Page 36 of Factory Thief

“Point taken.”

I pull some bills from the plastic bag in my back pocket and pay an exorbitant one-hundred dollars for what we get. A bed, a shitty table, an old-style television hooked up to cable, and a moldy smelling bathroom.

The first thing I do upon entering the hotel room is to throw the comforter aside and stuff it into a closet.

“They never wash the comforters at dives like this one unless there’s blood on them.”

“Great,” he says with a sigh.

“Relax. We’ll be fine.” I pat the bed. “Sit down. I’ve been thinking a lot about our problem, and I think I’ve come up with a solution.”

“Okay.” He eases his bulk down onto themattress beside me. “What did you come up with?”

“It’s simple. I’m going to break into Xtera’s main corporate offices. If you took the data files from them once, you can do it again, right?”

He sighs, blowing air out through his lips noisily. “It’s impossible. Completely impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible.”

He gapes and stares at me in astonishment. “Listen, you just don’t understand. They haveformer special forces working building security, and—and retinal scanners, and motion sensors all over the place…look, it’s not happening. No way, no matter how good you are. James Bond couldn’t break into this place even with Lara Croft’s help.”

I smile, and he looks downright afraid.

“You—you’re smiling. Why are you smiling?”

“Because I love a challenge.” I kiss him on the cheek. “But you know what? I don’t know about you, but I need a shower.”

“Me too,” he answers. “And fresh clothes.”

“I should have thought about this sooner,” I confess.

I call dibs on the shower and run into the bathroom. The water is tepid but the pressure is good. I rinse the salt out of my hair and wash thoroughly. While I’m at it, I also wash my clothes in the tub.

Five minutes later, I’m done and strangely disappointed he didn’t think of joining me in the shower.

I wrap myself up with one of the two towels provided by the motel and call him out, “I’m done. Your turn.”

He enters the bathroom without a stitch of clothes on.

Well, what was I expecting? He can’t really wash himself with his clothes on, can he?

I look away and escape to the bedroom to put my clothes on hangers to dry.

His jeans and t-shirt are on the floor. I pick them up and enter the bathroom again.

“You need to rinse these,” I say, tossing them over to him.

Without waiting for an answer, I escape to the bedroom. I need time alone, time to think.

I get ten minutes.

When he returns from his shower, I have the skeleton of a plan.

“Okay, this is how I see it…” I tell him.

While his jeans drip over the tub and his t-shirt dries on a hanger, we spend a couple of hours talking about a good place to break in. The sun sinks below the horizon, and the neon lights outside create a rainbow panorama on the wall as they filter in through the flimsy curtains.

I’m trying to concentrate on what’s being said, but I just can’t stop thinking about the red hot sex we had in the sea cave.

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