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“I’ll let you know,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want to jump in too fast with this and wind up regretting it.”
“Fair enough,” I told him.
“One more round?”
“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “I already finished my glass of water, which tells me it’s time to call this a night.”
“As you wish,” he said with a smile.
I left him sitting at the bar, though I couldn’t hide the smile on my face. I had to admit, there was some undeniable chemistry between us. It might not be the most blatant thing, but when we were able to sit down and talk with each other, I could feel it.
And there was a part of me that hoped he felt it, too.
NINE
Greyson
I sleptin for the first time in as long as I could remember, and it felt good.
That is, minus the headache I had from the alcohol the night before.
I wasn’t a heavy drinker, not really, anyway. I didn’t drink very often, but when I did, I did enjoy drinking enough to get a good buzz going. But perhaps it would have been wiser to have taken a glass of water for my final drink rather than trying to have one last beverage to round out the night.
But, I went to bed with a smile on my face that night. There was no denying that. The fact that I had shared a few drinks with Laurel and had gotten to see another side of her was the best thing I could have asked for. Normally, I didn’t see myself being overly happy with the position I was put in here, but since I was working with her, I was happy about the time I would be spending down in Florida.
The alarm clock on the dresser told me it was nearly nine, which was a lot later than I normally slept during the week. But then, since I didn’t have anything else to do with my time, I didn’t feel too hard on myself. I knew breakfast was being served in the hotel all the way until eleven, and I had showered the night before after I got back to my room from the bar.
So, I had little to do besides pull on the new clothes I’d purchased the day before, then I headed down to the lobby to find a hot cup of coffee to jumpstart the day and get rid of the headache that wanted to cling to me.
I was glad to see the variety of flavor options, as well as the variety of caffeine options that presented themselves to me when I walked into the lobby. But, it was the fact that I saw Laurel at the other end of the hotel lobby that really brought a smile to my face.
She was up and fresh as a daisy with clean clothes on, and her hair had been styled in loose waves that fell about her shoulders. She wore dark rimmed glasses that made her look even smarter than I’d found her to be the night before, and I had to remind myself I was here for the sake of being a coworker and a helper, not someone who I was looking to date.
I grabbed a second cup of coffee and headed in her direction, greeting her before I reached her to ensure I didn’t startle her when I walked over.
“Your heaven sent,” she said when she took the cup of coffee from me. “Honestly.”
“You looked like you could use a bit of a jump start, too. I don’t usually sleep in, but when I woke up and felt that little bit of a headache settling in, I knew I was going to need a bit of caffeine to take the edge off before it really became something.”
“I didn’t have the time to grab a cup myself,” she said. “I woke up to a zoom meeting with Jason this morning, and with the new list of shit he wants me to check out, I felt the best thing to do was to examine what he has set up here and see how it all came together, then to find out from him what he likes about this design and what he doesn’t. I’m not sure exactly the level of what he’s going for here and how different he wants it to be from the rest.”
“I don’t want to be rude, but you really lost me in that,” I said with a laugh. “You were talking about that fountain last night, and now you have to see how different he wants the new place to be from this place? I can’t say I realized that we were even in the same hotel chain with this place.”
“Oh yes. He owns this chain. He just wants to open up the new one with a whole new experience. I think the gist of what he’s trying to do is to open up a hotel that offers almost as wild of an experience as any of the theme parks in the area, so he can justify trying to rival them with location and their other hotels, you know?” she said. “When it comes down to it, what he’s trying to do with the new place is to offer an experience that’s bigger and more explosive than anywhere else. And I’m pretty sure the emphasis is on anywhere.”
“Including the theme parks, gotcha,” I said with a shake of my head. “Well, I don’t think you can go with the same themes as the parks, which is going to throw a damper on you if you want to offer something that the whole family is going to fall in love with.”
“Right,” she said. “Which is why he wants there to be the different levels of wonder, as he’s now calling it. He wants to have each lobby in the place appeal to a different lifestyle. Which, as you can imagine, is a really good idea – except for when it comes down to really executing what he has in mind.”
“And I thought my job was difficult at times,” I said as I looked over the same lobby she was looking at. It seemed to me that there was a lot of the same here, and if she wasn’t going to be going for the same setup as this place had, I wasn’t quite sure what it was she was going for exactly.
But then, I wasn’t the one who had to deal with the design aspect of what she was doing. I was the guy who would come along and see what, if any, I could offer her along the way. Not that there was much I would be able to give her with what I knew versus what she knew, but still.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t able to still offer what advice I felt would be helpful to her in the long run. At least, I would try.
“Do you have a general idea of what you want to go with?” I asked after looking over the lobby myself. “I mean, there’s no denying that this is a really nice hotel, but if that’s not the gist of what you want with the next one, then what are you doing here?”
“I want to get a feel for the atmosphere,” she said. “Once I know what I’m going for with that, then I’m going to have a better feel with what I want to do next. I don’t know about you, but I think that it’s going to work out better if I focus on what the kids want when the families first walk into the place, then we can go for more upscale the higher up we go. As you may have noticed, hotels tend to price higher the higher the room, so why not go with that same theme with the rest of the location?”
