"I didn't bring a change of clothes in," she said.
"No."
"Because I thought I had privacy."
"You do."
"You're in the room."
"I'll turn around."
I turned around. I heard the small sounds of someone getting dressed behind me — the zipper, the rustle of flannel — and I spent those thirty seconds doing the kind of focused breathing a man does when he needs to remind his body that it does not run the operation here.
"Okay," she said.
I turned back. She was dressed. Her hair was damp around her face where it had escaped the ponytail, and there was a pink flush across her collarbone from the shower, and she was looking at me with an expression that wasn't entirely readable.
"Your turn," she said.
I took a cold shower. Not because I was warm. I took it cold because the morning had already presented me with enough problems and I didn't need to add to them.
The water hit and I stood under it and thought about what I could actually afford on this job — which was nothing, and I knew it — and then I turned the temperature down another two degrees and stayed there until the answer felt like it was settled.
When I came out she was on the bed with her knees drawn up, working through the remains of my in-room coffee and looking at the ceiling. She'd found the spare pillow and had it tucked behind her back, and she'd organized the takeout containers from last night into a neat stack by the door without apparently thinking about it. She'd done the same thing with her toiletries on the bathroom counter, I'd noticed. Everything she owned, she organized. It was one of the twenty or thirty things about her that I'd registered and told myself was operational awareness.
"Ready?" I said.
She looked at me. Then her expression shifted — something caught, assessed, and landed somewhere she didn’t entirely hand over — and she said, "You look insufferably well rested."
"I sleep fine."
"That's deeply unfair." She swung her legs off the bed and stood up. "Let's go. I need to eat something before I become a problem."
"You're already a problem."
She pointed at me. "That was almost a joke. I'm noting the development."
I picked up her bag. She picked up mine. We both noticed. Neither of us mentioned it.
We were on the road by eight. She'd had the coffee, found the sun, and was sitting with her feet half-up on the dash andthe flannel pulled tight across her shoulders when the drive-through came up outside Tonopah — a faded yellow overhang over two lanes, a hand-painted board supplementing the main sign, a car ahead of us already pulling out. I rolled the window down. The person at the window was a woman around forty, wearing a headset and the particular expression of someone who had processed several thousand orders and expected to process several thousand more before anything surprised her.
London sat up.
"Good morning," London said.
"Morning. What can I get you?"
"I'd like eggs."
"We've got the breakfast burrito, the egg and cheese sandwich, or the combo platter."
"What's in the burrito?"
"Eggs, cheese, sausage, salsa."
"What kind of sausage?"
"Pork."
