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“Yeah, he just got here.” I look over at him, and he winks.
“Great.” I brace myself for an onslaught of questions about how I ended up here and what could have gone wrong to need Emory’s intervention, but Mom just says, “I just saw the weather alerts, and I don’t think it would be safe for you to drive back right now.”
“Oh,” I say. Emory’s eyebrow quirks. “You don’t think we should drive back because of the snow?” I say, just to let him know what we’re talking about, though the explanation makes his eyebrow lift even higher.
“Do you still have your emergency credit card?” Mom asks.
“Yep,” I say, glancing toward my purse in the back seat.
“Great. Go to the nearest hotel and get both of you a room, okay? And tell Emory I’m so sorry and it’s not that I don’t trust him but this weather is scary, and I just want you to be safe.”
I nod even though she can’t see it, and then I mumble something that lets her know I understand, and I’ll follow her directions. All the while, I can’t take my eyes off Emory as he watches me, curiously wondering what’s going on. I had been worried that our little bubble on the side of the road would disappear as soon as we got back home. Well, if that’s true, at least I get to prolong it a little while longer.
“What’d she say?” Emory asks when I hang up the phone.
I check the screen again, just to make sure the call has ended, and then I grin, feeling a little bit drunk again.
“Iz-la,” he says, dragging out the nickname as he leans across the driver’s seat, his head falling to his shoulder. “I am not a fan of being kept in the dark. Especially when you have that look on your face.”
“She wants us to go to a hotel. Get separate rooms. And wait out the snow.”
We’re both quiet as my words hang in the air between us. Emory breaks first, his lips curving upward as he leans over the center console. I close my eyes and let him kiss me again, reveling in the sensation of butterflies bursting awake inside of my stomach.
“Hope you don’t mind spending all night with me,” I say, peering up at him under the whimsical glow of snow covering the windshield.
“You know how the saying goes,” Emory says, placing a kiss on my cheek, then my temple, then my lips again. “The best date is one where she gets dressed up for another guy, but ends up in a hotel with you.”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t think that’s a saying.”
“Well don’t fault me,” he whispers between kisses. “You’re the relationship expert here. And although I am just a lowly, but reformed, heartbreaker, I think we’re doing a bang-up job. The road trip, the snow—it’s all a perfect recipe for the start of something real.”
“Never thought I’d hear you talk about something real,” I say, watching intently to see if his reaction is genuine.
“Never thought I’d give a shit about what happens in Break Up Support Group,” he says. His fingers lace into mine, and he pulls my hand up to his lips. “And then I met you.”
Emory and I each hold a plastic key card for our adjoining rooms in the Texas-themed Best Western hotel. My pulse races a little more with each level the elevator climbs, and although I’m standing so close to him, our shoes and legs and hips are touching, I look only at the card in my hand. Emory taps his key card on top of my head.
“Someone’s quiet.”
“Can you blame me?” I ask, just as the elevator dings and the doors swing open. He grabs my hand. We step onto the maroon and tan carpet, following the signs down the hallway that match the ropes glued to the handrails down the center of the walls. Room 410 and 411 have doors right next to each other, marked by a gilded number sign in the middle of a set of plastic deer antlers.
Emory slips his key into the door slot and the handle lights up green. He tosses me a playful smile. “First one to the secret door wins,” he says, and then he pushes open his door and disappears inside.
“Ah, crap,” I say, rushing to open my door. It clicks open, and I burst inside the hotel room, running straight past the cowboy hat lampshade and to the locked door against the left wall. I twist the deadbolt and pull open the door.
Emory’s standing there, his hands pressing into each side of the door frame. The little compass charm on his bracelet catches the light from his room. “You lose,” he says.
I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him down to my level, kissing his ridiculously soft lips. “You cheated.”
“So …” he says, sliding his hands down my waist and settling them on my hips. “Did you see that complimentary nacho machine in the lobby?”
I grin. “Yeah I did.”
We help ourselves to nachos and a free bag of peanuts and several bottles of water from the hotel’s lobby. On the way back to our rooms, Emory takes a picture of me sitting on a giant ceramic cow in the hallway and embarrasses the hell out of me by saving the photo as his phone’s wallpaper.
“You owe me a stupid photo of you now,” I say a while later when we’re back in Emory’s room, and the nacho trays are nearly empty. “One that’s so awful it makes you look as dorky as I do on that stupid cow.”
“That’s impossible,” he says, shaking his head and licking cheese off his index finger. “I’m so damn handsome that every photo of me is a perfect one.”
