“Okay,” Clark said, arriving in the doorway of the laundry room, breathing hard. “So I think you’re all set. You’re—” He pointed behind him, leaning slightly on the doorframe for support while he caught his breath. “Sorry.” He shook his head. “I was trying to hurry.”
“It’s appreciated.” I was trying my best not to inhale. Bertie, after tossing his cookies all over me, had gone back to sleep, while I’d frozen, not wanting to move, or breathe. Clark had scrambled to his feet and gotten me a towel, but it soon become clear that the towel could only do so much and that I really needed to change—and probably needed to shower, since my hair had not been spared. I’d told Clark this, and only after I’d said it did I wonder if this was weird—to ask to shower at a guy’s house. But then I figured we’d gone so far beyond anything normal tonight that I no longer cared. And more than worrying if it was weird, I needed to not be covered in dog puke. Clark had gone off to get me a change of clothes, and I’d looked at the sleeping dog, wondering just how much Maya’s overtime was going to be and if it would come close to making up for this.
“So my room’s down the hall,” he said, pointing. “Second door on the left. There’s a bathroom in there, and I put out a fresh towel and a change of clothes.”
“Oh,” I said. Somehow I’d figured that in a house this big, he’d direct me to a guest bathroom somewhere. I hadn’t thought I’d be in Clark’s room. Not that it mattered. It didn’t mean anything, after all—I was only doing this because I had to. I got up, trying very hard not to look at what had happened to one of my favorite dresses. I would see if I could work a laundry miracle tomorrow when I got home. “Great. I’ll, um, be right back.”
I walked down the hall as fast as I could, careful not to touch anything on my way. Even the wallpaper looked expensive, subtly patterned and edged in what looked like gold. I tried to casually glance into the other rooms I passed as I walked, but the doors were firmly closed, and I knew this was not the time to go snooping around.
I found Clark’s room right away—it was the only door that was open, light spilling out from it into the darker hallway—and stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind me. I knew this wasn’t really Clark’s room, just the room he was staying in for the summer, but even so, the genericness of it took me by surprise. This seemed like it was probably normally a guest room, since there were almost no personal touches—just a queen-size bed with a cream coverlet, a gray couch in the corner, and a desk tucked under an eave. I started to let my eyes roam around the room, but looked down, remembered the situation at hand, and made a beeline for the bathroom.
Ten minutes later I’d washed my hair and was confident I no longer smelled like horrible things. I wrapped myself in the towel Clark had left out for me, neatly folded, and walked out to his room. I’d balled up my dress and stuffed it into a plastic bag I’d found underneath the sink, trying not to think about the fact that I’d been worried, a few hours earlier, that it had gotten wrinkled on the drive to the restaurant.
I saw that, at the foot of the bed, there were a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt laid out. The sweatpants were gray and fit well enough, thanks to the drawstring waist. The T-shirt was a dark blue, and across the front, in typewriter font, it read ASK ME ABOUT THE LUMINOSITY. I just looked at it for a moment, then gave up trying to figure it out and pulled it on.
I knew I should probably head right back out to help with Bertie, but I’d taken a quick shower, and I figured I probably had a few minutes’ cover before my absence seemed suspicious. I told myself I wasn’t going to snoop, or look through anything—I had a deep aversion to that, ever since I had returned from the bathroom during an interview two years ago to see the reporter poking through my bag—but I told myself it couldn’t hurt to just look around.
It didn’t take me long to realize that this was different from the guys’ rooms I’d been in before. Usually, there was a lumpy, hastily made bed, a pile of stuff in the corner, and clothes tossed around. Even Topher, who was pretty neat, had a room that was just a little in disarray, like he was always kicking off his shoes and tossing off his jacket, leaving someone else to deal with them.
Clark’s room wasn’t like that. There was a neat stack of books on the desk—a few thick fantasy books, but most of them seemed to be nonfiction, with titles like Breaking the Block, Jump-Start Your Imagination, Moving Beyond Writer’s Block, and Resisting Resistance. I glanced away from them quickly, feeling like I’d seen something that I probably shouldn’t have seen.