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The tip of the pen slipped between her lips.
“You know they put the hole in the lid so you can’t kill yourself.”
Random wasn’t unusual for Danny.
Her eyes went up on a blink. “Baby, I—”
“The lid,” he said, bobbing his chin toward her, still watching the road. “Of the pen.” She took it from her mouth to look at it. “They put that hole in there, so if you swallow the lid while you’re chewing it, you can’t choke on it… I say you could still choke, but, you know, who’s gonna test that theory?”
“That’s interesting,” she said, not really sure why he’d felt the need to share the trivia.
“You think the internet will kill you, but you’ll put the pen in your mouth.”
Okay, so that was why.
She couldn’t equate the two. “The pen company don’t want to be sued,” she said. “They want to prove they did everything any reasonable person could do to protect those using the product. You can’t sue the internet.”
“The internet’s not trying to protect you?”
“It’s our job to protect ourselves,” she said, admiring the gleam of artificial light on the lid of her mother’s urn. “And the people we care about.”
“You won’t use the internet because you’re protecting yourself,” he said, like he wasn’t sure. “From what? What are you protecting yourself from?”
“What?”
“You think the internet is evil?”
“My mom didn’t trust it.”
“What did she think would happen? Something would jump out and grab ya?”
He gave her leg a sudden squeeze.
“You’re mocking my dead mother?” Tess said, sliding her ass down while bringing her feet up to the front edge of the seat, propping the notepad on her thighs and the end of the pen on her lip.
“Feet down.”
Tess groaned and let her heels slither back to the floor. “I think you should give up towing,” she said, pushing up to sit straighter. “It’s affecting your head.”
“I’ve seen a lot of car wrecks, Little Red.”
“Yeah,” she said, leaning toward him. “But those people didn’t have such a strong, careful, sexy driver, did they?”
One side of his mouth responded to her teasing, which was enough for her. Danny was a good driver, as far as she’d seen anyway. But his attention to her positioning was a surprise. He didn’t let her put her feet on the dash or on the seat. He allowed her to sleep twisted toward him, but that was about as much of a concession as he gave.
Righting the back of her chair that had been reclined while she was sleeping, obviously by her driver, Tess concentrated on the cards again.
“We have to stop at a library,” she said after a few minutes of pondering. “I must have missed something.”
“I can use the internet,” he said. “I can check it out for you, if you want.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
He snickered. “What do you think’s gonna happen to me? It’s a keyboard and a screen.”
“And a connection to the world,” she said. “Everything on the internet can be tracked, traced, followed.”
“That’s what you think?” he asked like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “You think we’re being followed?”
