Winter Solstice in St. Nacho's (St. Nacho's #5) - Z.A. Maxfield Page 0,18

room, and during the was cycle, we pulled them outside and sat in the parking lot, soaking up the brilliant rays of the afternoon sun.

My mood had improved. I was almost optimistic again.

Tug stayed quiet, except when one of the motel’s many doors opened and a woman walked past us to have a smoke.

“Look, do you think it would be okay if I bummed a cig off her?” asked Tug.

“You smoke?” He nodded. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Do you have cigarettes?” he asked.

“No, but I wouldn’t make you go cold turkey from that at the same time you—”

“Didn’t matter. I was so fucking out of it. Now though…” He glanced longingly at the woman who’d lit up. “It will make the room smell like tobacco. You’re okay with that?”

“Sure. Jesus. Who cares at this point?” He was concerned about the weirdest things.

“Thanks.” He got up and left to approach her.

On the way, he flipped some internal switch and his whole demeanor changed. He no longer appeared frail. He smiled in a way I’d never seen before. As if he could pull the smooth on like an old comfortable sweater, he swaggered with each step he took.

Our neighbor responded with a toss of frosted blond hair and an assessing glance his way. She must have liked what she saw because she brightened and offered him a smoke from her pack before he asked.

I had a hard time believing a sensible person would voluntarily stay at the Palm Court, so I wondered what had brought her there. I guessed she was about thirty. She was too thin, wearing a tight band t-shirt, low slung jeans with enough holes to make them superfluous, and flip flops.

It was obvious she was intrigued by Tug and interested in me by extension. The two of them glanced my way more than once. I got the feeling they were laughing at me.

The change in Tug’s behavior fascinated me.

In the natural world, prey animals don’t allow themselves to appear weak. You’d never know Tug felt anything less than one hundred percent as he put on a winning smile and charmed the woman.

He leaned against the wall as they engaged in soft small talk. His body language issued an invitation to come closer, which she did. It seemed flirtatious to me; promised an intimacy that surprised me because I’d made certain assumptions about Tug after our original meeting.

That he’d been a sex worker was one, and Gayle had corroborated it. Another was that he was gay, which didn’t necessarily follow. He didn’t have to be gay at all to have asked me where we’d met in the dismissive way he’d done when he’d believed I might be a john.

Men paid for sex more often than women did, so it made sense his customer base must have been mostly men.

That didn’t mean men were his preference.

No doubt about it, everything I’d experienced since finding Tug had challenged some pretty entrenched notions I had about the world. Here was yet another thing. He was well used to using sex to get what he wanted, but my assumptions about what he wanted might have been totally wrong. Tug’s body language said what his words did not. He was open and available to the woman he was smoking with, far more than he’d ever been with me.

I didn’t let myself think about how that made me feel—even for a second. Instead, I let myself relax in the sunshine. Familiar, baking heat soothed my muscles. When I closed my eyes, I knew exactly where I was in the geographical sense. Drought had killed so many of the plants in the area that the first scent I caught was the burning creosote odor of dried scrub grass and diesel from the highway. Faintly, eucalyptus, commonly used as a windbreak and for noise reduction.

Though I used unscented laundry soap, the smell of Tide and perfumed cling sheets had permeated the small room where the coin-operated laundry machines chugged through their cycles. With the door open, the cloying floral fragrance wafted into the parking lot.

Last to my senses came cigarette smoke. I didn’t like the smell. I never had. I wasn’t averse to pipe tobacco or the skunk aroma of weed, but I’d spent too many anonymous nights with men who carried cigarettes and alcohol on their breath not to associate the smell of smoke with the awkward necessity of making small talk.

The buzzer sounded, meaning I could switch our things from the washer to the dryer.