Page 60 of The Law of Attraction
Adam leaned outside to shake some of the water off the umbrella before shutting the door against the driving rain. “We left just in time,” he said, propping the dripping umbrella in the corner as a rumble of thunder rattled the window.
“I didn’t mean to drag you away from your new acquaintance. Who was she?” Olivia tried not to sound jealous, because she couldn’t blame him for wanting to talk to someone who wasn’t her after three straight days of forced proximity. They were like two characters handcuffed together in a tropey TV episode.
“I think she said her name was Becca?” Adam replied on his way to the bathroom. “Or maybe Beth. I forget.”
“You looked like you were having a good time talking to her.”
He shrugged as he reemerged with a hand towel. “She’s a sales rep for some kind of health supplement? Sounded like a multi-level marketing scam to me. She was asking me about my fitness regimen, but I think she was just trying to sell me protein shakes.”
He finished drying off his arms and offered the towel to Olivia. It smelled faintly of oranges from his hands. In fact, the whole room smelled a little like oranges, which was a distinct improvement over wet umbrella.
She hung the towel up in the bathroom when she was done drying off, and came back out to find Adam staring out the window.
“I guess it’s too dark to keep knitting,” he said.
“Yeah.” It had gotten too dark to do much of anything, even though it was the middle of the day. There was enough light to move around and make out objects in the room, but not enough to read by or see fine detail.
She was tempted to get her phone out, but she needed to conserve the battery. Linda had said the power company had crews out working on the downed lines, but in this weather they wouldn’t be able to get much done.
Lightning flashed across the sky outside, and Olivia saw Adam tense at the ensuing crash of thunder.
“Let’s play a game,” she proposed, both to distract him and herself.
He turned away from the window. “I thought you didn’t have any games. Not that we could see them anyway.”
“There are games we can play with just ourselves.” His eyebrows shot up in amusement, and she gave him an admonishing head shake. “Get your mind out of the dumpster. I was thinking Twenty Questions.”
“How about Truth or Dare?” he proposed instead. There was an eagerness in his voice that made Olivia’s stomach tingle.
“I don’t like dares,” she said with equal amounts of trepidation and excitement. “I’m not going to lick deodorant or whatever other stupid, gross thing you come up with.” She didn’t tell him the real reason was that she didn’t trust herself around him. It would be altogether too tempting to dare him to kiss her.
“Fine, then we’ll play Truth or Nothing.”
“What if one of us asks something the other doesn’t want to answer? We won’t have any recourse.”
He toed off his shoes and sat on the bed, pulling his legs up underneath him. “We each get three passes we can use on questions we don’t want to answer.”
“And after we’ve used our three passes? What then?”
“Then you have to answer, no matter what.” He patted the mattress beside him. “Come on, what else are we going to do to pass the time? There aren’t enough people for ‘light as a feather stiff as a board.’”
She laughed to hide her nervousness as she sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard with her legs steepled in front of her. “Are there any ground rules? Any subjects that are off-limits?”
He thought about it. “I don’t know. I guess there are certain questions that would be inappropriate to pose to a coworker. We wouldn’t want to upset Karen in HR.” There was an ironic lilt to his voice, like he meant exactly the opposite. Like he was dying to ask inappropriate questions that would make Karen in HR apoplectic.
“I feel like these are extenuating circumstances,” Olivia said, unable to help the smile that spread across her face. “We’re a little beyond the purview of HR regs at this point, don’t you think?”
They were sheltering in place during a natural disaster, sharing a motel room. A few hours ago they’d been spooning in this very same bed they now were sitting on. His erect penis had accidentally touched her leg, for Chrissake. Karen in HR would just have to deal.
“I think you’re right.” Adam grinned as he leaned back on his elbows. “The HR code of office conduct is pretty much a dot receding in the distance from here.”
“Okay.” Olivia laced her fingers together and straightened her spine. “In that case, I propose that for the remainder of the power outage, we aren’t coworkers anymore. We’re just friends hanging out. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Adam said, and a shiver of anticipation ran up her spine.
Let the game commence.
Chapter Fourteen
