Canvas of Distance

*This one's for anyone who's ever crossed an ocean just to touch someone's hand. I wanted to capture that breathless rush of finally being in the same room after months apart. Thanks for reading, hope it makes you feel the dust and the heat.*

Omar had been driving trucks for eleven years, and he figured he knew every mile of interstate between Chicago and Denver by the sound it made under his tires. What he did not know was what to do with himself on an airplane for ten hours. He was thirty-four years old, and he spent most of the flight to Buenos Aires staring at the seatback map, watching the little plane icon crawl down the coast of Brazil.

Two years he had been dating Victoria. Two years of phone calls at odd hours, of video chats where the connection froze right when she smiled, of her voice cracking up on bad signal in the middle of a story. He had met her at a truck stop diner outside Amarillo when he was thirty-two and she was twenty-seven, passing through on a road trip, and after ten minutes of pretending to read her phone at the next table she had asked him if the pie was any good. He had said the pie was terrible but the coffee was honest, and she had laughed and sat down at his table anyway.

Now he came down the jetway into Ezeiza airport with a duffel bag over one shoulder and his heart going, though he would never admit that to anybody, least of all to Liam, who had told him before he left, "Bro, you're gonna propose at this rate, just admit it."

He did not see her at first. The arrivals area was packed, drivers holding signs, families hugging, everybody talking fast in Spanish. Then somebody shouted his name with the O rolled long, the way she always said it, and he turned and there she was, pushing through the crowd, twenty-nine years old, dark hair loose, wearing the same green jacket she had on in half his phone photos.

The hug was eager and a little clumsy. She came in too fast and hit him off center, and his duffel slid down his arm and trapped him, and they both cracked up while trying to fix it without letting go of each other.

"Ow, your bag," she said into his shoulder.

"It's fine. Hold still." He shoved the strap off and wrapped both arms around her properly. She smelled like airplane and city air, and after two years of screens that was enough to make him hold on a beat too long.

"You got taller," she said.

"Nope. Same height. You got shorter."

"That's the shoes." She pulled back and looked at him, hands on his jacket lapels. "You look tired."

"I drove eleven hours to the airport in Newark before this flight. So yeah, a little."

"Why did you drive to the airport? You could have parked closer."

"The truck had to go somewhere, Vic."

She laughed and took his hand, and he decided right there that the whole trip was worth whatever jet lag was coming.

They took a taxi into the city because her apartment was small and her roommate was home, and Victoria had booked them two seats on an overnight bus to Córdoba from the terminal. He had never heard of taking a bus for twelve hours when you could fly in ninety minutes, but she explained it the way she explained most things, patient and amused.

"A plane crosses the country," she said, while they ate cheap empanadas near the terminal. "A bus lets you feel it. Also it's a third the price and the seats lie flat, so stop complaining."

"I'm not complaining. I'm asking questions."

"You're complaining in question form."

Omar grinned. "Okay, maybe a little."

The bus left at nine at night. It was one of those double decker coaches with seats upstairs along the windows, and Victoria had claimed them two seats by the window, and she made him take the window so he could watch the country go by in the dark. He thought that was a very backwards way to arrange it, watching country in the dark, but he kept that to himself.

The lights of Buenos Aires fell away behind them. Pampas rolled out flat and black on both sides, with occasional farmhouse lights floating out there like boats. Victoria pulled her socks off and put her feet up and read on her tablet, and Omar tried to sleep and failed, because his body was still on American time and his brain was still buzzing from the airport.

Around midnight she gave up on pretending she was asleep too and slid down in the seat until her head was on his shoulder. He put his arm around her. Her hand landed on his knee, just resting there, and for a while the conversation consisted only of hands resting and breath evening out.

But his hands had spent eleven years on steering wheels and gear shifts, always moving, and they did not know how to rest. His fingers started walking along her thigh, up over the knee, tracing the seam of her jeans in the dark.

"Omar," she murmured, not lifting her head.

"What."

"Your hand."

"What about it?"

"It's being a hand with plans." He could hear the smile in her voice.

He froze his fingers mid stride. "Sorry. Nervous energy."

She shifted, turned her face up toward him in the blue glow of the cabin light. Her voice dropped low. "I didn't say stop. I said it had plans."

He looked at her. Around them the bus hummed, most passengers asleep, a blanket draped over both their legs. His hand went still on her thigh, then continued, slower, up toward the warmth of her, and she breathed out slow through her nose and did not stop him.

"Not here," she whispered, and pressed his hand flat and still. "My aunt's guest room has a door that locks. Twelve more hours. Be a gentleman until then."

"Twelve hours," he said.

"Twelve, if the driver's good."

He took his hand back and laced his fingers with hers instead, which was its own kind of torture, and she fell asleep smiling against his shoulder, and Omar lay there in the dark watching telephone poles flick past and thinking that twelve hours was nothing after two years.

They reached Córdoba in the morning, and Abigail was waiting at the bus station in a little silver hatchback. Victoria's aunt was fifty-five, a retired Spanish teacher who had lived in the hills outside the city for decades, and she greeted Victoria with a long cheek-to-cheek hug and a flood of Spanish, then turned to Omar and switched to careful, accented English.

"So. The famous Omar." She shook his hand with both of hers. "Victoria has told me everything. Almost everything, I suspect."

"Almost everything sounds safer," Omar said, and Abigail laughed like a door creaking open, and Victoria covered her face with one hand.

The drive wound up into dry green hills, past stands of eucalyptus, past stone walls that had been there longer than the country had, and the smell of woodsmoke started drifting in through the vents even before they turned up the dirt drive. The house was low and rustic, whitewashed walls, a wide porch, a dog that came around the corner barking once and then flopping over for belly rubs like it had been waiting for company all week.

"That's Ramón," Victoria said. "He does this to everyone. Don't feel special."

"I felt special."

They ate empanadas on the porch that evening, and Abigail produced a bottle of red wine from the region and refused to let anyone's glass sit empty. Omar could follow maybe one word in three of the family talk, the jokes about a cousin's divorce, an argument over the correct amount of onion in an empanada that got loud enough to attract the dog. Victoria sat beside him and translated the good parts in a low voice against his ear, her hand on his knee under the table.

"She just called Aunt Abigail's onions excessive," Victoria murmured. "Abigail is now defending herself with the entire history of the province."

"Who's winning?"

"Nobody ever wins. That's the point."

He loved watching her do it, the quick switch between languages, her face bright and animated in Spanish, then turning to him in English like a lamp turned his way. He felt the gap between him and the table sometimes, sitting there nodding at jokes he only half caught. But then Victoria would laugh at something and glance at him first, checking that he saw it too, and the gap felt small.

"So, Omar," Abigail said at one point, tapping the table. "How long do you stay?"

"Eight days," he said. "Then I got to get back for a run to Denver."

"Eight days." She nodded slowly, like she was doing math. "And after eight days, what?"

"Aunt Abigail," Victoria warned.

"I ask only because you fly ten thousand miles for a girl. That is not an eight-day question. That is a longer question." She topped off his wine and went back to Spanish, leaving Omar sitting there with a full glass and no comeback.

Victoria leaned over under cover of the argument about onions. "She's been waiting two years to ask that," she whispered.

"You could've warned me."

"No, this is better!" She was smiling, that same smile from the diner in Amarillo, and Omar figured Abigail could ask whatever she wanted.

Later, when the dishes were cleared and Abigail went inside to find a photo album she insisted he needed to see, Victoria stayed on the porch with him, shoulder against his shoulder, watching the last light go off the hills.

"Twelve hours on a bus," she said quietly. "You behaved."

"Barely. Don't schedule any more long rides before the guest room."

"No promises. That's the room with the lock, right?"

"That's the one."

She squeezed his hand, and inside the house Abigail started calling them for photos, and Omar took one last breath of woodsmoke and eucalyptus before letting her pull him up off the porch step.

Abigail made it through exactly four pages of the photo album