Love Story (Love Unexpectedly 3)

Maybe whoever’s working the front desk will assume we’re siblings.

I sneak a glance over at the long expanse of Lucy’s slim thigh peeking out of her little shorts.

Nope. Not siblings.

I shove open the car door before I do something stupid like drool or cop a feel. I step onto the pavement and stretch. I don’t really need to stretch. The drive has only been a few hours, which is horseshit, considering we could have made it much farther.

And yet, as I inhale, trying to clear my head of Lucy, I admit that maybe she’s onto something with her little plan, because there’s something oddly nice about stopping just because we can. Something indulgent about spending time in a place that doesn’t require work or laundry or having your heart torn out by people dying and pretty brunettes leaving.

Realizing Lucy hasn’t gotten out of the car yet, I brace a palm on the top of Horny and lean down to see what’s up.

She’s scribbling in that stupid notebook, bottom lip drawn between her teeth as she writes.

“Dude. What are you doing?”

She doesn’t stop writing.

“Hello? Weirdo, it’s hot. Let’s go.”

She clicks her pen shut and reads what she’s just written. “And then, after not speaking for over three hundred miles, his first words are dude and weirdo. I’m no longer puzzled as to why he doesn’t have a girlfriend—”

I roll my eyes and slam the driver’s-side door on her sentence, and the passenger door opens a second later.

She stretches like I did, inhales like I did too, before she beams. “This is what I wanted.”

My eyebrows lift. “This? A one-star roadside motel with more roaches than guests?”

“Lighten up, grandpa. We’re on vacation.”

“Yeah, that’s not what this is,” I mutter, as I follow her up toward the check-in desk.

The thirtysomething dude with a scraggly goatee couldn’t care less whether we want one room or four, although he does give us neighboring rooms without us having to ask.

I’m relieved. Torture as it’ll be to share a wall with her, I don’t exactly love how isolated the motel is, and I’m betting the locks on the doors wouldn’t withstand a strong fart.

The AAA card her dad gave me makes the already cheap rate even cheaper, and I’m a little relieved to realize that if we keep finding shitty, cheap places like this, I won’t have to deplete as much of my savings during these two weeks as I thought. The last thing I need is to be tempted to share a room in order to save money.

Keys in hand, we head back to Horny to grab our bags. I pop the trunk, grabbing the duffel where I’ve packed clothes and toothbrush and shit, and wait for her to grab one of her nine hundred bags.

I look over impatiently when I see her simply surveying the contents. “I don’t think this place has a bellhop, Hawkins.”

She purses her lips. “Trying to figure out which bags I put which stuff in.”

I grunt in frustration. “You didn’t pack a go bag?”

She laughs. “A go bag? Simmer down there, Bourne.”

“You’re telling me you have a road trip diary with stupid stickers, but not a road trip bag?”

She scratches her temple. “Oops?”

“Unbelievable,” I mutter, shoving my own duffel at her. “Which ones? I’ll bring them in tonight, but then you repack it all into one.”

Out of the corner of my eye I see her salute mockingly, and five minutes later I’m hauling three bulging bags, two of them pink, toward our rooms.

Lucy unlocks her door first, and it opens with a tired creak. I follow her into the room, not all that surprised by the slight smell of mildew, nor by the fugly bedspread.

I drop her bags unceremoniously on the bed, intending to grab my own bag and get the hell out of here, either for a shower or a beer, I haven’t decided yet.