“So sorry we couldn’t do business with you, sir. Have a pleasant evening.”
I grumbled some nicety, hung up, and stepped forward to tuck the phone into Calvin’s pocket. “They’re full-up.”
Calvin glanced at me while taking our updated tickets from the attendant. “Every room? It’s a convention center.”
“Yeah, well, lots of clowns and redheads in town.” Both he and the woman were staring at me. I waved a hand. “Two unrelated events. There was a suite available, but if there’s a single moment in our entire marriage I can be a scrooge about money—let it be this one. I’m not paying six hundred and miscellaneous taxes to spend the night on a borrowed mattress.”
Calvin tapped the tickets against the counter a few times. “We’ll have to find a hotel farther away, I guess.”
“I, um, might have a solution,” the woman piped up. She smiled timidly when we both looked at her, and said, “Mission Operations. We don’t have a business relationship, so it’d still be out-of-pocket, and I’m not even sure they have availability, but it’s worth a try.”
“Mission Operations,” Calvin repeated.
She nodded quickly. “It’s a pod hotel here in the airport.”
“What is a pod hotel,” I asked, but the question came out flat.
“It’s neat,” the attendant insisted. “A mini hotel, really.” She pointed discreetly and added, “Head this way—Zone B. It’s past the Jamba Juice on your left.”
Calvin thanked her and took the handle of our suitcase in one hand. I reached for his other, and he accepted before leading the way out of line.
I know I said I was a homebody and that was why I didn’t travel outside of the city, but honestly, it was the near-crippling anxiety I felt when going to unfamiliar, public locations that kept me in New York. Big, bright places like airports washed out my vision—then I really was blind, and not merely from a legal standpoint. I can’t read signs very well and require my walking stick, and it was a stimulation overload because I found myself depending a lot more on my hearing to get around. The city might be home to nine million people, but it was a place of routine behavior. And when Ididneed public transport, I’d memorized all of the subways and stops. I was rarely thrown a curveball I couldn’t immediately adjust to and I never had a situation that required driving.
But here?
I’d be so fucking freaked out if I were alone. I mean, were there signs for Zone B? I hadn’t seen one—but was that because I’d simply missed it or literally couldn’t see it? What if this pod hotel had no availability and I’d had to go to a hotel twenty miles away? Dallas was a big city, so I was certain Uber and Lyft were available no matter the time of day, but what if I were somewhere more isolated and the only way to get around was to rent a car? I’d be stranded.
Calvin knew all of this now. He’d long ago learned my limitations and my hang-ups, but he also knew I’d adapted and managed for thirty-four years, and I didn’t need someone “more able” to rush to my aid. He knew I had methods for living in the world, and that if I did need help, I was capable of making it known. I didn’t always ask with words—maybe that was in part due to the teases and taunts I endured as a kid and not wanting to draw attention to myself—but Calvin understood. The other week I’d handed him a carton of coffee creamer, and he read the expiration date aloud and gave it back. That was it. No explanation from me and no pity from him.
So moments like this—when I held a hand out and he simply took it and started walking? I could feel my anxiety ease with each step. I’d be fine here, because Calvin would help and not make me feel less of myself for it.
We walked down a long—very long—passage of mostly empty gates and shops shuttered for the evening. The wheels of our suitcase echoed on the polished floor, and the overhead speaker system played a canned safety announcement. Calvin gently tugged me to the side just before one of those buggy golf carts honked and zoomed past. Eventually we reached the Jamba Juice in question, the lights off and gate pulled down over the entrance. Calvin took the left as the hall branched in a few different directions, and we came to a stop outside a sort of incognito setup behind a glass wall.
“Mission Operations,” Calvin read from a blinking neon sign overhead.
“Beam me up.”
He smiled as the glass door automatically opened with a sort ofwhooshsound effect. We had to adjust to single file down a narrow corridor that ended with a check-in counter and a lone employee, all of it obscenely backlit in some, I guessed, futuristic space aesthetic.
The guy sitting at the counter glanced up from his phone, sighed audibly as he pushed it aside, and said with such a bored tone that he might as well have been unconscious, “Welcome to Mission Operations.”
I looked around Calvin’s hulking figure and answered, “Houston sent us.”
Calvin shot me a look. “Don’t antagonize,” he whispered. Then he turned back to the counter and the apathetic astronaut. “Do you have any rooms available?”
“You don’t have a reservation?”
“No,” Calvin said, holding up a finger when I opened my mouth, like he could just sense the smartass remark I had ready to let fly.
Astronaut sighed again, directed his attention to the monitor on his right, and said after a moment, “We have one pod currently available.”
“Great.” Calvin reached for his wallet.
“It’s by the hour,” the astronaut continued.
“So like a love hotel,” I replied.
“Shush,” Calvin murmured before saying, “We’ll take it until seven.”
