Chapter Four
RAFE
ONE SECOND THE MOTEL room was quiet. The next she was upright, hair sideways across her face, taking in the ceiling, the teal carpet, the bad art, the AC unit still rattling out its one-note contribution to the morning — running the full inventory with the expression of someone being handed evidence she was not prepared to accept.
I was already dressed. I'd been up since five, run through the threat picture on the burner, confirmed the operation was clean and holding. I was on my second cup of terrible in-room coffee when London's eyes tracked across the room and found me in the chair by the window.
"Why," she said, "do you look like a person?"
"That's a low bar."
"It's six in the morning."
"Seven forty-two."
She turned to look at the window as though checking my math against the available light evidence. The light confirmed it was seven forty-two. She appeared to resent this.
"I smell like a thrift store," she said.
"You smell fine."
"I smell like someone else's decade." She dropped back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling with the specific despair of a woman running a very thorough inventory of how her life had arrived at this point. "I have been in this outfit for two days."
"One and a half."
"That's not the part that was supposed to get better." She sat up again. The ponytail had completely abandoned its original geometry overnight, and what remained was a loose brunette knot at the back of her neck, dark against the flannel, entirely uncalculated. "Tell me there's coffee."
I held out the second cup.
She crossed the room in bare feet and took it without looking at me, which was a tactical error on her part because I was looking at her.
The flannel was half-untucked, the hem of it falling past the waistband of the thrift store jeans she'd slept in, and her feet were bare on the teal carpet and she looked like she'd just woken up in my space and was entirely at home in it.
That was something I needed to stop thinking about immediately. I put my eyes back on the window and did not entirely succeed.
She took one long sip and closed her eyes.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I can work with this."
"Good."
"I'm going to need the bathroom for twenty minutes."
"Take thirty."
Her eyes opened. "You're being generous. That's suspicious."
"We've got a long drive."
She studied me over the rim of the cup for a moment — the way she did when she was deciding whether something was a setup. Then she turned and went to the bathroom with the cup and closed the door.
I heard the shower start three minutes later.
Here is what I did not think about: the fact that London Grant was in a motel shower approximately twelve feet from where I was standing, hot water running, the flannel and the jeans and whatever was under them on the bathroom floor.
I did not think about the bare shoulder I'd registered twice in the truck.
I did not think about the line of her throat when her head tipped back, or what her voice would sound like if it lost its edges.
I thought about all of that anyway. Thoroughly and in sequential order. I was still thinking about it when the shower shut off and I heard the brief silence that meant she was standing in front of the mirror, and then the door opened.
She came out in a towel.
She had the flannel in one hand and was reaching for the jeans on the bed and had clearly not thought through the sequencing, because she stopped when she registered me and I watched her recalculate.
"I didn't bring a change of clothes in," she said.
"No."
"Because I thought I had privacy."
"You do."
"You're in the room."
"I'll turn around."
I turned around. I heard the small sounds of someone getting dressed behind me — the zipper, the rustle of flannel — and I spent those thirty seconds doing the kind of focused breathing a man does when he needs to remind his body that it does not run the operation here.
"Okay," she said.
I turned back. She was dressed. Her hair was damp around her face where it had escaped the ponytail, and there was a pink flush across her collarbone from the shower, and she was looking at me with an expression that wasn't entirely readable.
"Your turn," she said.
I took a cold shower. Not because I was warm. I took it cold because the morning had already presented me with enough problems and I didn't need to add to them.
The water hit and I stood under it and thought about what I could actually afford on this job — which was nothing, and I knew it — and then I turned the temperature down another two degrees and stayed there until the answer felt like it was settled.
When I came out she was on the bed with her knees drawn up, working through the remains of my in-room coffee and looking at the ceiling.
She'd found the spare pillow and had it tucked behind her back, and she'd organized the takeout containers from last night into a neat stack by the door without apparently thinking about it.
She'd done the same thing with her toiletries on the bathroom counter, I'd noticed.
Everything she owned, she organized. It was one of the twenty or thirty things about her that I'd registered and told myself was operational awareness.
"Ready?" I said.
She looked at me. Then her expression shifted — something caught, assessed, and landed somewhere she didn’t entirely hand over — and she said, "You look insufferably well rested."
"I sleep fine."
"That's deeply unfair." She swung her legs off the bed and stood up. "Let's go. I need to eat something before I become a problem."
"You're already a problem."
She pointed at me. "That was almost a joke. I'm noting the development."
I picked up her bag. She picked up mine. We both noticed. Neither of us mentioned it.
We were on the road by eight. She'd had the coffee, found the sun, and was sitting with her feet half-up on the dash and the flannel pulled tight across her shoulders when the drive-through came up outside Tonopah — a faded yellow overhang over two lanes, a hand-painted board supplementing the main sign, a car ahead of us already pulling out.
I rolled the window down. The person at the window was a woman around forty, wearing a headset and the particular expression of someone who had processed several thousand orders and expected to process several thousand more before anything surprised her.
London sat up.
"Good morning," London said.
"Morning. What can I get you?"
"I'd like eggs."
"We've got the breakfast burrito, the egg and cheese sandwich, or the combo platter."
"What's in the burrito?"
"Eggs, cheese, sausage, salsa."
"What kind of sausage?"
"Pork."
"Is it lean cut or — actually, you know what, can I get the egg and cheese sandwich but with the egg whites only, and if there's a multigrain option for the bread that would be amazing, and is the cheese real cheese or a processed cheese product? I ask because the sodium content in processed—"
"It's American cheese."
"Okay. Okay. So what about the combo platter — what does that come with?"
The woman looked at her. London looked back with full sincerity, as though this were a reasonable conversation to be having through a drive-through window at seven fifty-eight in the morning.
"Hash browns and coffee," the woman said.
"Are the hash browns shredded or formed?"
"Shredded."
"See, I actually prefer formed, because the shredded ones have more surface area so they absorb more oil, and I have a sensitivity to—" She stopped. She turned to me. "Do they have oatmeal?"
"No," I said.
"How do you know?"
"I've been here before."
She turned back to the window. "Could you potentially do a side of fruit? Or — no, that's not reasonable, sorry, ignore that. Okay. The combo platter. But could I do egg whites in the platter?"
The woman at the window stared at her.
"We make it the way it comes," the woman said.
"Right. Right. Of course." London sat back. Sat forward again. "Could I get a side of hot sauce?"
"It's in the bag."
"Two hot sauces?"
"They're in the bag."
"Great. Perfect. And a large coffee, please, with oat milk if you have it, or almond milk, or honestly any non-dairy — no? Okay, black coffee is totally fine, I drink it black sometimes, this is one of those times, I'm very flexible."
I ordered a breakfast burrito and a black coffee and two hash brown orders because I knew her and pulled forward.
London looked at me when we cleared the window. "That went well."
"Did it?"
"She was very helpful."
"She was."
"I thought we covered a lot of ground." She was quiet for three seconds. "I've never done that before. Ordered at a drive-through."
"I know."
"It's different than I expected. There's a—" She gestured at nothing. "There's a rhythm to it."
"There is."
"I'll be better next time."
I handed her the bag when it came through. She pulled out both hash brown cartons, opened one, took a bite, made the face of someone confronting the gap between their expectations and the actual sensory event, and then kept eating.
I laughed.
It came out before I could stop it — real, unguarded, the kind of laugh that doesn't ask permission. London turned and stared at me like I'd produced the evidence she'd been waiting to present in court.
"Was that a laugh?" she said.
"No."
"Rafe. That was absolutely a laugh."
"I don't know what you heard."
"I heard a laugh." She was grinning. "I made you laugh. That's mine. I'm keeping that."
"Eat your hash browns."
"I will. I'm also keeping the laugh." She ate another hash brown, delighted with herself, and the morning opened up outside the window — Nevada basin going broad and bright, the road pointing north into a sky that didn't bother with anything small.
SHE PUT HER FEET ON the dashboard somewhere past the Nevada line. One foot, then the other, testing to see if I'd object. I didn't. She settled in.