Chapter 172: The Last Motel

Chapter 172: The Last Motel
The motel room had two chairs, one television, a bedside lamp that worked, and a bathroom with water pressure. It was the most normal place they'd been in weeks, and Del had not realized until she sat down on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off how much she'd needed something that felt ordinary.
Oliver dropped the bag in the corner and went to the bathroom, and came back rubbing the back of his neck.
He dropped onto the bed beside her and looked at the ceiling with the comfortable ease of a man who could make himself at home in a parking garage. "There's a diner two doors down. I saw a sign that said 'world famous pancakes,' and I have questions."
"World famous is a lot for a motel diner in Presidio."
"That's exactly what I want to investigate." He turned his head to look at her. "You want world-famous pancakes?"
“Sure. Why not?” Del sat up. "Let's go."
The pancakes were not world-famous. They were, however, large and adequately warm and arrived with a small pitcher of syrup.
They ate across from each other in a booth by the window. The diner was quiet — a couple of other travelers, a man at the counter reading something on his phone.
Oliver ate with an appetite and did not bring up Ruth and Carl or Mara. He talked about the pancakes. He talked about a diner he'd been to once in Oregon that had served breakfast food exclusively and had been entirely serious about it.
Del listened and ate and let the conversation be what it was.
It was easy. That was the thing she kept bumping into — how easy it still was with him, when he was like this. She'd known him for long enough now and in close enough quarters that she could feel the shape of his moods before they arrived, and tonight he was entirely in the version of himself that she suspected was the most real one.
Warm and funny and interested in small things.
She thought about what she'd realized somewhere on the road today, sitting in the passenger seat. She'd been thinking about the progression of it — Oliver then, Oliver now — and she'd found herself doing the comparison she'd been avoiding for weeks.
If she went back to just the person in the booth across from her one rainy afternoon, she would clearly and without much effort, exactly know how she would have felt about him.
Completely gone on him.
Oliver was handsome, and he was funny, and he had a specific kind of attentiveness that made you feel like the most interesting person in the room. She'd thought about that a lot.
"You're doing that thing," Oliver said.
Del looked at him. "What thing?"
"Where you go somewhere in your head, and your face goes completely neutral, and you could be thinking about anything from the meaning of existence to what you want for dessert, and there's no way to tell which."
"Dessert," Del said.
"See, I don't believe that."
"Because you think you know me."
"Because I do know you," he said, without the usual lightness. "What were you actually thinking about?"
Del looked at him across the booth. He was looking at her with that expression that had always gotten through her guards, the genuinely curious one.
"You. The version of you when I first met you. In that coffee shop," she said. She picked up her coffee. "You're very easy to like, Oliver. That's just a fact."
He looked at her for a moment. Something in his face settled. "Coming from you, that's the closest thing to a declaration I've ever received."
"Don't push it."
"I'm not. I'm receiving it graciously." He leaned back in the booth and smiled at her in the way she'd always had trouble with. "Can I tell you something without you analyzing it?"
"No," Del said. "But go ahead."
"I'm really glad it was you," he said. "Of all the coffee shops, et cetera."
Del looked at him.
"You don't have to say it back," he said. "I know how you feel about unsolicited emotional content."
"I don't hate it when it's warranted," she said.
"Is it warranted?"
She looked at him across the table. She thought about what she'd thought in the passenger seat. "Yes," she said. "In its own complicated way."
Oliver looked at her for a moment longer. Then he picked up his coffee. "Good," he said simply.
They went back to the room, and Oliver found the remote control and turned the television on, and a nature documentary came up.
Del sat against the headboard with a pillow behind her back, and Oliver stretched out beside her with his feet hanging off the end of the bed. The documentary talked about migratory patterns in a soothing voice, and Del let her eyes go slightly unfocused and just existed in the room for a while.
It was the closest to ordinary they'd been since the cabin. Maybe closer than the cabin, because in the cabin, there had always been the locked door and the boards over the windows. This room had a door that she could open. She'd checked that first thing, without making it obvious, and it opened, and the parking lot was right there, and she could walk to it.
Oliver reached over without looking at her and tried to take the remote.
Del moved it to her other hand.
He reached across her. She held it further away.
"I was watching that," she said.
"You haven't looked at the screen in four minutes."
"I was listening."
"To the bit about salmon?" He made another reach for the remote. "There are other channels."
"I like this one."
"You don't care about salmon migration."
"I might," she said. "You don't know everything I care about."
"I know you don't care about salmon." He leaned across her fully now, reaching, and she twisted away from him, laughing, holding the remote out of reach.
He braced himself over her to grab for it, and she got a hand on his arm to block him, and they were both laughing now — actually laughing, the kind that didn't have a reason beyond the immediate moment.
He stopped reaching for the remote, and he was above her now, close and looking at her. The laugh was still in it, but underneath was something warmer.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," Del said.
Then he kissed her. And she kissed him back, and the remote ended up somewhere in the blankets, and the salmon continued their migration on the television, and neither of them noticed.
He pulled back just enough to look at her. "I cannot wait," he said, with complete sincerity, "to start a genuinely boring life with you somewhere warm."
"Boring," Del said.
"Beautifully boring. The kind with a routine and a coffee and the same walk every morning." He brushed her hair back from her face. "You can be antisocial, and I'll handle all the small talk you hate."
.