Lust - 1 (12 page)

“So, should we al meet tomorrow night?” Adam continued, after it was clear that Harper wasn’t going to be squealing in enthusiasm any time soon. “Hopeful y, we’l have some good news.”

We
. Great.

Harper sighed quietly and sat up in bed, digging her day planner out from beneath a stack of books and papers on her night table. Saturday night was free and clear—plenty of time for sitting around, staring at Adam, or aiming death glares (or at least some finely honed sarcasm) at the girls who kept standing in her way.

“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 real y caught on.

Adam always claimed he could tel when she was lying, something about the way she narrowed her eyes or played with her left earlobe. She didn’t real y buy it—but stil , 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 al , this is more important. Second of al , there is no lonely guy—I don’t do desperate. Third of al ,” 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 real y 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 smel ing like stale pickles. This day was looking up.

“Yeah, her last job wasn’t real y paying enough,” Adam confided. “You know, her family …” his voice trailed off, but he didn’t real y need to continue. Grace was a smal 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 stil 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 al , 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’l just have our meeting at the diner, and then we can al cheer her on. It’l 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 stil shuddered at the memory of the half-naked Kaia rubbing herself al over Adam.
Oh, you look so tense—do
you want a massage?
Please, who knew people stil 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 doubtful y. “She might not want us al there—not on her first day and al .”

“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’l be total y grateful.”

“You think?”

Eyes narrowed, Harper smiled.

“Trust me.”

Late Saturday afternoon, Adam pul ed 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 hol ow 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, sal ow 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 wal s, 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 pul off the interstate and drive twenty miles down a bumpy local road, just to stay in a dilapidated no-tel motel. Tourists had better things to do with their time—and those truckers who did pass through town usual y 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 pul ed 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 col ect 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 wal paper, was al stil 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) stil lay open atop the desk, he marveled. He flicked the light switch on the wal behind him—nothing.

No electricity, but that wasn’t a problem; the afternoon sun filtered in through the lobby’s smal 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 smal town, about anything that mattered—real y, she needed him. And she seemed to know it. “Then the new owners wil figure out what to do with al this stuff,” he continued, gesturing toward the vinyl chairs and woodpaneled coffee table to their right. “Or maybe they’l 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 shel s 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 hal way, explorers in a lost world. Not that there was much to explore. The surprisingly spacious lobby, a narrow hal with peeling orange wal paper and a long stretch of numbered bedroom doors, a cramped staircase leading up to an identical hal way on the second floor (though here the wal paper was green and purple—or had been, until al 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 spil ing outside, dancing in the moonlight, hooking up in the shadows. It was perfect. “It’s on the edge of town, so no one wil 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 al ?”

“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 hal . Adam pul ed 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 hel was that?” She squealed and threw her arms around Adam as a grayish white streak raced across the floor and disappeared into the far wal .

“Did you see that?” she asked between rapid, panicked breaths.

“It’s just a mouse,” he assured her. “No big deal.”

“It practical y ran over my foot!” Her arms stil 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 wal 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, pul ing 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 al alone, and then you brought me to the bedroom, and—”

“We’re scouting locations for a
party,
” he yel ed, 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 stil 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 al 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 pul ing him into a lip-lock. No questions asked.