actually disrupt the flow of what used to be a major river.

Chris laughs and calls you “JC: Master of Nature,” and you laugh and tell him to bite you. As he moves in, teeth bared, you run off to collect your rock.

You start seeing signs for Roswell long before you get there. It seems that they started right at the border, though Chris tells you later that they didn’t. With each sign you grow less excited.

He starts humming the theme of the X-Files as you pass yet another billboard urging you to visit the site of the alien crashes. If you hadn’t already promised Chris that you’d go, you’d be begging him to turn the car around and take you someplace else.

The town itself is strange. Giant posters and cardboard cut outs of aliens and space ships adorn every storefront on the main road through town. Guided tours to the crash sites are advertised. People are packed into every corner and you’re fairly certain you moan incoherently when Chris says he’s glad it isn’t tourist season. Crowds have never been your thing.

He takes you to the museum and you walk through, looking at badly doctored pictures of crop circles and UFOs.

Chris gets more excited as you work your way through the museum. He’s fairly bouncing by the time you get to the last display: “real” alien bodies recovered from the crash site.

“Look,” he says, breathlessly, wonder etched on his face.

“Chris…” you whisper. “Its rubber.”

“No, look, the plaque says…”

You look at Chris and he just shrugs. “You gotta believe, Scully.”

You snort.

Hours later, you stand beside Chris at the “actual crash site” of the alien space ship. The sun is hot, beating down at your back and head as if it were an actual, physical force. Your head itches from the baseball cap you have shoved low over it, and you can feel drops of sweat running down the middle of your back.

You’re miserable.

“Can we go now?” you ask. You don’t want to complain, don’t mean to complain, don’t like complaining, but the sun is hot and your head itches and you think your neck might be sunburned.

“Look at the scorch marks!” he says, crouching on the ground.

“They’re painted.”

“No they’re not.”

“Then they came out here with blow torches. Chris!”

“Whatever, man. The truth is out there.”

“Out there maybe,” you say, gesturing toward the sky. A thought occurs to you suddenly and you giggle helplessly, almost falling over because you can’t breathe in quickly enough to supply oxygen to the necessary body parts.

“What?” Chris asks, laughing because you are.

“Lance… out there…” you gasp. “Lance… aliens…” You keep laughing and making wild gestures to get your point across but you’re pretty sure that it’ll only be funny to you at this point.

Chris smiles indulgently. “Want to leave?”

You nod, still trying to catch your breath. You both turn to leave and he reaches down and takes your hand, twining your fingers together so his sweaty palm touches yours.

You think, maybe, that he’s both making and accepting an apology and you both accept and make one because you’re like that. Because it’s Chris and you’d probably do anything for him. Except tour Roswell again.

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