Page 22 of The Drifter

"And then what?"

"You've broken your ten miles. You're out. Where do you go?"

She thought about it.

That was the thing. She actually thought about it, standing in a hotel hallway with her arms folded, taking it seriously.

"Dubai," she said.

"Dubai."

"Don't do that."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing something." But her mouth had gone crooked. "They build hotels there like they're trying to prove a point. And I want to see it. I want to walk through one and see how they've solved things." She was talking faster now. "Because there's a hole in this city, and I've been staring at it for years. Charleston sells you history. That's the whole product. And so every good house in town is a two-hundred-year-old building with a boiler that's dying and a service stair from 1890, and everybody just accepts that, because it's charming."

"But."

"But it doesn't have to be." Her hand came up and cut the air. "You can have the good bones and the good bar and the porch and the story, and still put a mechanical system in it that works, and a floor plan where housekeeping doesn't walk eleven miles a day, and a back-of-house that doesn't make the people who run the place feel like they're not supposed to be seen. Nobody's done it. Everybody's picked a side. Old and broken, or new and soulless. There's a hotel in between those two and this city is starving for it, and I could⁠—"

She stopped.

I let the quiet sit.

"You're looking to start your own thing," I said.

And Sasha Benning blushed.

I watched it come up her throat and into her face, and she looked away down the hall, and she pulled that blouse straight with both hands like the blouse had done something.

"Maybe in my dreams," she said.

"That's where they all start."

She didn't answer that. She stood there a second, and then she straightened up—her whole spine, her shoulders going back, her chin coming level—and looked me in the eye.

"Maybe I should learn to take a break," she said. "Before I go trying to build anything." She shook her head slowly, at herself. "Maybe I should learn how to be bored. And how to like it."

She was something to look at, right then.

Not the way she'd been at the desk. At the desk she'd been beautiful the way a good building is beautiful, which is to say deliberately, and at some cost. This was different. She stood up out of herself for about four seconds in a hotel corridor and told the truth. I stood there with a key in my hand and had absolutely nothing to say.

I liked her.

That went through me plain and simple and without any fuss, the way water finds a level. I liked this woman.

"Thank you for the escort," I said.

"It's my job."

"It isn't. I could have carried a key." I put my shoulder against the frame. "Thank you for the rest of it, then."

Something in her went quiet.

"If we run into each other again," I said, "I'd like to hear the whole list. Where you'd go. All of it."

She nodded.