“I don’t know,” she hedged. “IVe got this thing … but I guess I can move it.” Not for the first time, Harper gave thanks that video phone technology had never really caught on. Adam always claimed he could tell when she was lying, something about the way she narrowed her eyes or played with her left earlobe. She didn’t really buy it—but still, better safe than sorry
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I don’t want to deprive some lonely guy out there his long-awaited chance to—”
“Shut up,” she said irritably. “First of all, this is more important. Second of all, there is no lonely guy—I don’t do desperate. Third of all,” she added, figuring it couldn’t hurt to appear a little in demand, “he can wait.”
“If you’re sure …”
“Positive,” she assured him, wondering how it was that she’d become the one talking him into this little shindig, given that it was really the last place she wanted to be. “How about eight?” she suggested, trying to muster up some fake enthusiasm.
There was a pause.
“Maybe a little earlier?” he requested. “I have to be out of there by nine—I promised Beth I’d go give her some moral support at the diner. It’s her first night of work.”
“Beths working at the diner?” Harper asked incredulously. “Our diner?” She smirked, imagining the preppie princess decked out in the Nifty Fifties tack costume (pink tank tops and poofy fluorescent green skirts with crinolines underneath), smeared with ketchup and barbecue sauce and smelling like stale pickles. This day was looking up.
“Yeah, her last job wasn’t really paying enough,” Adam confided. “You know, her family …” his voice trailed off, but he didn’t really need to continue. Grace was a small town, and even before Adam and Beth had started dating, Harper had known exactly how that story ended. “Her family …” was packed like sardines into a tiny ranch house in a squalid development one step up from the trailer park. Her parents worked three jobs between the two of them and still struggled to buy new clothes every year for their swiftly growing twin sons. Her family’s one car, a fifteenyear-old station wagon, broke down more days than it ran. Beth’s family, in essence, worked on a simple principle: Ask not what your family can do for you, but what you can do for your family. It seemed that Beth was stepping up to the plate once again—and Harper supposed that she should dig down inside herself and find a little sympathy, or at least a little respect.
On the other hand, there were a lot of things she should do. “Should” didn’t have much of a hold over her these days. “Could” was, after all, so much richer in possibility.
“So I think it’s a great idea!” Harper enthused, as a plan began to form in her mind and a dark smile crept across her face.
“What idea?” Adam asked, confused.
“Your idea, genius. Moral support—we’ll just have our meeting at the diner, and then we can all cheer her on. It’ll be such a great surprise.” As in: Surprise! Devoted boyfriend that I am, I brought along all my friends to watch you serve and clean and grovel for tips, and basically humiliate yourself in front of everyone you know on your first day of work. Don’t you love me, baby?
Plus, added bonus, Harper realized: a new locale for the meeting would guarantee a nonrepeat of the hot tub incident. Party planning in an empty mansion with plenty of drinks and a giant hot tub had seemed like a good idea at the time—but Harper still shuddered at the memory of the half-naked Kaia rubbing herself all over Adam. Oh, you look so tense—do you want a massage? Please, who knew people still used that line? (And why hadn’t she thought of it first?) It was a mistake she’d vowed never to make again.
“I don’t know,” Adam said doubtfully. “She might not want us all there—not on her first day and all.”
“Hey, we’re her friends, aren’t we?” Harper wheedled, twirling the phone cord around her fingers and hoping he would take the bait. “Come on, you’re a guy, what do you know about what she wants? Speaking as a girl, I can assure you that she’ll be totally grateful.”
“You think?”
Eyes narrowed, Harper smiled.
“Trust me.”
Late Saturday afternoon, Adam pulled the car into the empty parking lot and the two of them stared up at the dark, abandoned building that loomed before them.
“It’s perfect,” Kaia breathed.
And it was. The old Cedar Creek Motel (no creek in sight, of course—only a moldy drainage pipe and a dirty concrete pit that had once served as the “swim at your own not insignificant risk” pool), covered in dust and exuding a stale aura of hollow disrepair. A tilted sign with cracked neon tubing hanging over the entrance hailed the wreck as GRACE’S FINEST LODGING, complete with REAL COLOR TV and 100% REFRIGERATED AIR. The two-story motel, a fiftyroom complex on the outskirts of town, had once been painted a proud flamingo pink, standing as a boldly fluorescent oasis amidst the desert wasteland; now the grayish husk of a building, sallow weeds nipping at its foundations, effortlessly faded into its environment, an overgrown concrete cactus. Unlike the empty, gutted storefronts that littered the main streets of Grace, the Creek stood whole and complete—no boarded-up windows, no graffiti covering its walls, no garbage strewn across its empty parking lot. But it had been abandoned for months.
Not surprising—Grace didn’t have much of a tourist trade. There was no reason to pull off the interstate and drive twenty miles down a bumpy local road, just to stay in a dilapidated no-tell motel. Tourists had better things to do with their time—and those truckers who did pass through town usually took one look at the Creek and decided they’d be better off sleeping in the cab of their trucks.
Kaia and Adam approached the lobby door—locked, but not boarded up—and Adam pulled out the set of keys he’d snagged from his mother’s real estate office. She’d been trying to unload the place for months with, unsurprisingly, no luck.
They stepped inside—and the normal, in color, living, breathing world outside disappeared.
“It’s like a ghost town in here,” Kaia whispered in wonder. “As if everyone just picked up and left one day, just disappeared—and no one’s touched it since.”
And it did seem as if the lobby had sat frozen in time since the day the motel’s owners had skipped town, a few steps ahead of the bankers trying to collect on a year’s worth of missed mortgage payments. A thick layer of dust covered everything, but the furniture, the dingy carpeting, the vintage seventies wallpaper, was all still intact. Preserved. And waiting.
“No one wants to spend the money to clear it out,” Adam explained, stepping behind the reception desk and smearing a track through the thick layer of dust with his index finger. Even the reservation book (no newfangled computer system for this motel) still lay open atop the desk, he marveled. He flicked the light switch on the wall behind him—nothing. No electricity, but that wasn’t a problem; the afternoon sun filtered in through the lobby’s small windows. It was dim and shadowy, but they would be able to see. “They’re just waiting for someone to buy it,” he explained to Kaia, enjoying, as he often did when he was with her, the unusual sensation of being an expert; she knew so much, but nothing about the West, about life in a small town, about anything that mattered—really, she needed him. And she seemed to know it. “Then the new owners will figure out what to do with all this stuff,” he continued, gesturing toward the vinyl chairs and woodpaneled coffee table to their right. “Or maybe they’ll just tear it down. Cool, huh?”
“I think it’s creepy,” Kaia said in a hushed voice, pressing close to him.
Adam had grown up amidst the ruins of Grace’s past—playing spies in the empty shells of old factories, hunting for buried treasure around the abandoned mines. But he put a comforting hand on Kaia’s back—of course she wouldn’t be used to that kind of thing, he reminded himself.
“Come on,” he said, leading her through the dark lobby. “Let’s take a look. It’s perfectly safe.”
She stayed by his side, and they crept down the hallway, explorers in
a lost world. Not that there was much to explore. The surprisingly spacious lobby, a narrow hall with peeling orange wallpaper and a long stretch of numbered bedroom doors, a cramped staircase leading up to an identical hallway on the second floor (though here the wallpaper was green and purple—or had been, until all the colors faded to gray). And that was about it.
“This is the place,” Adam said with confidence, as they surveyed the “courtyard,” a paved area by the empty pool with some plastic tables and chaise lounges—he could already picture the scene, drunken seniors spilling outside, dancing in the moonlight, hooking up in the shadows. It was perfect. “It’s on the edge of town, so no one will notice us here, it’s big, it’s dark—this is the place.”
“We should check out a room first, before we decide, don’t you think?” Kaia asked.
“Aren’t you scared?” Adam teased. “Ghosts of truckers past, and all?”
“I think I can handle it,” Kaia said with a smile. “Just stay close.”
They chose a room on the first floor, at the end of the hall. Adam pulled out his mother’s skeleton key and turned it in the lock (Cedar Creek was a bit behind the motel curve—the electric key card craze had passed them by). They stepped inside.
The room was musty and dark, and just as frozen in time as the rest of the building. But it was a motel room nonetheless—bathroom, chair, TV—and queen-size bed.
What more did you need?
“I have to admit,” Kaia began, “it looks—aaah! What the hell was that?” She squealed and threw her arms around Adam as a grayish white streak raced across the floor and disappeared into the far wall.
“Did you see that?” she asked between rapid, panicked breaths.
“It’s just a mouse,” he assured her. “No big deal.”
“It practically ran over my foot!” Her arms still around him, she squeezed tighter.
“Hey, it’s okay. It’s gone now.” He rubbed her back for a moment until her chest stopped heaving and her muscles unclenched. “It’s okay now,” he repeated. She closed her eyes and slumped against him, leaning her head against his chest. He stared at the wall over her shoulder, trying to focus on the complicated pattern of flowered diamonds, on the large spiderweb dangling from the upper right-hand corner of the ceiling, on the critique his swim coach had given him yesterday after a subpar performance in the butterfly heat. On anything but the body quivering in his arms.
Kaia looked up at him, his face only inches from hers.
“Good thing you were here,” she said softly. “I’m terrified of mice—but with you here, somehow I feel so safe.”
Adam blushed and mumbled something incomprehensible.
“It’s funny,” Kaia said, leaning closer and tightening her grip. “I’ve only known you for a few weeks, but I just feel so close to you. Sometimes I think …” Her voice faded away, and then she tipped her face toward him and closed the narrow gap between them, pressing her lips to his.
For a moment he responded, pressing his body to hers, pulling her tight, his lips opening slightly, his tongue gently running along her lower lip, tasting her—
And then he pushed her away.
“What are you doing?” he asked harshly.
A look of surprise and what might have been anger flickered across her face. And then she crumbled.
“I—I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I don’t know what I was—you brought me here, and we’re all alone, and then you brought me to the bedroom, and—”
“We’re scouting locations for a party,” he yelled, backing away from her. Overreacting. (Had he been sending out some kind of messages? Hadn’t he, in fact, kissed her back? But he cut off that line of thinking before it could go any further. He couldn’t afford to go any further.)
“I know, I’m sorry—I told you, I don’t know what I was thinking. I just—got carried away.”
She raised her hands to her face and turned away from him.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said in a muffled voice. “I’m sorry.”
Adam instinctively reached out a hand to comfort her, to still her shuddering shoulders, and then, on second thought, let it drop to his side.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “Don’t be embarrassed. If I—if I gave you some kind of wrong idea, I’m—it’s just, you know. Beth. And I—”
“Can we just go?” Kaia asked, turning around again, her eyes dry. “I think we should just go now.”
The awkward pause lasted all the way out of the building, across the parking lot, and throughout the interminable ride back into town.
Kaia leaned her cheek against the cool glass of the car window and sighed, remembering when seducing a guy meant slipping into some sexy lingerie, crawling into his bed, and waiting for him to come home and get his surprise. Either that or, if she was feeling lazy, just grabbing the nearest hot guy and pulling him into a lip-lock. No questions asked.
Things were so much simpler on the East Coast.
Okay, so seducing Mr. All America was somewhat more interesting—but it was also turning out to be a lot more work.
She darted her eyes to the left, admiring his profile; he sat rigidly in the driver’s seat, hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the wheel, eyes resolutely focused on the road. This guy had by-the-book written all over him. Well, that’s why she’d picked him, right? She liked a challenge. And even if his heart was still totally committed to Beth, she now had some concrete evidence that his body was less than hopelessly devoted. No, his body seemed to have some ideas of its own.
They hadn’t spoken since pulling out of the motel parking lot, and Kaia had plenty of quiet time to plan her next move. She just wasn’t sure what it should be. She’d come so close back there, with the ridiculous mouse scare—and damsel in distress had certainly seemed the right way to go. But she was getting a little tired of waiting around for him to sweep her onto his white horse and off into the sunset; maybe it was time to be a little less subtle.
Adam parked the car in the diner lot and hopped out. Kaia waited a moment, and when it became clear that he wasn’t planning on opening her door for her (as he usually did), she got out as well. They walked together toward the entrance, Adam careful to keep at least a foot of space between them. Kaia could feel the guilt coming off him in waves, and she made sure to compose her face into the perfect combination of embarrassment, rejection, and vulnerability.
Just to rub it in.
Before they stepped inside the restaurant (undeserving as it was of the name), he pulled her aside, grasping her wrist to get her to stop—then dropping it quickly as if the touch of her skin had burned.
“Listen, Kaia, I’m really sorry—again—if I sent you the wrong signals or something,” he stammered, rubbing his temples and looking down at his feet. “I don’t want you to feel like, well—” He paused and finally looked up, meeting her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he finished lamely.
“Don’t worry about it,” she assured him. “It’s totally okay. I’m okay.”
But she averted her eyes and let her voice waver, and she knew he didn’t quite believe her.
Good.
“Here they are,” Adam said, in a light and brittle voice. He waved frantically toward the silver Camaro pulling into the lot. Harper and Miranda hopped out and jogged toward them, Kane loping behind at a more leisurely pace.
“Well?” Harper asked, before anyone had a chance to say hello. “Did you find a place?”
“Impatient much? Wait until we sit down “Adam told her, visibly relaxing now that it was no longer just the two of them. Kaia suspected that with all the excitement, Adam had almost forgotten their original reason for visiting the motel, or the triumph he’d felt when declaring it the perfect spot. He caught her eye, and the tips of his ears turned a bright red—was he thinking not of the motel’s ample party space or conveniently out-of-the-way location, but of the feel of her skin beneath his wandering hands, the touch of her warm breath on his face? She gave him a cryptic half smile?
??and he quickly looked away.
The group crowded inside and grabbed a booth next to the jukebox. Kaia would have sacrificed a few quarters to save herself from the tedious Ricky Martin song currently booming through the speakers positioned over every table, but she’d taken a quick look at the playlist last time she was there. If you weren’t an NSYNC fan and didn’t want to groove to the sweet sounds of Britney Spears or the Beach Boys, there wasn’t much there. Kaia grimaced, wondering how much she’d have to pay to get them to turn the music off.
As the rest of the “gang” bantered back and forth, Kaia quickly scanned the menu, reconfirming for herself that there wasn’t a thing on it she wanted to eat. She certainly wasn’t going for the “Sushi Special,” the mere thought of which filled her with nausea. (They were five hours from the nearest ocean and no freshwater in sight; the fish on the menu might very well have been, as advertised, the “catch of the day”—but which day? And in which year?) She did her best to suppress a sudden pang of homesickness—there was a little place in the West Village that served thirty different kinds of sushi, all better than anything you could get in Japan (which she knew from personal experience). She and her friends had made it a policy to stop there at least once a week—and the secluded park just down the street made the perfect spot for a picnic, as she and an incredibly hot NYU student had discovered one night. He’d satisfied her craving for sushi, and she’d satisfied his for something equally fresh and spicy. One of those perfect New York nights. It all seemed a very long time ago—and very far away.
Thankfully, before she could spiral downward into a cesspool of nostalgia and self-pity, the waitress showed up to take their order—and the shock of it was enough to slam Kaia back into the present. She was surprised enough by the quick service, but she was even more surprised that the waitress, beneath the tacky spangled tank top and gaudy makeup, was Beth.