Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

He picked up the laptop and made his way to the door before realising that he was just in his underwear. He went into the bathroom, rested the laptop on the edge of the sink, and pulled on the complimentary bathrobe. He collected the computer again and went outside, forgetting, in his haste, the key card to get back inside.

Never mind. He padded down the corridor to Hicks’s room and banged on the door.

“Hicks!” he hissed. “Wake up!”

He heard Hicks’s footsteps as he made his way to the door. It opened.

Hicks blinked the sleep from his eyes. “What is it?”

“It’s Milton. I know where he is.”

74

Ellie couldn’t help herself: she slapped him, hard, her palm clapping off the side of his face.

“Ouch,” he said.

“You deserved that.”

“I know I did.”

She looked down at him—at his scarred face, at the blue eyes that she remembered so well—and felt a mixture of anger and surprise.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“About what? Standing me up?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do something like that?”

“Because…” He paused and looked away. “Because I didn’t think it was such a good idea.”

“You thought it was a good idea by the lake,” she said, unable to stop herself from recalling the night that they had spent together under the stars.

“I know,” he said. “And it wasn’t a good idea, then, either.” He paused again, clearly finding the conversation awkward. “Jesus. I’m hopeless. I have no idea about this kind of thing.”

“‘This kind of thing’? What does that mean?”

He nodded at her, then at himself.

“Relationships, John?”

“Yes,” he said. “Relationships.”

“What are you? Ten years old?”

He shook his head, a wry and self-deprecating smile playing on his lips.

“It doesn’t have to be so hard,” she said, not quite ready to let him off the hook. “If you don’t want to have dinner with someone, you just say it—‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I want to have dinner with you tonight.’ And the good thing about doing that is that the other person—me, in this case—doesn’t have to wait for an hour in a shitty bar in Green Bay while everyone—including the douchebags who hit on me while I got half drunk at the bar—looks at me as if I’m some sort of love-struck teenager who’s just been stood up on her first date. That, John, is what you do when you don’t want to have dinner with someone.”

“I did want to have dinner with you. It’s just…” His brow creased as he looked for the right words to say what he wanted to say. “Look. Okay. Shit. I would’ve been more trouble than I’m worth.”