She found some pajamas and put them on, climbed into bed. She lay there with her eyes closed for two hours. She didn’t sleep. Not at all.
Then she got up and grabbed her phone, texting the kids to let them know that she had arrived in South Lake Tahoe, and then texting Elysia and Whitney the same.
It was Elysia who was awake and responded immediately.
Good. I was worried.
No need to worry. Just got distracted.
It felt disingenuous. But she couldn’t talk about what had happened.
She waited in her room. And paced. Waited for him to come and knock. But he didn’t.
Finally she gathered all of her things and walked down toward where the car was parked. She could text him. He could text her. Finally, in a fit of frustration, she knocked on his door.
It only took a second for him to open it. Shirtless. He was only wearing his jeans, and she knew they were the same jeans that she had taken off of him last night, and there was something extremely intimate about this morning after she had tried not to have.
So this was what it was like. To be intimate with somebody when you weren’t in a relationship. When you hadn’t professed to love each other or made any promises about the future, and in fact actively couldn’t make promises about the future.
“I thought maybe you’d taken a bus back to Oregon,” he said.
“No. I just went to take a shower.”
“At about four o’clock.”
“You were awake?”
“I was a single dad. Everything wakes me up. Hypervigilance.”
“Well, then, don’t go calling me a coward if you didn’t try to stop me from going.” She didn’t know why it irritated her. That he’d done that. That he hadn’t tried to have the conversation then. Maybe if he’d done that, she just would have let him talk her back into bed.
The thought made her warm.
“I wasn’t going to tell you what to do.”
“You had no trouble with that just a few hours before.”
“Different contexts,” he said.
“I wasn’t running away. I needed a shower, and I needed to text everyone and let them know I wasn’t dead.”
“I see.”
“I forgot. I text Elysia and Whitney and the kids every time we get to a new location. I was distracted. They might have thought I was…serial killed or something.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. She could tell that he wanted to have a fight with her. She sort of wanted to have a fight with him. She wasn’t entirely sure why. But she felt something intense burning in her chest, and she needed to let it out. She just didn’t know exactly what it was. What it meant.
The easiest way seemed to be yelling. Or maybe sex. But neither one seemed like an easy thing to reach for while they were standing in that motel doorway, her on the outside, him on the inside. She could feel them both trying to manufacture reasons. So instead she took a step toward him and wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck, stretched up and kissed him. Just light. More of a friendly kind of thing really.
She slid her hand down his bare chest, and he growled. She liked that. It was a little feral and ridiculous, but it was really hot. Suddenly the kiss felt deeper than it had when she’d given it.
“See,” she whispered. “I didn’t run away.”
He looked at her, and she could see the question there. If she wanted to go right back into that hotel room and do more of what had happened last night.
“Yes,” she said softly. “But I suspect that we should talk.”
“I was afraid you would say that.”
