“I have six varieties of instant noodles.”
Sawyer turned her eyes to the heavens and sighed loudly. “I came prepared to rough it.”
“Come in, then,” Nellie chirped, clapping her hands together because there was no other possible response to a billionaire standing in a forest with emergency fleece. “I’ll give you the tour.”
The tour took approximately forty-five seconds.
“This is the kitchen,” Nellie said, indicating the camp stove, the overhead cabinet, and the small counter with its clip-on cutting board and the tin of cocoa powder and the mugs hanging from their little hooks. “This is the bathroom,” she continued, pulling back the curtain on the compact wetroom that could, by a generous stretch of definition, be described as containing a shower. Sawyer examined it and managed not to wrinkle her nose. “And this,” Nellie said, pointing at the back of the van, “is the bedroom.”
The bed was very narrow. It had a good mattress, which Nellie had upgraded herself with a piece of memory foam she’d had cut to size and was deeply proud of. It had a patchwork quilt that Paloma’s mother had made her three Christmases ago and which was, in Nellie’s considered opinion, the coziest object she possessed.
Sawyer looked at the bed. Then she looked at the ceiling, and she appeared to be conducting an interior audit of her own comfort requirements against the available data.
“How,” she said, choosing her words with great and visible precision, “do you live like this?”
“With tremendous joy,” Nellie informed her.
“The ceiling?—”
“Is cozy.”
“Nellie, I’m five-foot-ten.”
“I have plenty of room.” Nellie patted the quilt. “It’s very comfortable. Paloma always sleeps brilliantly in there.”
“Where does Paloma usually sleep?”
“On the bed.”
“And you?”
“Also on the bed, but in a friendly, organized—” Nellie gestured at the mattress. “We’re both quite small.”
Sawyer’s eyes narrowed, and Nellie pressed her lips together hard to keep the laughter from getting out again.
“How the other half lives,” Sawyer whispered, echoing Nellie’s words from that fateful office visit that seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Was that a joke? Are you making fun of me?”
“I am doing no such thing.” But Sawyer’s mouth had curved, that small, real movement that she kept well-rationed.
“You are! You’re doing the whole—” Nellie lifted her nose and parodied a posh swoop of the head around the space, which made Sawyer’s grin widen further.
“I’m simply taking in my accommodation.”
“Your accommodation?” Nellie flopped onto the bed and looked up at her. “For what it’s worth, the birds are extraordinary in the morning. And there’s something about the trees right at dusk where the last light catches the very tops and—” Nellie glanced toward the rear window, toward the patch ofsky where Eleanor’s crown would be visible if you knew to look. “Well, you’ll see.”
When she glanced back, Sawyer was watching her. Her jacket was over the chair hook on the back of the passenger seat, which meant she’d taken it off without Nellie noticing, and she was standing in just the silk shirt with her sleeves rolled to the forearms. She seemed, Nellie thought, not precisely relaxed—Sawyer would not relax in the next century, probably, it wasn’t in her architecture—but content. Consciously, deliberately here rather than elsewhere.
“I intend,” Sawyer murmured, “to make the most of it.”
She reached forward and pushed Nellie down onto the narrow mattress.
Nellie fell back with a squeak and half a laugh that she didn’t quite finish before their lips collided.
It felt like seconds. One moment, there had been the sudden kiss and the slightly undignified noise she’d made when her back hit the patchwork quilt, and then there had been—time, presumably, a series of events with logical causal sequence—and now there was the van ceiling above her and Sawyer’s silvery head between her thighs and Nellie was completely naked.
“I want you to know,” Nellie stuttered at the ceiling, in a high voice that was doing its best to remain conversational and only partially succeeding, “that I would never have predicted this about you when we first met.”
