Potholes

Chapter 48 As told by Parker

I wiped my hands on my jeans hastily after propping the door open for the other as we crammed into the cigarette smoke filled lobby of the grungy motel. I shot Cassidy an I'm sorry for dragging you into this look as we followed Hayden, who sauntered up to the front desk. We asked the lady behind the desk for one room.

"Broke, eh" she said looking at the five of us, annoyingly smacking her chewing gum in a way that created much more noise than necessary. The rest of us just shared an awkward glance, obviously still not fully over the whole 'Hayden losing all our money' situation, before Cassidy spoke up:

"I can pay for t-" she said, interrupted by Eva.

"No, no, it's fine," Eva blurted out, "Hayden can just sleep on the floor."

He furrowed his eyebrows in Eva's direction, which she paid no attention to, but didn't protest.

I had subconsciously hoped that our room would look better than the rest of the hotel, but of course, it did not.

"Smells like shit in here," Eva grumbled, emphasizing on the profanity as she often does in a way to gather a reaction, which I had always found amusing, so I let out a small laugh. She ignored my giggle and left me without a jokingly harsh comment, so I knew something was up, I knew she was mad at me. That was another tactic Eva had for grabbing attention, but this one I found significantly less pleasant.

"Really?" I sighed, leaning over to Eva as she filled up the bedside drawer with her clothes. I wondered if she thought about the germs that could be in there, before realizing we had slept in a literal barn a few nights before. A slightly unsanitary hotel room seemed to be the least of our worries.

"What," She said, not lifting her eyes off her stack of jeans she was attempting to stuff in a drawer that was obviously too small to fit them. I could've yelled at her, told her that there was no physically possible way that her pants could shrink into a small enough size that they would fit into that tiny drawer without spilling out, but I swallowed the urge.

"Why are you mad at me?" I asked even though I knew. She only shrugged, which pushed me off the edge. She had jammed the drawer trying to close it on her acid wash jeans. I found it more irritating than I should have.

"I'll be right back," I said heading for the door.

"Where are you going," Rowan asked. She was beside the only power outlet in the hotel room, which was inconveniently placed where no furniture was close enough for a charger to stretch to it, so you had to sit on the dirty beige coloured carpeting that was almost certainly infested with carpet beetles in order to use your phone.

"Outside," I said. I hadn't meant to sound angry, but as I closed the door behind me, I realized that I definitely sounded it.

I pushed the insecurity bubbling up in my head down and continued down the hall. It seemed like they tried to mask the cheap architecture in the hotel with obnoxious wallpaper and a hot pink color scheme, but behind all the failed bedazzling there were still stains and exposed pipes that I wondered were up to the safety standard.

I disregarded Eva as she sat down beside me on the bench just outside of the hotel. We sat in silence as we watched a couple of people gather around in a circle in the parking lot, the smell of pot coming off of them was overwhelming. Eva started talking, and I smiled because I knew I had beaten her at her own silent treatment game.

"I didn't know you smoked," she said. The way she looked at me in the car, like she didn't know me, from earlier popped up in my head.

"I don't," I responded.

"But-"

"Once," I stuck my hand up to stop her from claiming my statement as false. "I've smoked once before."

"But what about that 'oh my first cigarette was woodbine' stuff," She said, mimicking my voice in a way that made me wince, but at least she had lightened up a bit.

"I read it in a book," I said, laughing at how lame I sounded. "The name woodbine, I mean."

"Really?" she asked. Something about how she cared so much, how she acted like she knew everything about me, still kind of aggravated me. But I brushed it off as an 'I'm just looking out for you because I'm the dad friend even though I refuse to admit it' thing.

"Yeah. And trust me, I hate it. God, it's so awful. The worst."

I left out the part where, in a bit of a panic, I managed to convince myself I had lung cancer after smoking once, because I didn't want to admit to my constant worrying too.

We headed back upstairs to join the others, laughing as we past a vending machine on the way there, remembering the time Rowan accidentally referred to Reese's Pieces as Reese's Penis.