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Maebe caught the keys in her hand, and her eyes glittered with pride. She popped her seat belt off, and got out of the car to switch seats with him. But before she did, she stuck her head back in the car and whispered, very quietly, but still filled with vast amounts of sarcasm -

"Guys, he's not paid to be cool. Gosh."

Taym would go on to undoubtedly disappoint both Maebe and possibly Grace by not caring even a little what was on the radio, as neutral to autotuned pop music as he was to hip-hop stations as he was to wailing country as he would have been to NPR.

It appeared that he, too, was going to pass as much of this trip as possible in the same way that Joy was, burying himself in his cellphone, the window down and a cigarette in one hand, the phone in the other, angled away from the girls' prying eyes although in truth he wasn't doing anything more interesting than soaking up the ability to actually catch up on the news at his leisure without feeling like he was wasting valuable leave time.

They ended up swapping seats once more, so that it was Taym who pulled in to the hotel, considerably more at ease given that the second leg of day one had passed much less eventfully than the first. He, too, handled checking them in--insistent that they swarm with him into the hotel lobby rather than being left alone with Maebe in the car, and at one point quietly hissing at Grace to stop looking at that guy in the doorway that way he is clearly twice your age--and as he gathered up the keys he handed Hope (a reward for good behaviour, or possibly a punishment, given the riot that this was likely to cause) the hotel-provided list of local businesses, telling her to find the page with restaurants who did delivery and pick something out.

He used this opportunity to catch Maebe, letting the girls get a couple of steps headstart down the hallway.

"We're sleeping in shifts," he informed her. "You wanna sleep first or second?"

There was not a goddamn chance of them ordering "chinese" and instead the fight, as in literal fight, was between pizza, Indian, and subs. On the other bed, what looked like a pillow fight (save for the pulled hair and one bleeding nose) quickly turned to politics as deals were made and blackmail leveraged.

In the end it was pizza of course. One for each. Grace wanted a very particular creation not on a standard menu that would take a good five minutes of phone negotiations, Hope would simply want pepperoni, and Joy wanted a nothing pizza with left beef because she was an a*****e.

Edith's response was to the point: good work, keep things in check, watch out for shenanigans.

Stuffed full of pizza, all three girls were in better moods. Grace actually fell asleep soon after, but the other two were complete night owls. Joy was still reading her e-book, which, catching one of Taym's glances, she pointed out was The Diamond Age and that it was the future, the near future, so maybe ******** google it you want to know more.

Hope obviously expected him to entertain her, which resulted in a small, travel-sized Scrabble board being unpacked.

Taym pocketed his cookie for later. Later meant probably never. This was not the same later that he applied to the thought of later I need to b***h Maebe out for kissing me on the ******** cheek, because that later was definitely as soon as possible.

After an hour or so of arguing with Hope over whether "oneshot" was a single word and padding his vocabulary in a way that would make Twitter communications significantly easier (he could now use "fanon" in a sentence), Taym declared himself defeated but only because he'd allowed Hope to play "kohai" on a triple word score.

"Go to sleep," he told her, with obvious fondness under the irritation. "Maebe's going to stay up with you guys for awhile." And then, to Maebe: "Come and get me in like four hours. Or whenever you get tired. And don't ******** throw your food," he added, never mind that it had been an hour ago. "For ******** sake."

And he'd try to sleep, try being the operative word, but he knew that it would be a few snatched half-hours interrupted by restless turns at his cellphone, in all likelihood.

He excused himself for the other room, and it felt empty and quiet and isolated there, more than he'd expected it to, and he opened the window to light a cigarette despite the no-smoking signs posted.

Maebe was only slightly agitated that, instead of sleeping, Taym was playing games with the only triplet that was even slightly social, which left her to text on her phone and flip through channels while lying on her bed in boredom. She'd just started getting steamy in sexts when Taym finally decided to try and sleep.

Try, because she immediately got a text from him, and let out an exaggerated sigh of annoyance. Instead of answering, she decided to use the bathroom, and while sitting there, started to text him back.







She'd peeked out the window after flushing, and saw him standing there, like an idiot. Probably thinking about her in the bathroom.

What a weirdo.

After several moments there came a knock at the door. "Hello," came a female voice, frightened and softly accented. She rapped again, more urgently this time, "Hello, please!" If they looked through the peephole, they'd see a petite young woman with long, dark hair, obviously spooked and very familiar. "Hello! There is a man, I think he wants to hurt me, please!"

After Maebe was manhandled away (but not before spritzing Taym with some air freshener, which she'd just happened to have in her hand when he pulled her out of the bathroom), she realized that the person she'd seen at the window couldn't have been in. She would have asked if he had an evil twin, except he made the SHUT UP MAEBE face and there was no arguing with it.

Then came the voice at the door.

She, quite obviously, wanted to go open it.

"What in the hell-" He was acting like they were surrounded by terrorists, or worse - the police. Her hand gestured in the direction of the door, so that she could go and look in the peephole. Clearly not frightened of the girl she could see, Maebe waved her hand at the knob, and raised her eyebrows. Could she open it?