He’s tan, pure muscle, and his shorts are low-slung enough to make out a hint of his happy trail—something Thomas doesn’t even have.
I want to run my finger along it.
“If you’re through ogling me, I’ll go ahead and deal with the roach.”
I don’t have much of a response to this since Iwasactually ogling him, so I step aside and nod toward the blinds. “There. I was just about to close them when I saw it.”
“You realize in the process of trying to kill it, I might end up disturbing it just enough that it scuttles away and then you won’t know where it is all night.”
I scoot into a ball near the headboard. “And if that happens, we’ll be switching rooms, as you were the one who chose this place. I’d be asleep in Oak Bluff if it was up to me.”
For a moment his eyes darken before he blinks his unhappiness away. “Do you have a shoe or something?”
“You can’t use my shoe. I don’t want dead roach all over it.”
He laughs under his breath. “A magazine?”
I don’t have any magazines, but the room came with a book in the nightstand just like hotels used to. I grab it and hand it to him.
He raises a brow. “You want me to destroy a life using the Bible? Isn’t that like a thousand years of bad luck?”
That’s a good name for my memoir about this road trip:A Thousand Years of Bad Luck. “You’re confusing it with a chain letter. Pretty sacrilegious of you.”
“Pretty sacrilegious of you to care so little about the Bible that you’d have me smash a roach with it. You’re just asking for karmic retribution.”
“I can’t imagine any punishment greater than traveling with you,” I say, and he just smiles as if he knows I don’t mean it.
Which is fair because I don’t. I’m sort of enjoying this trip, whether I should or not.
13
EASTON
Isleep like the dead.
I sleep like a girl who didn’t sit in a car most of yesterday, followed by a significant nap. I suspect I could sleep for another few hours if I allowed it.
I mentally scroll through disorders in which sleeping heavily is the only symptom. Very little comes to mind.
“What are the odds that this place has a carbon dioxide leak?” I ask Elijah when I enter the kitchen.
He frowns, glancing up from his paper. “Pretty slim, given that I’m not tired.”
I walk to the Keurig, then fumble in the surrounding cabinets, looking for coffee pods.
“There aren’t any,” he says, his gaze still on the paper.
“You don’t even know what I’m looking for. Maybe I was hoping they had some cocaine.”
“This place would have been a lot more expensive if that was the case,” he says, still not looking up. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
Two days ago I’d have refused, deciding it was best to limit any one-on-one time with Elijah. I’ve sort of given up on that, I guess, and it’s not as if it matters.
No matter how appealing he grows, I’m not going downthatroad again.
“Let me just get dressed,” I tell him.
“You look fine,” he says. “This whole dog-and-pony show you’re putting on is unnecessary.”
