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“Exhausted.”
“Hungry?”
Ashley flashes me a smile. She’s lovely when she does that. It makes the very corners of her eyes crinkle up just a little—this brightness in her expression can’t be faked. “Starving.”
“Alright,” I tell her. “So we’ll get room service once we get there. Introductions are probably going to wait until tomorrow. My parents tend to settle in around eight to handle emails and the like.”
It’s almost ten now, which means that we’re going to be in the clear for heading straight up to our room. Which is great, because I just don’t think that everything needs to be thrown onto Ashley the second we get there, especially after this long travel day. We already have the sharing-a-room situation that we need to deal with.
We’re both exhausted so we don’t say much more. I think Ashley’s enjoying watching the city pass us by, too. There’s this sort of wonder in her expression, this glinting innocence that keeps catching my attention. I find myself staring at her out of the corner of my eye the whole way there.
Using the turnaround valet driveway, our driver pulls up directly in front of the hotel. The hotel is a massive structure that stretches way up above us. There’s a fountain out front between the driveway and street. It’s lit up, with several life-sized horse statues in the large square basin of it. The statues have sprayers hooked up beneath them, angled to make it seem as though their hooves are churning up water.
Our luggage is pulled out of the trunk and given to a bellman. He places them on a trolley, I flash my ID, and the man nods, taking them inside. I checked in using the phone the moment that we got off the plane, so all I need to do is go up and grab the room key from the front counter.
The key is for room ten twenty-five, a penthouse on the tenth floor. We take a fully glass elevator up the lift; this gives us a chance to see the impressive ground floor dropping away beneath us. Ashley presses her hand against the glass wall in awe at the sight.
“What do you think of the hotel so far?” I ask.
“It’s gorgeous,” says Ashley. She flashes me another one of her fluttering smiles. Then we hit our destination and the doors creek open. The walls are a pale cream, and the floor is a dark hardwood. Everything about this hotel is meant to evoke a feeling of elegance and grandeur.
The penthouse is found quickly enough, and then I’m sliding in the key and swinging the door open. The inside is decorated in a chic, modern look. There are black and white pictures of the city carefully placed on the room’s walls, and heavy black-out curtains hung up over the large, wall-to-wall windows on the far side of the room. The curtains have been pulled open and the city lights are dazzling against the black sky.
I step around our bags, which have been neatly set at the foot of the bed, and head over to the wall of windows. “That’s what I thought. Look at this, Ashley.” I open the sliding glass door and step out onto the balcony. “We can see the London Eye from here. Look, it’s all lit up.”
True to form. The Ferris wheel is lit up with bright white lights, drifting slowly through a constant turn. But there’s no response.
I turn around and find that Ashley is staring at the king-size bed. It has pillows in both gray and white cases, with a single splash of color in the form of midnight blue bed sheets, folded backward, over the top of the gray comforter.
She’s frowning.
“What’s wrong?”
“I knew we were going to be sharing a room. I just didn’t realize we were going to be sharing a bed, too.”
Right. I should have thought of that. Ashley and I might be comfortable around each other but this clearly has a different degree of—closeness. One she hasn’t experienced before.
“I mean, my dad’s the one who booked all the rooms,” I tell her. “And I told him that I was bringing my girlfriend with me so… He probably just went ahead and did this because… That’s what a real couple would do. Share a bed.”
I move to join her, pressing the flat of my palm down against the mattress. It’s pillow plush and ultra-comfortable. Even though I’ve been looking forward to laying out on this bed all evening after a day of travel like that, I find myself wondering if I need to make the offer of giving her the bed.
Glancing around the room, I try to figure out where else I could sleep. There’s a round wood table on the far side of the room, with several wooden chairs around it. A small stretch of granite countertop is on a different wall, with a coffee station sitting on it and a mini fridge underneath it.
“Okay,” I say, still trying to figure out if I’ll need to sleep in the big plush armchair in the corner of the room. “How about we just start with the room service?”
Ashley flashes me a smile that’s so tight—more than anything else I’ve seen on her so far. “That sounds good to me.”
I handle placing the order; a bottle of red wine for us to split, and a few plates of appetizers from the hotel restaurant. Soon, we’ve got a spread of crispy calamari with lemon aioli, bacon wrapped asparagus, chicken satay, fresh cut strawberries and thick, sweet cream on the foot of the bed.
The food is great, but there’s something about the whole situation that feels a little bit… tense. Neither of us is really sure about this sleeping arrangement. Ashley has been sharing a house with me, sure, but she sleeps in the guest room, or sometimes down on the couch in the living room. We’ve never shared a bed with each other.
So we eat, and then she helps me gather the dishes. The usual ease and comfort that clings to us sharing a meal seems to have vanished completely. It feels more like this is the first time that she’s been to my house all over again.
Where is Brooke to break the tension when you need her?
Well, since my niece is in another country, I guess I need to diffuse the situation on my own. “You know,” I tell her. “I haven’t checked out the bathroom yet, but places like this normally have those jet tubs.”
“Yeah?” Ashley asks, perking up a little bit.
