Anne's car slipped to a halt around the bend in the dirt road. Listening to the wipers swish, squish, smack the icy sludge away from the shield, Anne came to herself. Trevor could be thoughtless, but he wasn't cruel and leaving him in this weather was cruel - something Anne, though selfish, was not. She hooked her right arm about the passenger seat's headrest and looked through the back window for a second or two before really making up her mind.
Hastily pushing the shifter into reverse, Anne backed the car around the bend in the road and then to where she'd left Trevor, but he seemed to have vanished. Leaving the engine running, Anne got out of the car. Hunkering into her coat, she looked around as best she could then started to call for him. She had wandered to the tree line on the right side of the road when she tripped over a log, or what she thought was a log. The log groaned and it took all within Anne to keep from yelping in terror. "Trevor?"
The guy was curled into a ball near one of the pine trees. He seemed to be dozing, but fitfully. Anne could not get over how strange it seemed for him to be asleep in this weather, lying on such soggy ground.
He was muttering a kind of sing-song-y poem that went something like: "No. Go away. No. I can't stay. No. Let me alone. No. I must be gone."
Anne's brow furrowed, but she couldn't determine if he was speaking to her in his strange little rhyme or if he was speaking to someone in his dream, so she grabbed his arm and pulled at it a bit to test his weight. In the sludge, it was reasonably easy to pull him, so that's what she did - Anne pulled Trevor to her car. Getting him into the car took considerably more strength, but she managed that too.
"Now, what to do with you," Anne said, having buckled him into his seat and rounded the car to get in herself.
He was still muttering, mostly nonsense about his cat being called Katty and not Kerianne, his eyes opening now and again, like he was suffering from some fairy tale enchantment or something. Anne leaned over and opened the glove box. From inside, she pulled a big stack of papers and tossed them into the back seat. Then she saw what she wanted - a bottle of caffeine pills. She had used them once or twice to get through an especially boring meeting, but she sure was glad she'd left them in her purse and then transferred them into the borrowed little hatchback. She fumbled around blindly in the back running board and finally pulled out a small travel sized bottle of water with an "Ah-ha!"
Forcing twice the normal dose on the dozing fellow in her passenger seat proved a little more challenging than she'd expected, but eventually the pills had been swallowed and Anne settled back in her seat to wait for them to work. She turned the heater as far to the red as she could with hopes she'd dry out before having to see Paul later. He was going to kill her when he found out that not only had she gotten lost, she'd picked up Trevor. No, Paul wasn't going to be too happy about that.
Trevor groaned but was still in his dream state. Anne put the car into drive and slowly started to make her way through the gloom and towards what she hoped was a main highway. She couldn't remember where he said he needed to go, but she hoped it would be on her way.
"Wait, I've gotta see her!" Trevor sat up straight, his eyes wide.
Anne's brow furrowed but she didn't give him more than a cursory glance. She had to focus on the road, otherwise they'd end up in a ditch.
"What! Where am I?"
"Nowhere important, just in my little car. Where'd ya think you were?"
"I... I can't be here. I've got to see her!"
"Well, unless you wanna hop out of a moving vehicle, I suggest you calm down and wait until we find a decent highway." Anne did some of her own muttering about the state of the road way and how it was all Paul's fault that she was out so late and trying to take a "short cut" that had turned out to not be so short.
Trevor rung his hands, ran fingers through his damp hair; his eyes darted from here to there, and his foot started to pat the floor boards. Anne wondered if she'd really done him a disservice by giving him so many caffeine pills, but it had gotten him out of whatever stupor he had been in.
In the road ahead, she noticed a shadowy figure. A deer maybe? She slowed to an even more labored pace and squinted at the form. Trevor said again he had to see “her” whoever, she was and then…
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