Page 5 of Coast

“Why? You having trouble pulling your own women?” she teased.

“Baby girl, have you seen me?” I asked, getting a laugh out of her.

“I have, in fact. Every last inch. And as much as I don’t think you need the ego boost, you’re right. Have I mentioned how glad I am that you haven’t gotten yourself an old lady yet?”

“Yet? Try never,” I said as we made it to my bike.

“Oh, you totally just jinxed yourself.”

“Never gonna happen,” I insisted as she slid close, arms going tight around me.

“That’s what they all say,” she warned. “Right before they fall flat on their faces for some woman who comes crashing into their lives.”

I had to admit she was right about the rest of the guys in the club.

But I never saw myself settling down.

There was way too much hell to raise still.

I didn’t need a girl to put a wrench in those plans.

CHAPTER TWO

Zoe

Two beds, a mini fridge, and a coffee machine.

It was a step up from the last rent-by-the-week motels we’d been staying in.

“What do you think, Lainey?” I asked, leaning down to press my lips to her mostly bald head. “Not too shabby, right?”

I mean, it wasn’t great.

The whole thing looked straight out of the seventies. I was half-expecting to find some newspaper on the nightstand with headlines about the Hillside Strangler.

But, hey, while the orange-tinted paneled walls were kind of tragic, and the pea-green drapes in no way matched the canary yellow bedspread, it all seemed reasonably clean. Even the carpet (beige wall-to-wall in a heavy-traffic motel room was certainly achoice) was almost spotless and had comfortingly fresh vacuum lines on it.

The TV was a good decade old and screwed to the top of a dresser bench, which provided a second seating area, aside from the two full beds.

There was no desk, but I felt like the little fridge and coffee area more than made up for the lack of one. I didn’t need a desk anyway.

The whole space had the lingering scent of bleach and lemon Pledge, despite none of the “wood” in the room being real.

It was a kind of nostalgic smell that brought me back to my childhood for just a moment. So many “Sunday resets” with my mom. She’d worked too much during the week to get much cleaning done, so we both rolled up our sleeves on Sundays to start the week with a clean house. She’d get hard to work on the kitchen and bathrooms while I would vacuum the living room and Pledge all the wood surfaces, leaning down to take long sniffs of the lemon scent.

A whole lifetime ago, it seemed now. Though I did still do Sunday resets, even while living in temporary accommodations.

I moved toward the closet, finding several hangers still inside, along with a random laundry basket that someone must have left behind.

That was another perk to this hotel: there was a laundry room on the lower floor. No more dragging things to the laundromat. Or, let’s face it, washing things in the bathtub, since babies went through a metric ton of clothes and burp cloths in a week. And, well, I didn’t have a lot of extras.

“Let’s get your bed set up, huh?” I said to my daughter as I hauled her playard up onto the bed to unzip it from its bag, then pull it out.

I’d sprung for a somewhat fancy one that had a bassinet areaanda changing space, since I’d known from the day the stick turned blue that I was going to be doing this all on my own with no stable place to live, so having everything in one neat package was going to be the best bet for us.

Was it ideal to have a growing baby in a portable crib? No. Obviously. Cribs were bigger and had thicker mattresses. But my research said they were just as safe.

Besides, literally nothing about the situation we found ourselves in was ideal. We just had to do the best we could with what we had.

---