Page 85 of The Maverick
I stood in front of it for a full thirty seconds trying to work out which knob was the water.
I found it, eventually, through a process of cautious elimination, and stood under a rainfall head the size of a dinner plate and let the water come down hot and even. I thought about the shower in my apartment, which sometimes ran cold afterfour minutes and made a sound like it was personally offended by the request.
This was a different world.
I'd known that. I'd known it walking through the lobby last night. I'd known it when the dinner table had appeared and disappeared without any human being making themselves visible. I'd known it in the helicopter, over the Atlantic, with the moonpath on the water below us and Tommy's voice in my headset saying things about his father that I understood were not things he said.
But knowing a thing from the outside and living inside it were different operations.
I was living inside it this morning, in a marble shower with a digital temperature display, and the distance between this and the fruit fundraiser I'd run in ninth grade to pay for the choir trip to Orlando—sixty-three individual door-to-door sales of citrus packages, two months of saving the proceeds, three days in a Holiday Inn with four girls to a room and a continental breakfast I'd eaten like it was the last food on earth—was so large I couldn't see across it.
I got out. Wrapped myself in one of the obscene towels. Went back to the bedroom.
Tommy was awake.
He was on his back with his hands behind his head, watching me come out of the bathroom with an expression of contentment so complete it was almost architectural, like a man who'd built something and was pleased with how it was standing.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning." I climbed back into bed. He pulled me in against his side without ceremony, the way he did everything, like the decision had been made some time ago and the execution was just housekeeping.
We lay there for a while.
This was the part I hadn't expected—not the suite or the helicopter or even the sex, which remained in its own category of evidence—but this. The lying there after. The ease of it. The way the silence between us had texture and warmth and didn't require managing.
"I want to take you somewhere," he said.
"Where?"
"Texas. Marfa. I want you to meet someone."
I turned my head to look at him.
"Your mother," I said.
"Yeah."
I lay there with that for a moment. The weight of it—the deliberateness of it, the intimacy of being invited into the room where his mother was—landed somewhere real.
"We could fly out today," he said. "Be there tonight. Back tomorrow."
He said it the way he'd saidcome find me at The Palmetto Roseand the way he'd saidmy treatat Proof and the way he said most things that involved the logistics of his life—easy. Uncomplicated. Like the only question was whether I wanted to, not whether it was possible.
And there it was.
The thing that had been sitting at the edge of my happiness all morning, patient, waiting for the right moment to make itself known.
"I have to work," I said.
"Okay." He didn't miss a beat. "When's your next day off?"
"I work a double today. And tomorrow. Day off after that."
"Then we go the day after tomorrow."
"Tommy—"
"It's a quick trip. In and out. I'll have you back before?—"
