Page 24 of The Drifter

I stood there in the empty lobby of The Palmetto Rose and looked at that name.

Clint.

I had never heard of a Clint. Fifteen years of that family coming through my doors and I had never once heard the name. Not from Izzy, not from Ryker, not from any of them, and I have heard everything. I have heard things I would have paid money to unhear.

Here was a brother nobody had ever mentioned, and he had walked into my hotel with a canvas bag and no car, and he had stood at my marble with his hands empty and asked me what I would rather be doing.

I'll pour their coffee. I'll burn their paperwork. But I will not love one.

I had stood on this exact square of floor and said that to myself. I could have shown you the spot. I could have put my finger on it.

It's fine, I thought.

I wasn't in danger of loving that man.

I'd known him a few, short minutes. I'm thirty-two years old. I've had my heart broken twice and I've done the breaking once. I know exactly what love looks like from a distance. This was not that.

What I was in danger of was something worse.

He had asked me one question—what would you be doing if you weren't standing there—and I had opened my mouth to give him the answer I give, the good one, the built one, the one that comes out perfect every time.

And there wasn't one.

Not I'd rather be at the beach. Not I'd rather be asleep. Not one solitary thing had come up out of me except a fog, and a kind of vertigo, and then a whole lot of talking in a hallway that I could not now account for, because I had said things to a stranger that I have never said to my best friend. I had said them fast, and I had said them like a woman kicking a door.

I don't think I know how.

I put my hand flat on the marble.

Dubai.

I had told a man I'd never met. Out loud. In a hallway. To a Dane.

I closed my eyes.

I stood there in the dark lobby with my eyes shut and my hand on the stone.

And I didn’t cry, because I had a shift to close, and because I don't, and because there was nothing to cry about.

There was only something to see.

He'd seen it right away. That's what got me. Not that he was handsome—he was, and I had already had a very unhelpful conversation with myself about the forearms, and about the way he crossed a room like the floor belonged to him and he had graciously decided not to mention it. Not that he'd been kind, though he had been.

It was that he had walked into a building that had known me my entire life, and he had looked at me for ninety seconds, and he had seen something that nobody else had seen.

You're looking to start your own thing.

Not one person had ever said that to me. Not one. And I have been screaming it, apparently, in some register only strangers can hear.

I picked up the folio. I entered him into the system under a code that would tell anybody who went looking exactly nothing. I closed the drawer and I ran the night audit. I balanced a set of numbers that came out to the penny, the way they always come out to the penny, because I am extraordinarily good at this.

Then, I got out my phone and I opened the email I never open.

It comes once a year. It's from a payroll system in a city I've never been to. The subject line has an exclamation point in it, which somebody somewhere thought was cheerful.

Your accrued paid time off!

There was a number.