drift

There was a pause on the line. Seb maneuvered around the Mazda and sped up to pass a semi. What was she thinking about? Had her mind caught on his gaping hole? Sometimes he thought of that hole a lot. He would think about his mother and everything they did together, like play Rummy, and his hole would close up for a while. Before reality came back with its brutal prying hands and ripped it back open. And sometimes he thought it was like an oddly shaped place that used to house a puzzle piece, and though he tried to fit many people inside of it, no one seemed to fit. They just fell out.

But Trina was talking. What must have sucked, he wondered, to himself, then realized with the subject switch to her father, that she had indeed caught and bitten his unintended bait. Maybe he did want to talk about it. Maybe. But having no father, he thought, was not the same as having that parent for a while, then losing it. Not the same at all, and there was no way she could relate. But Sebastian is a patient, calculating kind of guy. He listened, calculated, and slowly chewed his cud of thoughts. "I'm sorry, for that," he said, knowing that it would be hard to have relatively no parenting, just a whore mother and a whore grandmother. What would that be like? "But, anyway... have you ever traveled much?"

The classic, heart-breaker's change of subject. He was quite conscious of his rudeness, quite. He knew that she wanted to talk about their gaping holes, possibly discuss how they could be filled or sewed back together or completely ignored, but Seb didn't want to. Maybe it was his male-ish-ness, or his character, but there was something in the way she had changed the subject to herself that had turned him off.