And then there was Abby, hanging her head out the window, trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue.
This woman was relentless. She was a fully-grown adult, hanging her body out the window. It was like she was a full-grown mastiff that didn’t understand that she wasn’t a lap dog. I didn’t understand it.
I didn’t understand her, and I had no passion to.
“Abby?” I asked.
Either she couldn’t hear me or didn’t want to answer me.
“Abby?”
She giggled out the window while the snowflakes got stuck in her hair, and I knew exactly how to get her attention. I turned on my windshield wipers and sent a flurry of snow in her general direction.
“Hey!”
She started sputtering and shaking as her body hit the seat, and I couldn’t help but grin. It served her right for being nothing but a mooch who used the Christmas spirit as a way to extort a ride home from me. She was brushing off her hair and her face while I rolled the window up. Then, I conveniently locked it, so she couldn’t get it back down.
“Oh, so you’re just gonna lock me in?” she asked. “How mature.”
“Says the woman hanging her head out the window like a dog,” I said. “Look up the weather on your phone.”
“It’s dead.”
“Then look it up on my phone,” I said.
I took it out and tossed it back to her. She had to be good for something. She had to have some sort of skill rattling around up there in that brain of hers. I listened while she typed around on my phone, but she wasn’t typing fast enough. The snow was getting worse and worse, and by the time she actually had something for me, I was already pulling off onto an exit.
“The latest weather report says—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I can’t see driving on the road any longer. We’ll have to pull over and wait until the snow stops.”
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Somewhere in Iowa.”
“You don’t know what town?”
“You were the one hanging out the window a second ago,” I said. “You didn’t catch any of the signs?”
“I got it, Colin. You’re a scrooge with money, and no one to spend it on, and you’re pissed because you never get laid and have no family who loves you.”
I had to physically bite down on my tongue in order to keep from firing back an insult at her.
We passed a sign that said, “Town of Lamoni” while I searched for a hotel for us to stay in. If I had to venture a guess by the amount of time we’d been driving, we were about halfway to Minneapolis. But because it was such a small town and there seemed to be absolutely nothing around, the only place I could find was the rundown motel whose vacancy sign wasn’t even lit up.
Even though the entire parking lot was desolate.
“Are they even open?” Abby asked.
“Let’s hope so,” I said, sighing. “Because it’s all we’ve got. Can you sit here?”
“Are you asking me if I’m capable of it?”
“Yes, Miss Lap Dog.”
“You’re fucking insufferable, you know that?” she asked.
“And she curses. Good to know.”
I got out of the car before she could say anything else and walked into the pathetic excuse for a front desk area. This was nowhere near the type of place I would pick to stay at for myself, but the snow was coming down harder than ever, and I knew I couldn’t drive any farther. We had no options, we were out in the middle of nowhere, and we were at least an hour outside of the next major city, according to the last mileage sign I could remember seeing on the highway.
“Need a room?” the woman asked.
“Two, if you’ve got them,” I said.
“We’ve only got one,” she said.
“But the parking doesn’t have anyone in it,” I said.
“Just because people don’t have cars doesn’t mean people don’t stay here,” she said.
“So, you’ve only got one room. Does it at least have two beds?”
“Nope,” she said. “But it’s got a king-sized bed in it. You good with that?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not good with that. Are there any other places in town I could check out?”
“Nope.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to be good with it.”
If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Not only was I stuck with a woman who acted like a toddler, but now, I had to share a room with her. She was beautiful, which was obvious to anyone who had an eye to spare her way, but that didn’t make up for the asinine attitude she carried with her. She was all smiles and Christmas songs and hanging her idiot ass out the window to catch snowflakes. She was insane.
And now, I had to share a fucking bed with her. I could only hope that this motel room had another piece of furniture in it besides this bed. I highly doubted it. The front desk barely had a few chairs for people to sit in and wait, which was only a foreshadowing of the room to come.
“Room 113,” she said. “It’s down at the tip of the ‘L.’”
“The tip of the ‘L,’” I said. “Great.”
Even in just that small amount of time, the roads were beginning to freeze up. I got back into the car and felt the car beginning to slide. I took the car out of park and simply let it
