Free First Love by James Patterson

“Let’s go find a place to sleep.”
    So we pulled into the nearby parking lot of Treasures, which at first I thought was a gift shop. “Why’s it open so late? Who needs a snow globe at two AM ?”
    Robinson laughed—
at
me, not with me. “It’s a strip club, you dope. This is Sin City, remember?”
    I was too tired to take offense. I settled down in the backseat and pulled my sweatshirt over me. Robinson snaked his hand around his seat in the front, and I reached out and took it. Here we were in the car again, three feet of air and eight inches of foam between us.
Why
hadn’t I made a move at the hotel?
    “Tell me a bedtime story,” Robinson said.
    “Sing me a bedtime song,” I retorted.
    “Flip a coin,” he said.
    I agreed, and he lost. So I fell asleep to Robinson singing, drumming lightly on the dashboard.
    There was a girl named Axi
    who was a runaway.
    Instead of taking a taxi
    she tried to drive around LA.
    She crashed her car and hurt her nose
    and I don’t mean to brag
    but who should rescue Axi
    but a charming scalawag?
    It was a pretty good lullaby, all in all.
    The sound of ringing laughter woke me at 4 AM . A handful of dancers were leaving the club, done with their shift for the night.
    One passed by the car and spied me in the backseat. “Hey, girl,” she said, leaning in so close I could smell perfume and sweat. “You can’t sleep here. They’ll tow your car and take you and your friend here to the pound.”
    Robinson sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Huh?”
    “Y’all need to be getting on home,” said another. I could hear her smacking her gum. “Wherever that is.”
    Robinson leaned out the window and smiled at them like they were long-lost friends. “That is excellent advice,” he said. “And I thank you for giving it. But unfortunately it is not possible for us to follow it at this time.”
    The women burst into laughter. One nudged the other with her bony hip. “Look at them! They’re as cute as kittens. Chrissy, you take ’em home with you.”
    The blond one called Chrissy looked us over. She spent an especially long time looking at Robinson. “My car’s the white Chevy over there,” she said finally. “Y’all follow me out.”

18
    S UFFICE IT TO SAY THAT I DID NOT WANT to go. What if Chrissy was an ax murderer?
    But Robinson said that for one, the chances of that were very slim; and for two, being killed with an ax was conceivably more appealing than spending another night with the emergency brake poking into his side. So we followed Chrissy toward the old Las Vegas Strip (the place they used to call Glitter Gulch) and into a modest apartment complex.
    “Here we go,” she said, pointing toward a sagging red couch in the middle of a dingy living room. Neon lights from the signs outside reflected on the bare walls. “You sleep in there, and your boyfriend can have the floor in the kids’ room. It’s carpeted.”
    “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said, out of habit. I could see Robinson getting ready to deliver his line—
She asked me out, but I turned her down
—so I quickly added, “He’s not my type.”
    Chrissy raised one thin, painted eyebrow. “Oh yeah? ’Cause looks to me like he’d be everyone’s type.”
    Robinson, who seemed ready to fall over from exhaustion, made a show of kissing his biceps. He was such a beautiful goof—of
course
he was my type.
    “Dork,” I said.
    “Nerd,” he retorted.
    Chrissy cackled. “God, you two are seriously the cutest things ever. If you aren’t together, I don’t know what your problem is.”
    Then she handed Robinson a pile of blankets and shoved him toward the door of a bedroom. “The kid on the left snores,” she said. “Fair warning.”
    She gave me one last tired, vaguely maternal smile and disappeared into her bedroom. I lay on the soft couch and thought about what she’d said: that if Robinson and I weren’t together, she didn’t know what was wrong with us.
    I didn’t know, either. I mean, there