I stare at him. “What’s that for?”
“Your room.” He’s got another key ring. He puts it in his pocket.
“You got us…separate rooms?”
He gives me a funny look. “Yeah. I mean…” He slips his hands in his pockets and shrugs.
Suddenly the thought of Shane so far away from me, in a whole other room, practically seizes me with panic. “No.” I say it louder than I intended. “Don’t get a different room. Please.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he says, “Be right back.”
When he goes back inside the office, I wrap my arms around the urn and look up at Alkaid again. “You think I should forgive him?”
The star twinkles again, and I feel a warm sensation on the side of my head, like someone is laying a hand there.
I hug the urn close to me as Shane returns, opening the back of the Blazer to take out our stuff. “Guy was really weird about it, but he refunded the other room.”
I slide out of the passenger seat and hold Ev’s urn as Shane carries our stuff. I gather up the cushions from the backseat and carefully carry everything to the motel room. Once inside, I turn on the light and look around. There are two beds. So, it would have been silly then for Shane to have gotten another room. A waste of money. I put a cushion on one of the chairs and set Ev’s urn on it. I put my hand on the ugly floral bed spread. A huge waste of money. I’m sure Shane hasn’t got a lot of it with a kid.
After Shane sets down the last of our stuff, he gets on the phone. I pretend not to be listening as I get some food out of the tote, but I can tell he’s talking to Gina. Then I hear the distant, high-pitched voice of a child, and Shane laughs at somethingshe says. When he hangs up, he asks if I want to use his calling card to call my parents. I tell him I’d rather call them tomorrow before we leave.
“I saw a diner a couple miles up the road,” Shane says. “You want to grab something to eat there? Or do you just want me to make you a cup of noodles?”
I turn around and he’s standing behind me. “You want to make me dinner?”
“Of course.”
One second, I’m a couple feet from him, looking at the stubble appearing on his upper lip, then in the next I’m feeling that stubble as I kiss him on the lips. Hard.
It’s like in the movies when fireworks go off. It’s like when you touch one of those balls of electricity and you feel your hair raising from your scalp.
I pull away from him, and he’s looking at me as if he felt it too. “Let’s just stay here,” I tell him.
And he agrees.
We put Ev on a nest of pillows on the nightstand between the beds, and I turn on the TV. We try to find a movie or a show to watch, like the old days, when we’d stay up late, watching dumb shit and providing commentary like we were Bevis and Butthead.
We channel surf while we eat, but we don’t really find anything good in this backwoods place, so we sort of settle on a rerun ofMatlockthat gets fuzzy and flickers any time a car drives by.
“Who in the hell ever watches this?” Shane muses.
I look over at him sitting on the edge of the bed next to me. “Old people, I guess.”
“Yeah.” He takes one last bite from his Cup O Noodles. “And I guess one day we’ll be those old people.”
“Me and you, maybe. But not Everett.”
Shane looks solemn. “That’s true.” He stands up and takes our trash to throw away, pausing to make sure he puts anything plastic in the bag I brought along to toss in a recycling bin. My heart skips a beat.
I get out a cigarette and Shane watches me smoke for a second before he gets it from me and takes a drag.
“I must be a bad influence,” I say to him.
He exhales. “I smoked for a little while. When Mikayla was like, two. Me and Gina would split a pack at night after we put her to bed. We’d sneak outside, even when it was close to minus ten out so Mikayla wouldn’t smell it.”
I take the cigarette back. “I should probably quit.”
“Probably,” Shane agrees. “Why’d you start?”
