13. Oatman #2
She held it in her palm and looked at it for a long time.
"This one."
I took it to the register. The woman behind the counter wrapped it in tissue paper and placed it in a small bag. She handed it to Nora, who held it against her chest with both hands.
"Thank you," Nora said.
She smiled at me, and I wanted to kiss her right there in the middle of the shop just to see if her smile could get any bigger.
The first drops of rain hit the window. Heavy, sudden, the kind that come all at once. Within a minute the street was dark with water and the awnings were pouring sheets of it onto the boardwalk.
The woman behind the counter looked past us toward the street. "Where are you two headed back to?"
"Las Vegas."
"Not tonight." She shook her head. "The mountain roads flood when it rains like this.
Zero visibility, water running across the pavement.
I wouldn't drive it." She reached under the counter and pulled out an umbrella.
"There's a lodge up the street on the left.
The Miner's Lodge. Tell them Marge sent you.
Bring the umbrella back tomorrow when it clears. "
I looked at Nora. "Do you mind staying?"
She smiled and shook her head.
We ran up the street under Marge's umbrella. The rain was coming down hard enough that it bounced off the dirt and soaked our shoes before we made it half a block. Nora was laughing, pressed against my side, one hand holding the umbrella and the other gripping my arm.
The hotel was old. Two stories, adobe walls, a wooden sign out front that said THE MINER'S LODGE in faded letters. Inside, the lobby was small and dim, the walls and ceiling covered with signed dollar bills, thousands of them, layered over each other going back decades.
The man at the front desk looked up from a paperback. "Room?"
"One room," I said. "Whatever you've got."
He handed me a key attached to a wooden tag. Second floor, end of the hall.
The room was small and clean. One bed, a dresser, two chairs by the window, a bathroom with a shower. The rain was hitting the window in sheets, and outside the mountains had disappeared behind a wall of gray.
Nora stood in the middle of the room with her arms crossed, her clothes damp, her hair starting to curl from the rain.
"You should shower first," I said. "Warm up. Leave your clothes outside the bathroom door and I'll get them laundered."
"Thank you," she said.
She grabbed the bathrobe off the back of the bathroom door, went inside, and closed it behind her. A minute later the door cracked open and her hand came through holding her clothes in a folded pile. I took them without looking.
I called the front desk and asked about laundry. They didn't have any. I hung up, looked around the room, and found a hair dryer in the top drawer of the dresser.
I stripped down to my boxers and sat on the edge of the bed with the hair dryer and Nora's clothes in my lap.
Her skirt. Her top. Everything underneath.
I held the dryer to her skirt and tried to focus on the task and not on the fact that I was holding every piece of clothing Nora Avery had been wearing ten minutes ago.
I could hear the shower running through the door. I could picture exactly what was on the other side of it, and I made myself stare at the wall and keep the dryer moving.
It hit me somewhere around drying my own shirt that neither of us had anything to change into. The bathrobes were all we had. We were going to be in this room, in those robes, all night.
I was still sitting there processing that when the bathroom door opened.
Nora came out in the hotel bathrobe, her hair wet, her face scrubbed clean.
She looked smaller without her boots on, standing barefoot on the old wooden floor.
She looked at me sitting on the bed in my boxers holding a hair dryer and my half-damp shirt.
"They don't have laundry service," I said. "Hair dryer was the best I could do."
"Don't worry about it. Go shower. I'll finish."
When I came out in the other bathrobe, she was sitting in one of the chairs by the window. Everything was dry and folded on the dresser. She'd ordered tea from the front desk, two cups on the small table between the chairs, steam rising from both of them.
"I hope you don't mind," she said.
"Not at all."
I sat across from her. We looked out the window at the rain coming down over the mountains. The street below was empty. The boardwalks were dark. The only sound was the rain against the glass and the building settling around us.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't plan on getting us stranded."
"Don't apologize." She picked up her cup and held it in both hands. "I had a lot of fun today, Knox."
The room was quiet. The rain wasn't letting up. The evening stretched out ahead of us with nothing to fill it.
Nora was sitting sideways in the chair with her legs folded in front of her, her cup in both hands, her face turned toward the window.
The neckline of her robe had fallen open and loose, and I could see the line of her collarbone and the skin below it where the fabric fell away.
I thought briefly about what it would be like to slide my hand through that opening.
"Knox?"
I looked up.
"You okay?"
I sat up straighter. "Yeah."
There was a worn deck of cards on the table between us, sitting next to a pad of paper and a pen with the lodge's name on it. I picked them up.
"Do you know how to play anything?"
"I know a little poker." She shrugged. "I was never really good at it."
"You can't be that bad. Want to play?"
"Okay."
She was that bad.
We used sugar packets from the tea tray as chips.
I dealt the first hand and explained the basics again as we went.
She nodded along, picked up her cards, and immediately held them up to her face with both hands like she was reading a secret letter.
Every time she had something worth keeping, she sat up a little straighter.
Every time she had nothing, she sighed through her nose and rearranged her sugar packets into a neater stack.
She bit her bottom lip when she was about to bluff, and she bluffed on almost every hand.
I could have read her from across the room. From across the table, she didn't stand a chance.
She lost the first three hands. She lost the fourth. She pushed her remaining sugar packets to the center of the table on the fifth and lost those too.