“I can’t even if I wanted to. Too drunk to drive.” I scoffed, trying to make light of it. I didn’t want that concerned and pitying expression in her eyes to stay there.
“Which one’s your car?” She looked around.
“It’s at Life’s A Beach. Ben’s got my keys. I’ll walk back and take a room in—”
“I’ll drive you,” she interjected. “My car’s over there.” She pointed toward an area farther up the road, on the other side of the street.
“No, that’s okay. Thank you. I got this.”
“Not leaving you here, Oliver.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me, stepping out of the umbrella’s perimeter.
I followed her to an old, red pickup that seemed odd belonging to her.
“It’s my … Never mind. Get in,” she ordered, and I waited, holding the umbrella over her head until she got into the driver’s seat.
Leaving the dripping umbrella on the floor, I buckled next to her. “Thanks.”
“I know a good place,” she said.
“January.”
She looked at me, and her face was so illuminated, and open, and bright that it darted right into my heart, and all I could do was repeat myself.
“Thanks.”
“Shut up,” she said with a chuckle and pulled out of the spot.
We drove silently toward the promenade. The only sounds were those of the engine, and the squeaks of the rusty springs of that truck whenever we hit a bump, and of the wipers chasing away the rain that kept falling on the windshield. It was surreal, but the haze in my head kept me from wondering about it.
January pulled over at the Ocean Breeze Motel. I was about to thank her and climb out when she extracted a card linked to a lanyard out of her coat’s pocket. “Just a sec,” she said, took out a cell phone, and texted something. “Okay, let’s go.”
Too bleary to think clearly, I followed her out of the truck and toward the L-shaped line of rooms. The rain had stopped.
“I work here,” she explained, walking next to me. “It’s a good place, and in your state, no one here would let you in at this hour if you walked up to the front desk. Just pay them in the morning when you’re fresh and good. Don’t worry about it; I texted the manager and said that it was an emergency for a friend.”
Been a while since I’d had a friend. I had a few mates in London, but not friends that would go out of their way for me. I wanted to tell her that but, instead, I asked, “You work here?” Her working at a motel didn’t add up in my head.
“Yeah, housekeeping. It’s a temporary thing, just until things fall into place,” she said. Her face was averted toward the card key she was sliding into the door lock. She then turned to look at me as the door clicked open. “I’m sorry I hit you.” The way her face contorted at that, which I could now see under the single light bulb above us, told me what was crossing her mind.
I was about to reach out and touch her face, if only to remove that expression from it, but January pushed the door open and stepped forward, into the room.
She turned the lights on by inserting the card into its device by the door, the lanyard dangling from it. “It’s a master key, so just leave it with reception in the morning. If you choose to stay, they’ll replace it with a regular key.” She said all of that as she moved efficiently through the room, turning on a side lamp, closing the curtains of the window that faced the parking lot and the promenade beyond it, and brushing her hand over the bed’s cover as if ensuring that it had been properly made.
I still stood by the closed door, watching her and feeling the ethanol vaporizing from my body. I didn’t want her to leave. She was like a sliver of light through dark storm clouds, appearing out of nowhere. We were both only twenty-two, and I hadn’t seen her in four years, but I felt that I couldn’t let her disappear into nowhere again, that I couldn’t go another day without her light, warmth, essence.
She came up to me, about to leave. She was smiling.
“January,” I said. My voice came out hoarse.
She stopped in front of me. I could smell the drying rain in her hair and clothes. We looked into each other’s eyes. All that blue skies in hers.
“Don’t stay with him,” she said. “Take yourself away in the morning and go. Don’t go back there. You have money, education, opportunities. Go to … I don’t know … Go to London, to New York. Just don’t be near him.” Somehow, it sounded like she knew what she was talking about from personal experience.
“I will.” I grabbed her wrist. The vapors still clouded my head, but I knew what I was doing when I added, “Come with me.”
January let out a little cackle. “I can’t.”
I trailed my gaze across her face. In this light, I could see the circles around her eyes, and a crease that was beginning to form between her brows, on her twenty-two-year-old forehead. “You look like you could use getting away from here, too.”
