“Where are you?” He dug a piece of paper out of his bag and started scribbling on it. “Yes… Fine… I’ll see you soon.” After hanging up, he turned to me. “Time to get packed again.”
I crawled to the edge of the bed and swung my legs over. Glancing over to the clock, I groaned at the 4 a.m. reading. “Where are we going now?”
“California.”
I sighed as I sat down next to my suitcase and started loading it back up. “At least we can drive there.”
He didn’t respond, instead rushed around, throwing things into bags.
Ten minutes later the room was empty of every item that we brought in. Our bags were in the car, while the trash we’d collected was deposited in a dumpster a few miles away.
“Do you ever check out of motels?” I asked as we merged onto the interstate.
In the rearview mirror, the sky was lighter and I dug into my purse to pull out my sunglasses in preparation for the coming sunrise.
“No.”
“No?”
“Less of a trail.”
I thought about it and nodded in agreement. If someone came looking, they would only have a paid through date but nothing on when he actually left.
Our drive out of Las Vegas was beautiful, watching the landscape change from desert to almost tropical as the sun rose over the horizon.
Close to the border, we stopped for gas, and I took the opportunity to use the restroom and get some coffee. Caffeine had been a luxury over the past months, and I smiled as I held the cup up to my nose and breathed in a substance that was once my lifeblood.
Walking back out to the car, Six was staring down at his phone, his jaw clamped down tight.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, pulling some flyaways behind my ear.
His jaw twitched. “Jason isn’t responding.”
“Do you know where he was headed?”
He shook his head and stuffed the phone away. “Come on.”
Back on the highway again, I convinced him to roll down the windows, letting the warm breeze in. Sure, my hair flew everywhere, even pulled back, but I loved the calm that took over, reminding me of carefree times long ago.
“Ooh, that looks like a shit-tel,” I said as we drove into Los Angeles. “Oh, there’s another one.” Six glared at me. “I’m just saying. Every hotel you’ve chosen but Paris has been the same. I assumed L.A. would be the same pattern.”
“Shit-tel?”
“Yeah. Short for shithole motel. Shit-tel.”
Half an hour later we pulled into another very ‘60s looking motel, but it looked in better shape than the past drug dealer specials.
“Better?”
I pursed my lips and looked around, pausing before nodding. “Yeah, not as afraid of stabbing myself with a stray leftover needle here.”
The places in Vegas were all ripe with hard drugs, prostitutes, and gangs. Besides the guys Six killed the first day we arrived, they’d all left us alone. Then again, Six did have an aura that screamed “Don’t come near me or I will fuck you up,” which all but the idiots seemed to respect.
The interior of the room was an improvement. Instead of out-of-date prints or paneled walls, everything was plain. Very little color deviation, all neutral, and even the mass produced artwork on the wall was pretty bland.
Once again, it was sit and wait. We’d made it to California, but without a meeting point, we were dead in the water, which didn’t sit well with Six. With nothing else to do, I pulled Sir Flopsalot out along with my book and used him as a pillow while I dug back into my story.
“You know, a watched pot never boils,” I said after he’d stared at the phone for an hour, willing it to ring with some word from Jason.
He refused to look at me, but I could tell he registered what I said when his gaze flickered between the phone and the window.
With a sigh, I put my book down, marking the page with a leftover receipt. The tension coming off him was infecting the whole room and making it hard to enjoy my reading.
As I walked over to him, he glanced to me but always back down to his phone.
“Enough,” I said as I kneeled in front of him between his legs. I reached out and pulled at his belt, working it loose.
“What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer until I popped the button and had the zipper down. Once his cock was out and in my hand, I looked up at him.
“You need to relax.” I ran my fingers up and down his hardening length, watching his reaction.
The crazed energy that seemed to be crackling in him simmered down, his gaze no longer on his phone but intently on my actions.
“I know you don’t like things to be out of your control, and what’s happening is hard for you to compute.” I ran my tongue up the length of his shaft. He was only half steam, but growing harder with each second. “You’re a warrior fighting an invisible enemy. You always know your target.” I took the head of his cock into my mouth and sucked, earning a groan and causing his body to sag a bit. “You don’t cope well with blindness.”
“How do you know?”