Chapter Four
RAFE
ONE SECOND THE MOTELroom was quiet. The next she was upright, hair sideways across her face, taking in the ceiling, the teal carpet, the bad art, the AC unit still rattling out its one-note contribution to the morning — running the full inventory with the expression of someone being handed evidence she was not prepared to accept.
I was already dressed. I'd been up since five, run through the threat picture on the burner, confirmed the operation was clean and holding. I was on my second cup of terrible in-room coffee when London's eyes tracked across the room and found me in the chair by the window.
"Why," she said, "do you look like a person?"
"That's a low bar."
"It's six in the morning."
"Seven forty-two."
She turned to look at the window as though checking my math against the available light evidence. The light confirmed it was seven forty-two. She appeared to resent this.
"I smell like a thrift store," she said.
"You smell fine."
"I smell like someone else's decade." She dropped back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling with the specific despair of a woman running a very thorough inventory of how her life had arrived at this point. "I have been in this outfit for two days."
"One and a half."
"That's not the part that was supposed to get better." She sat up again. The ponytail had completely abandoned its original geometry overnight, and what remained was a loose brunette knot at the back of her neck, dark against the flannel, entirely uncalculated. "Tell me there's coffee."
I held out the second cup.
She crossed the room in bare feet and took it without looking at me, which was a tactical error on her part because I was looking at her. The flannel was half-untucked, the hem of it falling past the waistband of the thrift store jeans she'd slept in, and her feet were bare on the teal carpet and she looked like she'd just woken up in my space and was entirely at home in it.
That was something I needed to stop thinking about immediately. I put my eyes back on the window and did not entirely succeed.
She took one long sip and closed her eyes.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I can work with this."
"Good."
"I'm going to need the bathroom for twenty minutes."
"Take thirty."
Her eyes opened. "You're being generous. That's suspicious."
"We've got a long drive."
She studied me over the rim of the cup for a moment — the way she did when she was deciding whether something was a setup. Then she turned and went to the bathroom with the cup and closed the door.
I heard the shower start three minutes later.
Here is what I did not think about: the fact that London Grant was in a motel shower approximately twelve feet from where I was standing, hot water running, the flannel and the jeans and whatever was under them on the bathroom floor. I did not think about the bare shoulder I'd registered twice in the truck. I did not think about the line of her throat when her head tipped back, or what her voice would sound like if it lost its edges.
I thought about all of that anyway. Thoroughly and in sequential order. I was still thinking about it when the shower shut off and I heard the brief silence that meant she was standing in front of the mirror, and then the door opened.
She came out in a towel.
She had the flannel in one hand and was reaching for the jeans on the bed and had clearly not thought through the sequencing, because she stopped when she registered me and I watched her recalculate.
