She walked to the door.
“Do you remember the first thing you ever said to me?” he asked. “Please just wait a second.”
Her flats shuffled tissue paper. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she passed and then she was pushing down on the door handle.
“I don’t feel like I said what I was trying to say!”
She was out in the hall, walking away. The door clicked shut behind her. She wished that Daniel would come sprinting after her and skid to a stop in front of the elevator, giving her one more chance to take everything back. Together they’d exorcise the horror of what had just gone down in that room. Their aborted breakup would linger forever like a bad smell in the walls, casting a pall over couples until the air resounded with Let’s just be friends and It’s not you, it’s me. But no footsteps came. She told herself it was for the best as the elevator doors opened. She curled a strand of hair around her finger and descended.
William dashed from the hotel. If he’d been wearing a coat, it would have flapped in his wake, sweeping tabloids from convenience store racks. The blood rush in his ears mingled with country music on the strip. He was familiar with adrenaline surges, but this was uncharted territory. This was more than friends. This was Christina Hernandez informing him that she’d hop in the shower while he literally ran to get the condoms he’d packed, and there was nothing sardonic about the way she looked at him before closing the bathroom door. He wanted a never-ending supply of the sight so he could return to it in times of need.
The condoms were in his bag. His bag was in the car.
He ran a gauntlet of shoulders and elbows.
Christina had one twisted rib that stuck out a little more than the others, and he couldn’t get enough of it. Who else but Christina Hernandez would have something so secretly awesome?
His phone chimed. The melody was vaguely familiar, but the number was unknown. He answered without breaking stride.
“Hello, William. How’s the weather in Oklahoma City?” Dr. Diaz’s voice synthesizer had been tweaked so that the therapist sounded slightly auto-tuned.
“I don’t know, I’m in Nashville.”
“Of course you are! I was making a geographical joke.”
“Did I butt-dial you or something?” Dr. Diaz had never called him before. William didn’t know the algorithm was capable of such an action.
“Ha-ha!” William winced. The therapist’s laugh was like an icy wind in his ear. “I’m just checking in about the hashtag Autonomous Road Trip.”
William turned sideways to dodge a huge family bristling with selfie sticks creeping along the sidewalk like Roman infantry.
“Now’s not really the best time.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“I didn’t—”
“Good! Let’s explore that. What are you doing right now?”
“Going to get condoms.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Listen, Doctor, I appreciate you checking in, but—”
“Are you in love with the human being with whom you’ll be intercoursing sexually?”
“It’s Christina Hernandez.”
“Do you love this human being?”
“Stop saying ‘human being.’”
“Are you intrigued by the possibility that your newly sexual relationship with Christina Hernandez may evolve into a multifaceted love union?”
“I don’t know, we’re not quite there yet. I really don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“You are free to hang up.”
“Are you just gonna call me back?”
“Perhaps!”
He sighed. “Christina’s awesome. I don’t know anything about love. I don’t know.”
“You resisted this kind of potential love union with Christina Hernandez for several years.”
“Yeah, I mean, we have a next-door neighbor thing. I didn’t want to mess it up.”
“But the hashtag Autonomous Road Trip has altered your relationship.”
“I don’t know.”
“The consequences have shifted.”
“I don’t care about the consequences anymore.”
“On a scale of one to fourteen—”
“A one, okay? A one. I’m not scared. I’m just gonna do it. So fuck off.”
He ended the call and careened around a neon corner, practically smashing into Melissa. Her phone was pressed against her ear. She was wearing a new outfit, and he wondered if she was headed to a honky-tonk bar. But Daniel was nowhere in sight. Maybe she was just talking to her parents; it looked like a hushed, sober discussion. William lifted a hand to wave and kept moving. He was on a mission-critical errand and not about to be sidetracked by any more talk.
William checked the street signs. He was close to Otto’s parking spot but couldn’t find the car. A crowd of people had gathered across from a garage with metal gates pulled down over big loading-dock doors. As he slowed to a walk, he took note of the vehicles that lined the street: Porsche 911, Corvette ZR1, Audi Renegade X6, and idling in the middle of the road, a Mitsubishi Lord, quivering with cold, hard menace, twin-turbo engine rising from the center of its hood like some alien periscope.
These were some of the best street-legal race cars money could buy. Probably not a coincidence. Farther down the block he saw that the crowd was congregating around Otto, inspecting and prodding.
He sauntered up, at once conscious of his affected gait and unable to change it. The crowd was dressed mostly in jeans and T-shirts with the odd leather jacket interspersed. He felt eyes on his approach. A skiffle beat drifted up from Broadway, and a girl with an eyepatch tapped out the two-step on Otto’s passenger window. She gave him a nod.
“Sup, William.”
A fiery scar of mottled skin swept back from the patch across her temple, like a flame decal on a hot rod.
He nodded back, calm and friendly. The girl was tall, maybe nineteen or twenty years old. There was a hush as her friends turned their attention to him. The guy next to her leaned storklike against the car, knee bent, foot pressed against Otto. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and drew one out with his teeth. Then he
