“Dorito dust?” I hazard.
“Better than no Doritos at all.”
“Hit me.”
She does, and we walk back to the quilt festival, munching Dorito tidbits and talking about nothing at all, and at some point she says, “Is it really weird that I’m not thinking about Paul at all?” and I say, “No,” but what I’m thinking is,Oh, God, I am so, so,sofucked.
20
Eden
Joe picks us up and drives us to the hotel in Spokane. In the car, he and Rhys spar about college football—Rhys is a Ducks fans and Joe is a Cougs fan—and I sternly tell myself that Nothing Happened in the big box store.
We arrive at the hotel. Joe and Rhys work out the details about returning Rhys’s BMW, and then Joe pulls out, leaving Rhys and me at the sliding glass doors to the lobby.
We approach the desk, summoned forward by a clerk probably in his forties, dressed in a gray button-down and tie, with his hair in a man bun. “Two rooms for Hott,” Rhys tells him.
There’s a long pause while the clerk taps on his keyboard. And then taps again. And taps some more.
“We haveoneroom for Hott,” he says.
“I booked two,” Rhys says.
“I’m so sorry,” the clerk says. “We have just the one. Let me—” More tapping. “Unfortunately, we’re all booked up?—”
Rhys turns to me. I can’t read his expression. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”
My feet hurt. My brain hurts. I just want tolandsomewhere. And it’s not like we haven’t done this before. We shared a room last night.
“Please tell me it at least has two beds?” I ask the clerk.
“Two queens,” he confirms. “And I’ll give you a twenty-percent discount for the error.”
I look back at Rhys, who raises his eyebrows at me.
“I feel like if we didn’t kill each other last night, we’ll be okay?” I say.
Of course, last night wasbefore. Before the piggyback and the Bad Decision Panties on the store floor. Killing each other might be the least of our issues.
Still. If Rhys had any interest in acting on the chemistry that flared between us earlier, wouldn’t he have done it? He wasn’t jilted yesterday.
He has his phone out. He’s poking at the screen, and when I look over, I can see that he’s messing around with other reservation systems.
“There’s a big blues festival going on,” the clerk says, wincing apologetically. “And some kind of rock-collecting convention. Oh, right, and the UFO people. I’m so sorry. Big week in Spokane.”
Rhys takes a few more tentative stabs at his phone, then sighs heavily. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything else nearby. Unless you want to try to get a rental car and?—”
“No. This is fine. We’ll be fine.”
Famous last words.
“We’ll take it,” he tells the clerk.
We don’t talk in the elevator on the way up. When we reach the room, Rhys calls dibs on first shower. “For the good of the collective,” he says. “I can’t believe Joe didn’t throw me out of the car.”
I don’t tell him I love the way he smells or ask him if we can save water by showering together, though I do wonder what he’d say if I did.
Instead I offer to go throw in a load of laundry while he showers, saving myself from the (delicious) agony of picturing water sliding over golden skin.
