Elite 2: The Wrong Side of Revolution (27 page)

After a particular story about Daniel’s old buddy Rufus getting stuck in a tree, there was a brief moment of silence that followed their joined laughter where the two locked eyes and smiled. It was not the first time in their weeklong journey that they had gotten drunk in a hotel room together. Daniel never felt the need to get with Jordan anymore, but anytime a little alcohol got involved old desires managed to resurface themselves. She was an undoubtedly beautiful woman.

Jordan threw herself backward from the side of her bed and threw her feet around to the foot of the bed, her momentum carrying her until she was once again upright. She leaned forward and started digging through her bag. “I’m going to take a hot bath.”

Daniel took a deep breath and crawled back on his bed toward the night stand. He set his beer on the stand and picked up the remote, switching on the TV. Jordan slipped her shirt over her head so that she was wearing just a sports bra and leggings. She carried a pair of shorts and a pink cami with her into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

Daniel could hear the water begin rushing out of the faucet as Jordan began running her bath. He always considered joining her whenever she took a shower or bath, but the thought usually faded quickly. He flipped through channels and eventually settled on a show about a pawn shop in Las Vegas, even though it was an episode he had already seen two or three times.

He heard the faucet turn off and the sloshing of standing water as Jordan climbed into the tub. He closed his eyes and tried to drift off to sleep. He hoped it would come easier with the aide of beer and tequila.

After a few minutes of failing to drift off, he gave up on sleep and the pawn shop and stood up from his bed. He downed the rest of his beer and walked over to the case to grab two more. He then made his way to the bathroom door and slowly swung it open.

“What are you doing?” Jordan yelped, attempting to cover her chest beneath the surface of the water.

“Relax,” Daniel assured her as he took a seat on the toilet next to her. He reached over and handed her one of the beers he was carrying. “I won’t oogle.”

Jordan gave up resisting a little too easily and took the offering from Daniel. He leaned back on the closed toilet seat and stared at himself in the closet mirror just outside the bathroom door. He then took a long sip of his beer.

Jordan sipped hers before setting down on the floor next to the tub. It appeared as though she might say something, but decided better of it. Instead she leaned her head back against the back of the tub and enjoyed her bath.

Daniel closed his eyes and took a deep breath, enjoying the feel of the steam rising up out of the hot bath water against his skin and into his lungs. “It’s very relaxing just sitting out here.”

Jordan turned her head and smirked. It was clear that something was on her mind.

“Do you wanna see what it feels like in here?” she finally asked.

Daniel opened his eyes and turned his head toward her, raising an eyebrow. Instinctively, he found his eyes moving up and down her naked body under the water, but something deep down in the still partially sober area of his brain caused him to turn away.

“No I do not want to get in there with you.” He said it in a manner that made it sound as though he were playing it off as a joke.

“Why not?” Jordan countered, trying to sound offended but allowing a tad of relief to come through with it.

Daniel stood up from the toilet and made his way out of the bathroom, beer in hand. “Because you’re drunk.”

Daniel awoke the next morning to the image of Jordan setting coffee and a Danish down next to him on the night stand. She was fully dressed in grey sweatpants and a black hoodie that read “Purdue” on the front in bronze letters. Daniel brought his hands up to rub his eyes and took the first deep breath of the day.

“What time is it?” he asked her.

“Almost ten,” Jordan answered. “Continental breakfast ends at ten-thirty. I wanted to make sure we didn’t miss it.”

Daniel chuckled as he sat upright in his bed. Jordan always did love a free continental breakfast. “Thank you.”

He reached for the Danish and took a bite with his legs still under the sheets. He followed the bite with a sip of hot, black coffee.

“What do you think the beds at the farm will be like?” Jordan asked him as she took a bite of yogurt and granola.

Daniel shook his head and shrugged. “Whatever they’re like I’m sure they’ll be a lot better than that cot I was sleeping on at Elite, and a lot worse than the bed you were sleeping on at Demérs’”

Jordan laughed. It probably hurt to think about the bed she had shared with her villainous ex-fiancé, but there was no point in getting upset about it now. The bed
was
comfortable.

“Do you think I need to be dressed nice to meet them?” she asked.

“Eva’s cousins?” Daniel clarified. “I wouldn’t think so. We are going to be living with them after all.”

“Good point,” Jordan shrugged.

After they finished their breakfast, both took turns taking showers before they headed out on the final leg of their journey. Daniel asked the clerk at the front desk and thankfully there were no reports of the bridge being closed due to ice. It would only take them an hour or so to get to their final destination just outside of Petoskey.

Daniel noticed Jordan biting her nails as they crossed over the five-mile long suspension bridge. “Nervous?”

Jordan recognized her incisive chewing and immediately pulled her hand away from her mouth. “Bad habit.”

“I know,” Daniel responded, “but your leg won’t stop bouncing either. Is it scaring you being on the bridge?”

Jordan looked down to notice her bouncing knee. “It’s not the bridge. I’m really nervous about meeting these new people. What if they suck? We have to live with them.”

Daniel laughed lightly. “We’ll just have to deal I guess.”

Jordan appeared unsatisfied with his answer. “Give me the phone,” she ordered.

“Why?” Daniel countered abruptly.

“I want to call let and let them know that we’ll be there soon.”

Daniel shrugged and pulled the phone out of the black duffel bag in the back seat behind him. He had called them the afternoon of the 24
th
to let them know that they would be arriving in the early afternoon on the 26
th
, but he supposed Jordan was right to be polite and alert them of their near arrival.

She turned on the phone, selected the contact “Carlos and Marie” and hit send. “You got to talk to them last time, I want to hear what they sound like—Hi, Marie? Hi, this is Jordan…Yeah…Yeah, we’re just crossing the bridge now so we should be there in about an hour…Yeah…Okay…Okay see you soon. Thanks. Bye.”

Daniel shook his head. He always found it amusing the way women changed the infliction of their voice when talking to someone they don’t know very well on the phone.

“She sounds nice,” Jordan concluded.

“I’m glad you approve,” Daniel jested.

It was just after 12:30 when Daniel and Jordan pulled into the long dirt road that lead back to the house that sat on their hosts’ twenty acre farm. After spending more than an hour driving through the mountainous regions of northern Michigan, Daniel and Jordan found themselves feeling a bit isolated from any form of organized society. Large fields of land were cleared for farming, but they were surrounded by dense forest. Most of the trees were bare except for the snow that rested on their branches, though there were also many coniferous plants which hung onto their needles throughout the winter months.

The two-story grey house could be seen from the road, resting beyond the tundra where crops grew during the summer. The driveway that lead to the house was much longer than it had appeared from the road, and also very slippery—coated by a thin layer of ice. The triangular roof of the house was covered in snow, as well as the lower sections of roof that hung over top of the front porch. As they approached they could see Christmas lights strung along the trimming.

“It’s beautiful,” Jordan commented as they got nearer.

“Certainly is,” Daniel concurred, sticking his head forward to get a full glimpse out the windshield. “And big.”

Though simple and rectangular the house seemed to wield a lot of square footage, and even from the outside had a warm, homey feel to it. This was reinforced by the sight of a plume of grey smoke coming from the chimney.

As they approached the end of the driveway, the front door opened and a man and woman in their early forties stepped out onto the porch. Daniel spotted what looked like an adequate parking spot off to the side of the house, next to an old Dodge pickup truck. He pulled in and put it in park.

“Now
that’s
how you get around in the snow,” he told Jordan, pointing up at the truck.

Jordan rolled her eyes and got out of the car. “Hi!” She called to the couple on the porch, waving as she made her way to the trunk of the black sedan. The couple waved back with a welcoming smile.

Jordan and Daniel pulled their most important bags out of the trunk and back seat. Before they could close the doors the man from the porch came up behind them.

“What can I grab?” he asked.

Daniel looked at Jordan since she had the most luggage, all of which had been purchased after they left Chicago since they were unable go back to their own homes. Eva was most likely unaware of Jordan’s little shopping problem when she handed him a credit card under his new name that the government had volunteered to pay off. Out of guilt, Daniel had purchased most of his things with the cash he’d withdrawn from the bank in St. Louis.

“Thank you,” Jordan said as she began handing their host bag after bag.

“Let me help you,” Daniel cut in, taking a few bags off of the man’s hands so that their loads were even.

“Sorry,” Jordan said sheepishly.

“Come on in and get out of the cold!” The woman called from the porch. The trio currently weighed down with luggage was happy to oblige.

“Carlos will carry your bags upstairs with you and show you your rooms,” the woman said with a motherly tone as she held the door open for them.

“Follow me,” Carlos instructed his guests.

The sky outside was overcast and grey, and it seemed like every light in the house were turned on as they made their way through the kitchen and up the creaky staircase. The house was old, with wood paneling everywhere, and Daniel could feel the dry heat coming from the large wood burning stove in the kitchen.

When they reached the top of the stairs, Carlos lead them down a narrow hallway. At the end of the hallway was a bathroom, one bedroom and a what appeared to be a closet were on the right, and there were two identical bedrooms on the left.

Carlos walked into the first bedroom and dropped the bags he was carrying onto the bed. “This room can be hers, and you can have the one next to this.” Daniel guessed that Carlos had made that decision based on the fact that most of the bags he was carrying belonged to Jordan.

Daniel was more than happy to take the second room and stepped inside to drop off his stuff. He immediately plopped down on the bed to test it out. It was an older, springy mattress, but it would do the job. He looked around the room and noticed that it was fairly empty. There was a modest wooden dresser and what looked like an antique night stand in the far corner next to his bed. After those three items there was not much more space on the off-white carpeting for anything else. The walls had wood paneling that extended halfway up, and the rest was white painted drywall. Except for a few hooks, there were no decorations.

As he exited his room he noticed that in the bedroom across from his were a bunch of frames and decorations stacked up on the bed. Eva’s cousins must have cleared out his and Jordan’s rooms so they could decorate them however they pleased. He smiled to himself, deciding that these were indeed good people.

As he turned down the creaky wooden-floored hallway, he saw Carlos and Jordan waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

“Lunch is ready downstairs,” Carlos told him.

Daniel smiled and followed them down the staircase. As he passed by he took a quick glimpse into Jordan’s room. It was in fact identical to his, the only difference being that while his bedspread was beige, hers was green and white.

Lunch was incredible. Carlos’ wife Marie had made homemade chimichangas that were to die for.

“I got the recipe from Carlos’s grandmother,” she explained to them. “The women in his family make the most amazing Mexican food. It’s difficult to live up to their expectations.”

“That’s why I married an Italian woman,” Carlos told them. “I knew she’d know how to cook.”

Daniel and Jordan chuckled as they enjoyed their home cooked meals. It had been too long for both of them. Marie’s kitchen reminded him a lot of his mother’s only older. It was a large kitchen, divided into a cooking area and an eating area. The refrigerator sat across from the bottom of the staircase, and next to it began a long counter that lined one half of the longest wall in the room, and then curved out to form a sort of breakfast bar and separate the prep area from the dining area. A row of cabinets hung above the counter along the wall, and on the wall opposite the counter sat an oven, a modern stove, and the old wood burning stove.