Her eggs came scrambled. She considered them for a long moment, the expression of someone conducting a silent cost-benefit analysis, then turned it on me. I kept drinking. She picked up her fork, picked up the jug, and poured the cartoon lumberjack directly onto her eggs. She ate everything on herplate and did not say a word about any of it. In the cab she'd had a comment for everything. In a diner with bad syrup and no modifications she ate and said nothing. It was a level of restraint I'd stopped expecting from her since yesterday morning.
The brew was bad in the straightforward way, strong, simple, brewed without any pretension about it. I was on the second when London set down her fork, reached across the table, and picked up my rye toast.
I let her.
She was reaching for the second half when her expression caught, the moment she noticed what her own hand was doing. Her eyes came up. I raised mine.
"It was going to go cold," she said.
"That works out, then."
"You weren't going to eat it."
"You don't know that."
She ate the second half without comment. I set it down. Both hands flat on the table, out of harm's way. My cock had a separate opinion. I wasn’t consulting it.
I was three cups in when the laugh reached me from the counter. I hadn't seen London move. She had the phone by the time I got there, thumb already moving.
"I'm documenting this for my lawyer," she said, and surrendered it.
I put the phone back on the counter. Left her a bill and held her gaze long enough that the relevant information arrived without words. She pocketed it and returned to the couple at the far booth without comment.
London was watching me when I sat back down. "She was charming about it. You could study that technique."
"Cash is faster than charming, and cleaner."
"That's a bribe, not a method." She curled both palms around her mug. "I had the wifi password."
"I saw you work it out."
"I was twenty seconds from sending one message."
"Fourteen, by my count. You type fast."
She fixed on me across the table with an expression that wasn't pure irritation and hadn't resolved into anything I could read cleanly. Whatever it was, it had been building across since West Hollywood.
We were back in the cab at 7:22. The morning had committed to cold, the air thinner at this elevation, the peaks close enough that snow lines were visible on the upper faces. She sat in the passenger seat and faced the road ahead.
"Tonight," I said, once we were back on the highway, "we get to the first stop."
"Where?"
"Somewhere I can account for the exits."
She was quiet. "That's not a location."
"It is now."
She turned toward me, stayed silent for a moment, and faced forward.
The highway climbed north. The first real pine appeared along the ridge cuts on either side, not scrub, not brush, actual trees in black lines against the morning sky. The air through the gap had sharpened. She had the thermal from last night behind her head, and somewhere around mile six she shifted toward the glass.
London Grant said nothing for the next eighteen miles, which was somehow louder than the six hours when she'd said everything.
Chapter Three
LONDON
