Only one more sleep until you're here! she writes. Paul
checked out the hotel yesterday to see the final plans.
Everything is DONE and it looks BEAUTIFUL and I am only
hyperventilating two times a day now.
I click through the attached photos, marveling at each one.
The hotel is the reason for the long engagement. Paul was
adamant he wanted to get married there but a lengthy waiting list coupled with a not-so-small price tag meant this was the
earliest they could get.
My new passport arrived this morning! I email back. We
are officially all systems go. I can't wait to see you.
"Sarah?"
Harvey, my boss, stands beside the cubicle, his glasses
pushed into his gray hair. "Do you have time for a quick
chat?"
No. "Of course!" I hit send and grab the latte.
Will gives me a pitying look as I follow him. At least no
one else is in to see this.
"It's about your plan for the Grayson Group," he says as
we enter his office.
He shuts the door and my mood drops. Harvey's door is
always open. Always. He only ever shuts it for serious
moments. HR moments. Bad-news moments.
I sit in the worn leather armchair in front of his desk,
trying to steel myself for what's to come.
At least I can always rely on him to be straight and to the
point.
"They want to move in a different direction."
Of course, a little easing in wouldn't be too bad either.
"Oh." I muster up a smile. "Did they say why?"
"They did. They felt it was uninspired."
"Right." I can feel myself growing defensive, but I can't
help it. "I'm following the brief."
"I know you are." A pause. "I also know you've got your
vacation coming up."
"That's not a problem. I'll give them a call. Take a look at
things before I go."
"I'm going to give them to Matthias."
Any attempt at professionalism drops. It's impossible to
hide how disappointed I feel.
Harvey sighs, sitting back in his chair. "You've got a week
off. I want you to enjoy that time. Take a break. You've been
working hard the past few months; don't think I haven't
noticed. But I need you fresh. I need you at your best when
you get back."
I force back my annoyance at his words. Best for what?
Grayson was supposed to be my focus for the next few
months. And now it was Matthias's. Just like that.
"You okay?" Harvey asks when I don't say anything.
"Yes." I try to brush it off. Try not to let it hurt me as much
as it is. "I'll take a break. I promise. And in the meantime, I
will get to work."
"Thanks, Sarah."
I smile brightly as I leave the office. It drops as soon as
I'm in the corridor. Working hard the last few months and
nothing to show for it. Not only am I not moving forward here,
I appear to be moving backward.
"Watch it," I snap on instinct as I almost walk into
someone rounding the corner.
It's Matthias, carrying a croissant in his hand.
"Sorry," I mumble at the shock on his face. "I haven't had
my coffee yet."
"I thought you were a morning person." He smiles.
"You're in even earlier than me these days."
Is that a dig? One look at his face tells me it's not. Of
course it's not. He's being friendly. Because he's Matthias and
that's who he is. Mr. Friendly guy. Mr. Talented, super nice—
"I left breakfast in the kitchen if you want some."
"Sounds great, thank you."
He opens his mouth to say something else but I'm already
walking away, forgoing the chat and the pastries to go back to
my tiny, cloistered cubicle where I belong.
Stupid Grayson Group and their stupid cultural center. Stupid
Matthias and his stupid visionary mind. Stupid me and my
stupid dull one.
I fling my suitcase onto the bed and unzip it. There's still
some sand inside from last summer when Annie and I visited
her family in Florida. We spent a lot of time eating shrimp and
drinking beer and drunkenly video calling Paul at 2 a.m. his
time.
It was a good weekend.
Now I shake the sand onto the floor. I have a few planned
outfits I want to wear but what about everything in between?
The majority of my closet is office based, the rest of it
embarrassingly casual. None of it is suitable wedding-week
attire.
Uninspired.
"Within budget" is what they meant to say.
"Following the brief with practical yet stylish adjustments"
is more like it.
You want inspired you whack on another million bucks,
Grayson.
My phone buzzes on the bed and it takes me a moment to
locate it underneath all the clothes. It's a text from Dad.
Bon voyage!
I stare at it, feeling a little guilty. We were supposed to be
going camping soon, our annual father-daughter tradition, but
with the trip to Ireland, I can't afford to take any more time off
work. He said he didn't mind but I know he's disappointed.
He's been on his own since I moved to the city, and though I
try to visit when I can, it feels like every year we're seeing less
and less of each other.
"I'm alive!"
I quickly message back as Claire's voice sounds from the
hallway and emerge to see her eyes glued to her own phone as
she untucks her blouse from her tight pencil skirt. She's
already swapped her heels for a pair of sleek black trainers.
Claire is a lawyer for one of those large corporations that
no one has heard of but that quietly runs a million companies
and probably a small country somewhere. She tried to explain
her job to me once. Something with taxes. A lot of reading. A
lot of meetings. No actual court experience. "I'm a sellout,"
she said seriously to me once. "But a sellout who is going to
retire by forty."
She's rooming with me to make as much money as she can
to buy her own place and I'm grateful for it. She gets the
bigger room and insists on paying a lot more rent than I do.
There's no way I'd be able to afford this place otherwise. It's a
decent two-bedroom on Avenue A with sunlight and closet
space. The neighborhood gets a little rowdy on the weekends,
but I love it and it's near enough to everything that I can't
imagine living anywhere else.
"What crawled up your butt?" she asks when she sees me.
"Nothing."
"You packed yet?"
"No."
She rolls her eyes and gestures me back into the bedroom,
where she collapses into the flea market armchair I squeezed
beside the bed.
"Doesn't it rain all the time in Ireland?" she asks,
examining my suitcase with a critical eye.
"Yes, but it's nearly June. And Paul says that's a myth."
"Throw in a fleece. Do you have an adapter?" She sighs
when I shake my head. "I'll give you mine."
"Thanks." I dump a pile of T-shirts into the case, followed
by my jeans.
"Bad day at work?"
I glance at her in surprise. "How did you know?"
"No reason," she deadpans as I kick a discarded jacket out
of the way.
I frown down at my clothes. Do shoes go in first or last?
"Turns out I'm not the creative genius I thought I was," I
explain. "Our new client doesn't like my design and, as it turns
out, neither does my boss."
Her face falls. "I'm sorry."
"Yay, vacation time, I guess."
"It will be good for you. There's a reason I go to some
nameless, extremely sunny beach every year. You never take a
break."
"I take breaks," I protest.
"Sex with random men when you feel like it is not taking a
break."
"It is to me," I mutter. "This is my plane outfit," I add,
ignoring her look as I hold up the sweatpants and sweatshirt.
She nods in approval. "And don't forget to put on a face
mask before you land." She pats the skin under her eyes.
"Helps those bags."
"I don't get bags."
"You definitely get bags. And let's try some serum, shall
we?"
Claire's obsessed with her skin-care regimen. Our
bathroom is crammed with cleansers and exfoliators and
strange contraptions that look like they belong in a doctor's
office but apparently "stimulate blood flow." All of this plus her quarterly Botox injections sometimes makes me more than
a little paranoid about my one-step moisturizer routine (I
recently graduated to using it morning and night) but she
assures me with my babyface cheeks and supposedly tiny
pores that I don't need to worry.
I guess it's one upside to getting constantly carded by
bouncers ten years younger than me.
"Don't drink any of the plane wine," Claire continues.
"The last thing you need is a hangover on top of jet lag. I'm
speaking from experience."
I dump the sweatshirt onto the bed. "You're kinda sucking
all the fun out of this, you know that?"
"It's five hours. It will fly by. Literally. And then you will
be in a whole new country on a whole new continent and I will
be extremely jealous." She plants two hands on the armchair
and hauls herself up. "I'm going to order too much pad thai.
You want in?"
"I already ate."
"Cold pizza doesn't count toward your five a day," she
sings, shuffling out of the room.
Bras. Underwear. I count them out day by day, including
some spares because, honestly, who knows and grab a handful
of socks from the drawer. The suitcase fills quickly, especially
when I add in Annie's presents from friends unable to travel
for the wedding. I keep my nicer heels in boxes under the bed
and I drop to my knees to pull them out when I spy something
glinting on the floor.
It's a watch.
I don't own a watch.
Crap.
I bang my head against the bed frame as I pick it up, the
metal strap cold in my hand.
For one second, I think about throwing it in the trash or
selling it on eBay. Then I remind myself I am not an awful
person. I don't have a good excuse anyway. We swapped numbers last night and I haven't gotten around to deleting it
yet.
I take a picture and message my one-night stand. I think
this is yours? I keep my tone polite, not wanting to give him
the wrong impression when he was so keen this morning. I'm
leaving it with my roommate. Going out of town for a few
days.
Friendly but formal.
Too formal?
I stare down at the text, deliberating. Smiley face? Or is
that too inviting? Maybe I— oh my God just send it. I hit the
button, hesitate and send another.
This is Sarah by the way.
Unless I didn't tell him my name.
From last night.
Ugh. Too many texts. But too late to take it back.
I throw my phone on the bed and continue packing. It's
barely a minute later when his reply comes.
I'm outside now.
What the… Is he kidding? I catch a glimpse of myself in
the mirror, dressed only in faded gray shorts and a sports bra I
should have thrown out years ago. The skin around my
eyebrows is still a stubborn pink, smarting from my wax down
the block.
I stand in the middle of my room, listening hard for the
sound of the buzzer or a knock on the door. When nothing
happens, I scramble over the bed to the window, which is
already open in the faint hope of a night breeze. We're on the
second floor and the light is beginning to fade. A couple of
people are smoking on the corner and a man across the street is talking loudly into his cell. But there's no one waiting
below.
He's kidding.
He has to be.
I abandon the window and head for the kitchen, grabbing a
T-shirt so I'm semi-decent, and peer through the keyhole,
squinting at the warped bubble of hallway.
There's no one there. I huff a sigh of relief as my phone
trills with another text.
Made you look.