“Good job I like sour cream and onion.”
He gave her a withering stare, then nodded toward the payment terminal.
“Busy day?”she asked, half teasing.
He blinked at her as if the idea of conversation were a foreign concept.“Not really.”
“What do you do after work?”
His eyes narrowed.“Look.I have a girlfriend.”
Kate found herself reddening.More out of anger than embarrassment.Did this monosyllabicchildreally think she was coming on to him?Someone should slap his face.
She drifted back across the parking lot, drink and chips in hand, smiling by this point.She couldn’t wait to tell Marcus about the kid at the desk.The night air held a faint diesel tang, mixed with the lingering sweetness of cut grass.Two moths battered themselves against the neon ‘VACANCY’ sign like tiny, exhausted souls.
The room felt different when she stepped back inside.
Not visibly.
Not tangibly.
Just… off.
Was there a faint chemical note overlaying the stale-damp smell she'd catalogued earlier?Something sharper.Something she couldn't name.
She paused.
Sniffed.
Nothing specific.Nothing alarming.Mainly mothballs.
She checked the bathroom.Nothing untoward. Messy, but quite clearly,hermess.
Probably just the clash of inside and outside smells, she told herself.Or the mattress.Or that hulking great wardrobe, full of mildew and naptha.
She tossed the Coke onto the plastic nightstand, ripped open the chips, and sank onto the bed.The sheets were thin enough to be nearly transparent.The television remote had one button missing.The TV itself crackled to life with a baritone voiceover and the faded colors of an early-2000s police procedural.
She kept the volume low.Just a murmur.Just enough to drown the silence.
Then she lay back.
Closed her eyes.
Exhaled.
The day unspooled behind her eyelids:
The Kingsleys.
Claudette's solemn face.
Hirschfeld's cool defiance.
Cox's insinuations, shadowing her thoughts even from a thousand miles away.
She put the tv on, the sight of other humans giving her a kind of reassurance, even with the sound turned down.Let the flickering scenes suck in her attention until she began to drift.
Not into rest, exactly—
