Page 52 of Fighting For You

I was still sitting there processing that when the bathroom door opened. Nora came out in the hotel bathrobe, her hair wet, her face scrubbed clean. She looked smaller without her boots on, standing barefoot on the old wooden floor. She looked at me sitting on the bed in my boxers holding a hair dryer and my half-damp shirt.

"They don't have laundry service," I said. "Hair dryer was the best I could do."

"Don't worry about it. Go shower. I'll finish."

When I came out in the other bathrobe, she was sitting in one of the chairs by the window. Everything was dry and folded on the dresser. She'd ordered tea from the front desk, two cups on the small table between the chairs, steam rising from both of them.

"I hope you don't mind," she said.

"Not at all."

I sat across from her. We looked out the window at the rain coming down over the mountains. The street below was empty. The boardwalks were dark. The only sound was the rain against the glass and the building settling around us.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't plan on getting us stranded."

"Don't apologize." She picked up her cup and held it in both hands. "I had a lot of fun today, Knox."

The room was quiet. The rain wasn't letting up. The evening stretched out ahead of us with nothing to fill it.

Nora was sitting sideways in the chair with her legs folded in front of her, her cup in both hands, her face turned toward the window. The neckline of her robe had fallen open and loose, and I could see the line of her collarbone and the skin below it where the fabric fell away. I thought briefly about what it would be like to slide my hand through that opening.

"Knox?"

I looked up.

"You okay?"

I sat up straighter. "Yeah."

There was a worn deck of cards on the table between us, sitting next to a pad of paper and a pen with the lodge's name on it. I picked them up.

"Do you know how to play anything?"

"I know a little poker." She shrugged. "I was never really good at it."

"You can't be that bad. Want to play?"

"Okay."

She was that bad.

We used sugar packets from the tea tray as chips. I dealt the first hand and explained the basics again as we went. She nodded along, picked up her cards, and immediately held them up to her face with both hands like she was reading a secret letter. Every time she had something worth keeping, she sat up a little straighter. Every time she had nothing, she sighed through her nose and rearranged her sugar packets into a neater stack. She bit her bottom lip when she was about to bluff, and she bluffed on almost every hand.

I could have read her from across the room. From across the table, she didn't stand a chance.

She lost the first three hands. She lost the fourth. She pushed her remaining sugar packets to the center of the table on the fifth and lost those too.

"Again," she said.

I gave her more sugar packets. She lost those.

"Again."

"Nora."

"I'm playing until I win."

So we played. She lost six more hands. She stopped sighing and started glaring at the cards like they had personally betrayed her. She stopped rearranging her sugar packets because she didn't have any left. I kept giving her more, and she kept pushing them to the center, and I kept taking them back.