“You think you can drive this?” Chase asked with a twinkle in his eye. He fastened his seatbelt and dangled the keys above the center console.

After adjusting the driver’s side seat to fit her shorter legs, Cameron took the jingling keys. “My brother has an Explorer too,” she told him.

“But does he let you drive it?” Chase asked.

Cameron cut her eyes sideways to glare, “No,” she answered with a pout.

“It’s bigger than that sporty little Miata you drive,” he warned her.

“And almost as red,” she said, dismissing his concerns, as she started the engine. The radio was blaring WPLJ‘s traffic report, and both reached for the volume control. Cameron turned the radio off because that particular DJ had always grated on her nerves.

“Just don’t back into anything,” Chase instructed. He tugged at the strap of the seatbelt. It barely touched the base of his neck, but he found it uncomfortable. It stubbornly snapped back into place, locking itself tightly into position.

“Please. If anyone should be worried, it’s the person stuck with you driving. I seem to recall you trying for the wrong side of the road before.”

“I just did that to freak you out,” Chase shrugged, recalling an early adventure in breaking and entering when he and Cameron had gone to a patient’s house and he had pulled out of their driveway onto the “wrong” side of the road. “There was nothing coming anyway.”

“That makes it loads better,” Cameron scoffed playfully.

“We should crack the windows to let in some fresh air. It’s kind of stale from being closed up for so long,” Chase commented as he sniffed the offending odor. Giving up on adjusting the safety belt, he scooted closer to the console.

“Are you nuts? It’s too cold outside to drive around with the windows down,” she argued, reaching to turn on the heater. “Get a Yankee Candle air freshener. That’ll take care of it.”

Chase frowned. “I don’t want my car to smell like magnolias or cucumbers or any of that crap. I want it to not smell at all.” He hated overpowering fragrances. They reminded him of his mother’s descent from functional drinker to reclusive drunk. Before she stopped venturing into public altogether, she had a bad habit of wearing way too much perfume to cover the smell of liquor that seemed to emanate from her very pores. He remembered feeling trapped when he had to ride somewhere while she drove. The perfume was so overpowering that it was hard to breathe and her careless attitude made him anxious every time they neared a traffic light or she tried to pass another vehicle. “Besides, they kill my allergies,” he added.

“Fine. We’ll ride back to your place with the windows down and the heat blaring. Makes sense.”

“That’s what I thought!” Chase answered in a defiant tone that was offset by his laughter.

“You’re in a good mood,” Cameron noted, remembering that he had been laughing when she returned from the lab.

“I don’t have AIDS,” he said gleefully. He knew he still had to wait for the confirmatory test, but the odds of it being positive were next to none. Statistics were very much in his favor.

“What were you and Foreman talking about that was so funny?” she inquired.

“Nothing,” he answered. His mood shifted immediately. Looking back, he was not sure why he was so amused by the idea of Foreman having a notebook. It scared him to think that he was not really entertained at all. Maybe Foreman was right and he was crazy. He certainly had his moments of acting insane.

Cameron could sense the switch in his mood, so she changed the subject. She was so happy that he was talking with her instead of yelling at her for her for revealing the information he had shared with her about his mother that she did not want to press any issue and risk messing up whatever it was that was happening between them. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as the SUV type,” she said. It was not as if she were unaware of Chase’s vehicle. She had been parking next to it for three years; but they had never discussed such things before, so it was a safe topic.

“If you tell me you would have pictured me in a KIA, I’ll never speak to you again,” he warned her, his demeanor brightening.

“Hmm,” Cameron paused as if she were giving it a lot of thought. “Nah, more of a BMW or Lexus or Mercedes kind of guy. I didn‘t think you foreigners went for the gas guzzling eco-unfriendly types.”

“I promise to get a flex fuel when I upgrade the model,” he replied. “I don’t like little cars. My first car was a truck. My grandmother drove a Jeep,” he told her proudly. Valerie was the one person from his family that he did not mind discussing. “It was ancient by the time I really got to drive, but that’s what I used to learn. I’ve never liked being close to the ground.” He left out the part about his father telling him he was an embarrassment because he would be seen in public in such a monstrosity as a bright red 1983 model Jeep. “She started giving me lessons when I was barely old enough to see over the steering wheel while sitting in her lap,” he laughed, remembering that his feet did not even touch the pedals, but Valerie had let him steer. “We never told my parents.”

“Your grandmother that made the quilt?” Cameron asked. She figured it was a stupid question. Rowan Chase’s parents had probably never immigrated to Australia. It had to be his mother’s mother.

Chase was taken aback by the question, wondering how she knew about his quilt. Then he realized that she must have read the stitched message when she and Foreman gathered things from his apartment. “Yes. She’s the only grandmother I knew.”

“She quilted… and drove a Jeep?”

“Yep.”

“That’s interesting. Kind of an unlikely pairing of skills.”

“She was a firecracker. She stayed busy outside when it was warm, and busy inside when it was cold or wet. I don’t think I ever saw her idle.”

“Did you get to see her a lot?”

“I practically lived with her when I was little,” Chase answered immediately, then regretted his openness.

“Oh.” Cameron held back her questions about his mother’s addiction and if that contributed to the time Chase spent with his grandmother. She was cautious of sending him into a depressed mood. “I’m putting the windows up!” she told him. The cool air was keeping them from getting as warm as she would like to be.

“What were you grandparents like?” Chase asked Cameron before she had a chance to delve further into his family history.

“My Nana made me a quilt too,” she told him. “But I bet she’s never driven a truck in her life. She has a Buick the size of an oil tanker. I didn’t see any of my grandparents very often growing up though. My mom’s parents live in Missouri and my dad’s parents did the very en vogue thing of moving to Florida when they could retire. I saw them at Christmas or Thanksgiving or maybe a week during the summer.”

“Any of them still living?”

“Dad’s dad and both on my Mom’s side.”

“We should go to Missouri then,” Chase stated, matter-of-factly.

“We should?” Cameron asked, surprised by the suggestion.

Chase felt reprimanded by her question. “Sorry. I’m saying stupid things because I’m glad I’m not going to die from a crappy disease.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry! I just thought you were mad at me about my stupid big mouth. I‘m surprised you‘d want to go anywhere with me.”

“Funny, I thought you were mad at me about my stupid big mouth,” Chase repeated her phrasing. House would have no idea that they had almost had sex again if he had not jumped to the wrong conclusions. Besides, despite what Dr. Johnson said about standing up for himself when he was angry, he was not going to risk losing a friendship just to appease what was left of his pride. He would get over it.

“I don’t have any right to be mad, unless it’s at myself. I should have--”

“Yeah, yeah,” Chase interrupted, clearly not wanting to stroll down that memory lane. “So, do you want to go to Missouri to see your grandparents? I mean, if you even like them.”

“Yeah, that would be nice. I haven‘t seen them in three years,” Cameron admitted. She thought it sad that he would question whether or not she even liked her own family. The more she got to know him, the more she realized how truly the word broken described his childhood home.

“So, when do you want to leave?” Chase asked. Comfortable that Cameron was not going to wreck his Explorer, he leaned back in his seat and yawned. He closed his eyes for a moment, waiting for her answer.

“I’m not sure,” she responded. She had no idea if Chase really had a yearning to go to Missouri or if this was some kind of residual of the euphoric mood he had shown in the office. Even though he still had leave time remaining, she was sure that he could not skip out on his therapy sessions with Dr. Johnson. It was safer for both of them if she did not commit to a timeframe.

“We can see that Arch thing,” Chase suggested, sleepily.

“Sure,” she agreed. Before she reached the next traffic light, he was snoozing. She heard the steady breathing and glanced over to see his head resting against the back of the seat. She looked back to the road, knowing they would reach his apartment in a few minutes.

She felt like cursing when she realized traffic was coming to a stand-still. There was construction creating an obstacle ahead. She sighed, accepting that she might be stuck creeping along at a snail’s pace for half an hour or more. Less than five minutes had passed when she considered waking Chase to keep her company, but she reconsidered. Instead, she turned the radio on softly enough that it would not bother her sleeping passenger. Maybe if she had listened to the traffic report earlier, they could have avoided this slowdown. She glanced from Chase to the road around her and back to him.

Something about his behavior did not feel right to her. He had gone from an anxiety attack to euphoric in a matter of twenty minutes--before she had given him the test results. Now that the emotional high was wearing off, he had fallen asleep in almost no time. She figured the emotional roller coaster had exhausted him, but worried that the extreme reactions were indicative of worse problems than she or House wanted to admit Chase had. He’s not suicidal, she reminded herself. She may not have been accurate that he was adjusting exceptionally well, but that did not necessitate that Foreman was accurate that he was going to hurt himself either.

Traffic came to a dead stop. She was glad to see the gas gauge was near the full mark. She watched Chase while he slept, studying his features as if watching his face closely enough could somehow show her the man behind it. She knew he had had a taxing day. While she had no idea what he and Johnson had discussed, she was certain that having to relive any part of what had happened to him was toilsome.

She had never personally been through anything this traumatizing. Even her husband’s death had not made her behave erratically. She had cried for a week, hurt like hell for a while, thrown herself back into her studies, and then started to heal. Though it still hurt if she thought about it, the pain had wholly consumed her for only a short time. Maybe it was because she had always known it was coming. She had never let herself rest in the idea of a secure home or a future family with the man. She had known her marriage would be cut short before she had even said, “I do.” She wondered how she would react if something like this had happened to her. Would she become reclusive like her friend Colleen had? She imagined that Chase would have shut himself off from the world if given the choice. She wondered if he would have even sought medical attention if Foreman had not alerted them to what had happened. If it had been something that he could have kept clandestine, she had no doubt in her mind that that it would have remained a secret.

She looked back to the road. There was no improvement there. Her attention was drawn back to Chase as he suddenly began to gasp for breath. His arms flailed as he let out a strangled cry. He took a deep, jagged breath and looked around frantically.

“Chase?” Cameron reached out to him. “Are you okay?”

He batted her hand away, “Let go!” he demanded. He shook his head and backed away from her, pressing himself into the passenger door. He coughed violently while rubbing his throat with his right hand, then pulled at the collar of his shirt. With his left hand, he released the seatbelt and it zipped back into its not-in-use position. That immediately sent the vehicle’s warning device into a series of annoying high-pitched dinging sounds.

“Put your seatbelt back on!” Cameron demanded. She panicked as the image of him jumping from the SUV and into a traffic jam leapt into her mind. He was just disoriented enough to do something that dangerous. “Now!”

Chase ignored her, but calmed down as he realized that he did not have to struggle to breathe.

“Chase, you were just dreaming,” Cameron told him in a low, calm voice. “You have to put your seatbelt back on. We’re on the highway.” As if to reinforce her demand, the warning system began another series of shrill beeps. She was convinced that Ford had patented the single most annoying sound in human history.

Chase recognized his surroundings as the dream started to fade, drowned out by what was real. The specific details might blur, but he knew the content. It was the same as what occupied his waking thoughts: jumbled images and sensations of the cold, sterile clinic; the barrel of a gun pressed to his temple; Foreman’s hands gripping his shoulders while the tip of Joe’s penis was pressed against his lips, then slammed into his unwilling mouth. He had woken up gasping for breath so many times that he thought he should be used to the panic. But it never got easier to remember those hands wrapped tightly around his neck and the struggle between living and dying. No matter how much he tried to move on, he could not. Even when his own mind was not occupied in self-torture, the people surrounding him would not let him forget.

Cameron watched as his eyes darted from one aspect of his surroundings to another. He reminded her of a caged animal, backed into a corner, and ready to come out fighting. Still, she felt no threat from him. Chase would not hurt her. She trusted that it simply was not in his nature.

As he accepted that he was not in immediate danger, he obeyed her command to buckle his seatbelt. It was so uncomfortable to him that he slipped the chest strap over his shoulder, allowing only the waist strap to touch him.

Cameron knew better than to make an issue of his wearing the belt improperly. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Chase nodded, avoiding eye contact. He turned away from her and stared out the window at the lanes full of cars. He swallowed several times, trying to keep his throat from feeling closed. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window.

“Chase?” Cameron said his name tentatively, and reached out to pat his shoulder.

He rolled his shoulder just enough to make her hand fall away.

“What were you dreaming?” she asked boldly, determined to stop him from falling into silence.

Chase did not respond.

Cameron was suddenly irritated with him. She was trying to help and he was sulking over a bad dream. Wallowing in self pity was not his style. “Tell me what you were dreaming,” she urged. Her tone was just a step away from a demand.

“Same thing I always dream,” Chase answered, never turning to face her. “Joe’s choking me while Foreman… never mind.”

Cameron was grateful that the traffic jam showed no signs of moving. “While Foreman what?” she prodded.

“He… holds me in place,” Chase answered softly.

Cameron was puzzled, imagining Foreman holding Chase still while Joe strangled him. “Why would Foreman help him while he was choking you?” she asked.

“Not with his hands,” Chase whispered.

“What do you mean?” she asked, shaking her head in confusion. She saw from Chase’s reflection in the window that his lashes were weighed down with unshed tears. He kept swallowing. “Oh my god,” she gasp quietly, covering her mouth with her hand, as she realized what he meant. She closed her eyes in a brief moment of denying her realization. “Oh, god, Chase… I’m sorry,” she offered. She did not know why this was coming as such a shock to her. She supposed she had never let herself consider that he had been forced into that act of submission. She reached out to him again, this time softly patting his leg. He did not move away from that touch. “I’m so sorry.”

She wondered how she could have been irritated with his sulking. Did she expect him to not be depressed? Was he supposed to be flooded with those memories and wake up jubilant and carefree? It was as if no matter what layer of hurt he allowed her to see, there was always something else lurking deeper.

Chase shrugged. “Not your fault. Sorry I fell asleep,” he apologized to her. Sorry I had another stupid dream, he added silently.

“It’s okay. You’re tired.” She was mindful of the traffic though she focused her attention on him.

“There’s always some excuse,” he answered. “I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m over-medicated. I’m crazy. I don’t have a free pass to be rude," His father had taught him that it was poor manners to sleep while someone else drove and he had never quite stopped believing it. "I’m not going to turn into that,” he declared, remembering the list of “normal” reactions he read online. He weighed his own symptoms. The precipitating event was the equivalent of catching a rare disease and it appeared that his illness was running its projected course. He saw it clearly. He had the sleep disorder, the mood disturbance, the sexual dysfunction. If he looked at his recent habits rationally, he would even have to admit he had problems with his appetite that could not be contributed only to his throat injuries. So, if he were following the pattern of the illness, what was the projected outcome? Was it going to be fatal if he did not find a remedy?

“Turn into what?” Cameron asked. One of the most striking differences in Chase since the attack was that, while he was sometimes more forthcoming with personal information, he was much more likely to express himself without clarity. To Cameron, it signified how jumbled his thoughts must be.

“One of those people,” he answered, thinking about truckdrivingman, Shriner#12, and the other men whose stories he had read. “I’m not going to stay like this forever. I’m not going wake up choking because of nightmares ten years from now. I’m not going to hide and use this as an excuse. I’m going to get better,” he turned away from the window to face her. “I just don’t know how.”

Cameron felt a lump in her throat as she saw the honesty in his eyes. He was lost. She could tell that Chase was looking to her for help, for hope. She was proud of him for refusing to surrender to the pain, but she did not know how to make him better either. “We’ll figure it out. I promise,” she vowed with no idea if that was a promise she could keep.