by Susannah Nix
Until it started to get too hot and stuffy. Adam was right—with the bathroom door closed, the steam combined with the lack of air-conditioning turned the small space into a sauna pretty fast. She decided against washing her hair, which she wouldn’t be able to blow dry anyway, and switched the water to cold for a minute to cool off before stepping out of the shower.
It was no fun pulling her clothes on over her damp, sweaty skin, but she didn’t have the option of walking around shirtless like Adam, so she sucked it up and got fully dressed. When she pulled open the door, sighing with relief at the influx of cooler air that hit her skin, she found Adam bent over examining her knitting.
He jolted upright, raising his hands like a criminal cornered by the police. “I wasn’t touching it, I swear.”
“Okay.” She carried her dirty clothes over to her suitcase and stuffed them deep inside.
“What are you making?” he asked, edging toward the bed.
“A shawl.”
“Is it for your grandmother?”
“No, it’s for my best friend for her birthday.”
He nodded and sank down on the foot of the bed.
Olivia went back to her knitting, settling down on the floor again with her back against the window. Outside, the rain pattered a steady, lulling rhythm, punctuated by an occasional increase in intensity when a gust of wind blew it against the glass.
Adam pulled out his phone with a sigh, thumbed through it for a minute, then shoved it back in his pocket with another, louder sigh. He got up and wandered over to the minifridge, stooping to examine its contents for a minute before shutting it again. He paced over to his suitcase, stared at it for a second, then paced over to the window to stand next to Olivia again.
“Dude, you’re making me nervous. Find something to do.”
“I’m bored,” he said with a grumbly sigh. “I can’t even play games on my phone, because I don’t want to run the battery down. Not that I have a cell signal.” He glanced at her. “Have you heard anything more from Gavin?”
She set down her knitting and checked her phone. No new emails or texts. “Nope,” she said, picking up her knitting again.
It wasn’t even ten in the morning. This was going to be one long-ass, unbearable day.
Adam sank down on the bed again. “What the hell did people do before electricity and television and the internet?”
“I think most of them worked themselves half to death just to stay alive.”
“Okay, but what about rich white people with servants to do all the work for them? How the hell did they pass the time?”
She thought about all the costume dramas she’d watched. “I believe their lives were so dull they considered a turn about the room entertainment.”
His eyebrows lifted in amusement. “So I should go back to pacing, then?”
“Please don’t.” She tried to recall what else the idle rich in historicals did to fill their time between meals and dressing for meals. “They wrote a lot of letters. There’s probably a pen and stationery in the desk if you want to give it a shot.”
He made a face. “I’m not doing that.”
“Needlecrafts,” she said smugly over her knitting.
“Good for you, but I seem to have left my embroidery back in LA.”
“Painting, drawing, music, and other artistic endeavors.”
“None of which is of any use here in this motel room.”
“They read a lot—or read aloud to each other.”
“Do you have any books?”
“On my phone.”
“Great.” He fell backward onto the bed, arms akimbo above his head, and let out another dramatic sigh. “I guess I’ll just lie here and contemplate existence, then.” Who knew he was such a baby?
“They also played games,” she offered.
He swiveled his head toward her hopefully. “Do you have any games?”
“On my phone.”
“No deck of cards in your Bag of Holding? I’m disappointed in you, Woerner.”
Her stomach did a swoop. It had annoyed her the first time he’d called her by her last name, but she was starting to like it. “Too bad you can’t play D&D with just two players.”
“You can, actually, but one person has to play the dungeon master and all the other party members and NPCs.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sounds like a lot of effort.”
“It’d be pretty impossible without internet access or rule books to refer to.”
“Or dice,” she added.
He shrugged. “I have a dice app on my phone.”
“You really are a nerd,” she exclaimed in delight.
“Are you surprised?
“Yes. You’re way too hot.” The words tumbled out before she could stop them.
He managed to look startled, dismayed and flattered all at once. “I don’t know if that’s more insulting to me or to nerds.”
Olivia concentrated on her knitting, pretending she hadn’t just overplayed her hand. “I just called you hot, so it’s probably not more insulting to you.”
“But it implies you didn’t think I was interesting because of the way I look.”
“Well that’s true.” She risked a wry grin and he huffed out a laugh.
His gaze lingered on her, long enough to make her uncomfortable again. “Teach me to knit.”
She stared at him in surprise. “You’re not serious?”
He came over and sat down next to her on the floor. The spicy-sexy scent of his hair product perfumed the air between them. “Why not?”
She didn’t know why not, except it wasn’t something she could imagine herself doing.
But she had an extra pair of needles and some worsted waste yarn in the bottom of her knitting bag, so what the hell? At least it would pass the time.
Adam groaned in frustration as yet another stitch escaped off his needle. “Why am I so bad at this?”
Olivia reached out and pinched the tiny loop between her thumb and forefinger before it could unravel. “You’re doing fine. You should have seen me when I first started.”
The thing about teaching Adam to knit that she hadn’t previously considered was that it required them to sit very close together. Even worse than that, it required her to touch his hands—a lot. She’d had to show him how to hold the needles, and where to insert the needle into the loop, and how to wrap the yarn around and transfer the stitch from one needle to the other.
Not to mention, there were a lot of dirty-sounding phrases involved in knitting. Every time she had to tell him to “insert the point” or “stick it in there,” she felt herself flush. It would be one thing if she was the only one conscious of the double entendre. But every time she said something like that, Adam would give her this look, like he was thinking about it too, and then they’d both be thinking about it, and she’d flush even more.
She’d even found herself uttering the phrase “just the tip,” which had driven them both into a five-minute fit of hysterical giggles.
“Did you think it would be easy?” she asked as she carefully placed the loop back on his needle.
“Maybe? Easier than this, anyway.”
“What exactly about using two sticks to turn a piece of string into clothing sounds easy to you?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“Not there,” she said when he inserted his needle into the wrong side of the stitch.
He course corrected, the tip of his tongue sticking out as he concentrated on wrapping the yarn around his needle. “I guess I never really thought about it at all, except as something old ladies do.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “And if old ladies can do it, it must be easy?”
“Well…yeah?”
“It’s not easy.” She nudged his shoulder with hers, only barely resisting the urge to lean against him.
“I’m figuring that out.” He sighed and lowered his small knitted rectangle to his lap. “My hands hurt, and it’s getting too dark to see.
”
She turned and looked out the window. Ominous dark clouds were building to the south. The next band of the storm was coming.
“We should go grab some sandwiches from the office,” she said, checking her phone and realizing it was past noon. Somehow they’d wasted over two hours knitting.
“Sounds like a plan.” Adam stood and offered her a hand off the floor.
She accepted it with only a small hesitation. When his fingers closed around hers, firm and strong, she tried very hard not to feel like Elizabeth Bennett being handed into a coach by Mr. Darcy.
But she did. Oh, she did feel like that. So much so that when he let go of her, she dropped her hand to her side and flexed her fingers just like Matthew Macfadyen in that Pride and Prejudice gif she’d reblogged a million times on Tumblr.
Which maybe made her the Darcy in this situation? Because she was the one who’d liked Adam and had her petition rebuffed—even if it had been a request for a professional reference instead of a marriage proposal. And now she was the one who still liked him despite herself, when he didn’t like her at all.
Except he liked her a little, didn’t he?
He liked being with her better than Gavin. He’d said as much.
He just wasn’t attracted to her the way she was attracted to him. But that was okay. That was fine. She only had to keep being normal around him in this absurd situation in this small room they were stuck in together with the giant bed. That was no problem at all.
“Aren’t you going to put your shoes on?” Adam asked. “Or do you not want to go for sandwiches after all?”
“No, I do,” Olivia said, snapping herself out of her daze. “I definitely want to go.”
Chapter Thirteen
The sandwiches were made with Wonder Bread and bright orange squares of American cheese with lots of yellow French’s mustard. To go with them there were single-serving bags of chips in a variety of flavors, and packets of Nutter Butters and Chips Ahoy cookies, and a cooler full of lukewarm cans of Coke.
It reminded Olivia of elementary school field trips, eating her sandwich on the bus out of a paper bag on the way back from the San Jacinto Monument or the Museum of Natural Science.
Except instead of a bus she was sitting in the recently renovated lobby of a Quality Inn, listening to a weather radio with a bunch of other stranded travelers. It felt like the setup for a Twilight Zone episode where they all realize the world has ended without them and they’re the only people left alive—only at the end it turns out it’s not the world that’s ended, it’s just their lives, and they’re all trapped in purgatory together.
There was definitely a purgatory-esque theme to this entire trip.
As she ate her ham and cheese sandwich, she watched Adam on the other side of the room. He was standing by the trash can, peeling an orange as he talked to a beautiful, tall brunette. She was dressed in a cute matching workout top and tights like she’d just come from the gym—although there was no gym at the motel—and a full face of makeup. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail so smooth and bouncy it made Olivia run her fingers through her own disheveled layers that were crying out for the aid of a blow dryer.
For once she hadn’t bothered to put on makeup, and now she was regretting it, because Adam was talking to a beautiful woman with perfectly lined lips and he actually seemed to be enjoying himself.
Olivia had never seen him like this. He was lively and engaged, making eye contact and even smiling. But then who wouldn’t smile at a woman who looked like that? She had the look of a former beauty queen or cheerleader turned pharmaceutical rep. The kind of woman who probably had an Instagram full of perfectly framed and filtered artistic selfies, and five thousand followers she was hoping to turn into a hundred thousand followers and a spot on a reality TV show.
They made a handsome couple: Adam with his broad shoulders and granite jaw, and Ponytail with her flat stomach and perfect posture. They would have the most amazing, dark-haired, insanely fit babies.
Olivia’s eyes fell on Adam’s hands, appreciating the confident dexterity of his fingers as he peeled his orange. He freed a segment of fruit and raised it to his lips, meeting Ponytail’s eyes and smiling as he popped it into his mouth.
She was gazing back at him with a rapt sort of attention that basically screamed I want to have sex with you. Who wouldn’t? The guy could make eating an orange unbelievably sexy. Imagine what he could do with those hands and mouth on a woman’s body.
Adam said something that made the woman laugh, and she reached out to touch him, her manicured fingers stroking over the length of his forearm.
Olivia’s stomach clenched and she turned away, looking out the window where the storm clouds continued to darken. Thunder rumbled a warning in the distance, and she shoved the last bite of sandwich in her mouth, grabbing some extra chips and cookies off the counter before making her way over to Adam.
He turned away from his companion as Olivia approached, and she felt the woman’s eyes rake over her the way a rhinoceros beetle sizes up its adversary before a duel. Ponytail didn’t know she had nothing to worry about. Olivia was ceding the field.
“I’m going to head back before the rain picks up,” she told Adam. “Do you want me to leave you the umbrella?”
“No, I’ll come with you,” he said before turning back to the woman and bidding her goodbye with a “Nice talking to you” and a “Maybe I’ll see you later.”
Olivia could guess what that meant. She totally understood if he wanted to spend the night in this other woman’s room. What else was there to do in this godforsaken place? What she didn’t understand was why he didn’t stay and keep talking to his new lady friend.
Adam retrieved their umbrella from the bucket by the door and flicked it open as they stepped outside. He held it over their heads as they hurried down the sidewalk to their room. A gust of wind drove a blast of rain into them, and he reached his free arm around Olivia’s shoulders, drawing her closer as he turned his body to shield them both from the sideways rain.
Her hand bumped against his leg, coming dangerously close to his groin, and there was nothing else to do but put her arm around him to keep that from happening again. She rested her hand on his lower back, her fingers curling slightly around the thick column of muscle that ran alongside his spine. His T-shirt was so thin she could feel the heat of his skin, and the way his back flexed and shifted with every step.
She stumbled a little, and his hand squeezed her shoulder, steadying her as he pulled her even closer. She was huddled against him now, almost leaning on him, her cheek against his chest as they hurried back to the shelter of their room.
It wasn’t until they were safely back inside and he’d let go of her that Olivia realized she’d been holding her breath. That had to be why she felt so dizzy. It was lack of oxygen, and not their clumsy, impromptu cuddle that made it so difficult to catch her breath.
Adam leaned outside to shake some of the water off the umbrella before shutting the door against the driving rain. “We left just in time,” he said, propping the dripping umbrella in the corner as a rumble of thunder rattled the window.
“I didn’t mean to drag you away from your new acquaintance. Who was she?” Olivia tried not to sound jealous, because she couldn’t blame him for wanting to talk to someone who wasn’t her after three straight days of forced proximity. They were like two characters handcuffed together in a tropey TV episode.
“I think she said her name was Becca?” Adam replied on his way to the bathroom. “Or maybe Beth. I forget.”
“You looked like you were having a good time talking to her.”
He shrugged as he reemerged with a hand towel. “She’s a sales rep for some kind of health supplement? Sounded like a multi-level marketing scam to me. She was asking me about my fitness regimen, but I think she was just trying to sell me protein shakes.”
He finished drying off his arms and offered the towel to Olivia. It smelled faintly of oranges from his hand
s. In fact, the whole room smelled a little like oranges, which was a distinct improvement over wet umbrella.
She hung the towel up in the bathroom when she was done drying off, and came back out to find Adam staring out the window.
“I guess it’s too dark to keep knitting,” he said.
“Yeah.” It had gotten too dark to do much of anything, even though it was the middle of the day. There was enough light to move around and make out objects in the room, but not enough to read by or see fine detail.
She was tempted to get her phone out, but she needed to conserve the battery. Linda had said the power company had crews out working on the downed lines, but in this weather they wouldn’t be able to get much done.
Lightning flashed across the sky outside, and Olivia saw Adam tense at the ensuing crash of thunder.
“Let’s play a game,” she proposed, both to distract him and herself.
He turned away from the window. “I thought you didn’t have any games. Not that we could see them anyway.”
“There are games we can play with just ourselves.” His eyebrows shot up in amusement, and she gave him an admonishing head shake. “Get your mind out of the dumpster. I was thinking Twenty Questions.”
“How about Truth or Dare?” he proposed instead. There was an eagerness in his voice that made Olivia’s stomach tingle.
“I don’t like dares,” she said with equal amounts of trepidation and excitement. “I’m not going to lick deodorant or whatever other stupid, gross thing you come up with.” She didn’t tell him the real reason was that she didn’t trust herself around him. It would be altogether too tempting to dare him to kiss her.
“Fine, then we’ll play Truth or Nothing.”
“What if one of us asks something the other doesn’t want to answer? We won’t have any recourse.”
He toed off his shoes and sat on the bed, pulling his legs up underneath him. “We each get three passes we can use on questions we don’t want to answer.”
“And after we’ve used our three passes? What then?”