During the ride over to the hotel in Monterey, Elfie counted stoplights and watched the GPS line on her phone incrementally shorten every few minutes like it was trying to be slow. She wanted to go out and do something with Tryp, anything that she could look back on as a fond memory, and then she wanted to go to his hotel room and fall in his bed and get this the hell over with.
Tryp kept trying to get her to talk, and they did. She talked about growing up in Texas, omitting a hell of lot, and she talked about her job when he asked her about being a roadie.
She asked, “You don’t actually use that term with any of the other technicians, do you?”
“What?”
“Roadie.”
“I thought it was a badge of honor.”
“It’s considered derogatory.”
“Hey,” he elbowed her, “What’s a derogatory term for a musician?”
Muso. “I don’t know.”
“Pizza guy.”
“Oh, stop.”
“What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?” He looked far too gleeful about this.
“What?”
“Homeless!”
“Oh, my God, stop.” She bit her lip, unsure just how good a sense of humor Tryp had. “How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb?”
“None. They have a machine that can do that now?”
“Ah! That’s good. I was going to say five, one to change it and four to talk about how much better Neil Peart would have done it.”
He cracked up, even drawing one of his long legs up. “I’ll bet you roadies have a lot of those.”
“Dude! Language! And just the usual. Why does the drummer always knock on the door so long?” She waited for a second in case he answered. “Because the drummer never knows when to come in.”
“Oh! The pain! I’ve got some about politicians.”
And they told each other jokes for forty more miles through the dark night, until Elfie was surprised when someone knocked on the privacy divider.
“What was that?” she asked.
Tryp grinned. “Five minute warning so we can get our clothes back on.”
“Oh, my God. He thinks we’re—”
“Yeah, but we’re not.” Tryp scooted forward and tapped on the divider. “Hey! You can drop this!”
The divider lowered, and the driver kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead. “We’ve nearly arrived.”
“Thank you,” Tryp said.
Their rooms were already checked in, so they just had to pick up keycards from the front desk. Tryp’s room was booked under the name Tryfon Diavolos, and hers was under the name that was on her driver’s license when she got the job: Elsa Hernandez.
In the elevator, Tryp said, “You don’t look like a Hernandez.”
“Genes are weird.”
“Okay.” He paused. “My first driver’s license said Gunther Haas.”
“You don’t look like a Gunther Haas.”
“Genes are weird,” he said.
In her hotel room, Elfie jumped in the shower and then stared at her dripping self in the mirror, reading a bottle of the silicone treatment that Left Blonde and Right Blonde had perscribed on the napkin. Since Elfie had more hair than most girls—and as wet as it was, it flowed past her waist to the dimples of her ass,—she poured a large palmful and started working it through her hair. The clear goo felt sticky at first, but when she got it all smoothed through and then blow-dried it with the hair drier attached to the wall, her hair practically glowed with blond light and fell in wide, soft curls to her waist.
Damn. Those silicone products did work. Maybe she’d have to try something other than sample-size hotel shampoo at some point.
She wiggled into her last new dress, a pale gold one, and checked her back for zits since the vee back there dipped nearly to her waist. Luckily, she didn’t have much boobage to speak of, so she could get away with not wearing a strapless, backless, cast-iron bra.
She didn’t bother to put on underwear.
She stepped into her heels that raised her up to five feet-four and tapped a new contact on her phone. “Tryp? I’m ready.”
His voice seemed unnaturally deep in her ear. “I’ll be right there.”