8. Chapter 8 #2
She takes in the room once, at all the available seats, then heads for a booth with a view of the front windows. Nothing dramatic about it. Just quick judgment and a seat she seems to prefer on sight.
By the time I slide in across from her, she’s already set her jacket beside her instead of on the seat. Her phone lands face down near the salt shaker, close enough to reach without getting in the way.
The waitress shows up with coffee before menus. Montana thanks her and leaves the cup alone until the woman moves off.
I pick up the menu without looking at it.
“What?” she asks.
I glance up. “What what?”
“That look.” She tips sugar into her coffee. “The one where it seems like you’re trying to solve a problem I didn’t know I handed you.”
I rest my forearms on the table. “You always pick the booth with the window?”
Her spoon taps once against the mug, then keeps moving. “You always start conversations like an ambush?”
“I’m serious.”
“I noticed.”
The waitress comes back for our order. Montana asks for chicken-fried steak, extra gravy, and water with lemon like she’s done this often enough to know exactly what a kitchen like this can do well and what it can ruin. I order coffee that’ll peel paint and a burger I don’t really want.
When the waitress leaves, Montana leans back just enough to settle into the booth and looks at me across the table.
“Some seats are just better than others,” she says as she reaches for her coffee she glances once toward the front door again.
The answer is light on purpose.
It leaves enough behind.
I look past her to the window, where my truck sits under a sky turning darker at the edges, and think about how quickly she sized the room up before she even took off her jacket.
When I look back at her, she’s watching me over the rim of her cup with the same level of attention I’ve seen her give nervous mares and difficult men.
“Who taught you to read a room that fast?” I ask.
The question lands between us harder than I meant it to.
She doesn’t answer right away.
Then she sets the mug down and says, “Same place I learned not to ignore a horse that pins its ears before it kicks.”
She leaves it there. Not enough to explain, but enough to change the air between us.
I lean back and look at her properly. “That kind of answer usually comes with a story.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going to tell it.”
“I’m eating chicken-fried steak in Oklahoma with my boss,” she says. “This doesn’t feel like the moment for my life story.”
“What if I’m not asking as your boss?”
Her eyes lift fast. “Are you not?”
The waitress drops our plates between us before I can answer. Steam rolls up from the food. Montana picks up her fork and knife right away, like the motion gives her something to do besides sit in the awkwardness.
I watch her cut into the steak. “You think that’s why I brought you?”
“I think you’re still deciding why you did,” she says.
Then she glances up long enough to make sure I hear the rest. “The part of you that wanted my eyes on the colt made sense. The part that didn’t sleep after seeing me dance with somebody easier to stand next to is the one you keep pretending not to know what to do with. ”
I go still.
Outside, the wind throws grit against the windows in a dry first warning before the rain.
She takes a bite, chews, swallows, and reaches for her water like she didn’t just rip me open with one sentence.
“You always talk like that over lunch?” I ask.
“Only when the company earns it.”
I close my hand around the coffee mug. “Was Holt easier?”
Her fork pauses halfway back to the plate. “What do you mean? Was he supposed to be difficult?”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No,” she says. “It was a trap dressed up as one.”
The storm hits then, rain hammering the windows hard enough to make the whole diner draw in around it. The waitress turns the OPEN sign so it stops buzzing against the glass.
Montana glances toward the weather, then back at me. “For the record, Holt asked me to dance once, and never acted like the room should rearrange itself for him. So yes. Easier.”
Surprisingly, that pulls a smile out of me before I can stop it.
She catches it at once. “There. That’s better.”
“What is?”
“You look less like you’re negotiating mineral rights and more like a person.”
Without responding with a comeback, I shake my head once, then attempt to finish my burger. She finishes half the steak, and wipes the plate with the last corner of biscuit.
By the time we leave the diner, the storm has found its shape.
It starts as a bruise over the western sky and builds from there, the clouds thickening until the light goes from late afternoon to something flatter and meaner.
The first drops hit the windshield ten miles back on the county road, big enough to sound separate.
Now the rain comes in sheets that blur the center line, and every gust shoves at the truck hard enough to make the steering feel alive under my hands.
Montana has become quietly alert in the way people get when weather stops being scenery and starts acting like it has plans of its own. The radio's off, the wipers keeping time across the glass, fast and frantic.
I ease off the gas.
“We can keep pushing,” Montana says, though it sounds more like a question than an argument.
“No,” I say.
The road dips ahead where it crosses a low creek bed, and the shoulder’s already taken on that slick, reflective shine that means trouble.
I know this stretch, and there’s nothing between here and Amarillo worth trusting in weather like this except a motel I used once during a sale-run three years ago.
Lightning flashes somewhere far enough off to count as a warning.
Montana turns in her seat just enough to look at me. “You know somewhere we can stop and get off the road?”
“I know a place with walls. It’s not much.”
Her mouth shifts, almost amused.
“That your formal recommendation?”
“It’s the one you’re getting.”
The sign shows up five minutes later through the rain, VACANCY flickering in tired red letters over a low strip of rooms the color of old bone. The lot is half gravel, half patched asphalt, with puddles already collecting in the low spots.
I pull under the awning and cut the engine. By the time the truck goes quiet, the toothpick between my teeth has gone soft at one end.
For a second, neither of us moves. Rain drums on the roof hard enough to fill the cab, and the heater quietly clicks as it cools.
Montana looks through the windshield at the row of doors, then down at the prospect file on the console between us.
“This feels like deja-vu,” she says.
It certainly does.
Motel lot. Bad weather. Nowhere else to go.
The first time, it was circumstance and bad luck and a storm that shoved us into the same room before either of us had the sense to stop it.
This time, I know exactly what I’m walking into.
I reach for the keys and open my door before that thought can settle too deep.
“This is close enough to where we’re going, so we can stay here later tonight but we should check in now,” I say.
Without any comeback, Montana nods once and pulls her jacket tighter around herself.
By the time we make it across the lot and into the office, I already know the only thing worse than another motel stop would’ve been trying to keep driving.
That does nothing to make the place feel less dangerous.
This time we will not be sharing a room. We will just be separated by one thin wall and a lock I no longer trust to mean much.
I am not sure that helps.