Annie just nods, beautiful and serene. “Now I want a soda.”
SEVEN
Annie
It’slate by the time we get to the place. Nico gets us a big cab (I manage to squeeze in two ‘cabs are here’ jabs) for all our luggage to take us to the… comically small murder shack that currently claims to be a motel.
“Is this some sort of sick joke?” I ask merrily.
He scrubs his hair sheepishly, but it’s already a disaster thanks to our four hour long convertible ride. Mine is a bird’s nest of tangles despite having it pulled back all day. “The rental place booked it for us,” he says unhelpfully.
“Why? Because when we die here, they won’t have to send us a new car?”
“Annie, please.” Nico looks exhausted.
Nico,DoctorNico, with the smarts and the whole ‘helping old Italian men and their restaurants’ thing, with the mad scientist hair that is tousled so handsomely it looks purposeful, who has my back in a fight with an actual meathead. With the warm brown eyes that turnconcernedinstead ofangrywhen he’s trying to do something stupid like ‘figure me out.’ Like I’m a science problem that needs analyzing and solving.
That was a mistake I let slip at Gino’s. He wasn’t supposed to see that. That what he said on the beach affected me in a way that was both sharp and aching, that it left an imprint so clear and deep that I was able to memorize it and repeat it verbatim.
That isn’t going to happen again.
I will also never again let that little part of me melt when he calls me ‘honey.’ When it comes out of his perfect mouth, I will not turn into an oozing puddle of goo. Or of honey, I guess.
Another tiny piece of me was almost disappointed when he didn’t open my car door for me, because he knew (rightfully so) that I would tear him to shreds about it. But I think I secretly would’ve liked it. I’m never going to think that again.
Because he’s already tired of me, and I need to make it to Miami.
I keep my mouth shut.
He doesn’t look at me and jumps out of the van. “Thanks so much, man,” he tells the cab driver with genuine warmth, because it seems that Nico really is that nice to everyone but me. Although he does unload all my luggage from the back, which is nice I suppose, but what’s even nicer is watching his biceps flex to do it.
“Leave them,” he tells me about my luggage. “I’ll come back for them. Stay here and I’ll go check us in.”
“If you insist,” I sniff. I’ll give him this, because I didn’t let him have my car door.
Nico walks back out with a room key and moves two doors down from where I’m standing. After a thirty-second battle with a key in the rusty lock, the door finally creaks open menacingly on its ancient, bloody hinges, signaling to the audience that whatever is in there is a Bad Idea.
I’m proven correct when Nico plants his hands on his hips and looks towards the sky. “For fuck’s sake.”
I inch towards him and peer around the door frame, bracing myself for the man in a clown mask we’ve just awoken from a nap.
It’s… a room. Technically. Everything is brown. Not chic leather brown. Not even trendy taupe. This is “fecal distress” brown. Shit-brown. The-color-of-shit brown.
One of the beds has a massive wet spot in the middle of it. We look up. The ceiling is leaking shit-brown water onto the shit-brown blanket.
“No, thanks,” I say amenably. “I’d rather sleep in the pile of used needles in the corner of the parking lot.”
Nico shivers. “I think I’ve just contracted Hep B.”
We both creep backwards.
“I’ll get us another room.”
“What if we just got a cab to literallyanywhere else?—”
Nico blows out an impatient breath. “Tried that already. They won’t give us a new car if we do that,” he sighs, like he’s just so burdened by logistics and not, say, the fact that the motel is leaking disease.
“Call me crazy,” I say, “but I’d rather lose the rental car than my skin.”
