“This guy owns a bunch of apartments here,” I say, head swimming. “He probably sent us the wrong unit number.”
I find the right email and click through the pictures. “Here!” I cry. “Look!”
Alex steps in close, looking over my shoulder at the pictures—a bright white and gray apartment with a couple of thriving potted fiddle-leaf figs in one corner and a vast white bed in the middle of the room, a slightly smaller one beside it.
Okay, so there might have been some artful angling to these photographs, because in the shot the bigger bed looks like it’s king-sized when it’s actually a queen, which means the other couldn’t be bigger than a double, but it definitely should exist.
“I don’t understand.” Alex looks from the photo to where the second bed should be.
“Oh,” he and I say in unison as it clicks.
He crosses to the wide, armless chair, in coral imitation suede, and yanks off the decorative pillows, reaching into the seam of the chair. He folds the bottom out, the back pressing down so that the whole thing flattens into a long, skinny pad with sagging seams between its three sections. “A pullout . . . chair.”
“I’ll take that!” I volunteer.
Alex shoots me a look. “You can’t, Poppy.”
“Why, because I’m a woman, and they’ll take your Midwestern masculinity away if you don’t fall on the sword of every gender norm presented to you?”
“No,” he says. “Because if you sleep on that, you’ll wake up with a migraine(an extremely severe paroxysmal headache, usually confined to one side of the head and often associated with nausea).”
“That happened once,” I say, “and we don’t know it was from sleeping on the air mattress. It could’ve been the red wine.” But even as I say it, I’m searching for the thermostat, because if anything’s going to make my head throb, it’s sleeping in this heat. I find the controls inside the kitchenette. “Oh my gosh, he has it set to eighty degrees in here.”
“Seriously?” Alex scrubs a hand through his hair, catching the sweat beading on his forehead. “And to think, it doesn’t feel a degree over two hundred.”
I crank the thermostat down to seventy,
and the fans kick on loudly, but without any instant relief. “At least we have a view of the pool,” I say, crossing to the back doors. I throw the blackout curtains back and balk(hesitate), the remnants of(a small remaining quantity of) my optimism fizzling out.
The balcony is way bigger than mine at home, with a cute red café table and two matching chairs. The problem is, three-quarters of it is walled off with plastic sheeting as, somewhere overhead, a horrible melee of mechanical rattles and screeches(give a loud, harsh, piercing cry) sound off.
Alex steps out beside me. “Construction?”
“I feel like I’m inside a ziplock bag, inside of someone’s body.”
“Someone with a fever,” he says.
“Who’s also on fire.”
He laughs a little.
A miserable sound he tries to play off as lighthearted.
But Alex isn’t lighthearted.
He’s Alex.
He’s high-stress and he likes to be clean and have his space and he packs his own pillow in his luggage, because his “neck is used to this one”—even though it means he can’t bring as many clothes as he’d like—and the last thing this trip needs is any unnecessary pushing on our pressure points.
Suddenly, the six days ahead of us seem impossibly long.
We should have taken a three-day trip. Just the length of the wedding festivities, when there’d be buffers galore and free booze and time blocked out that Alex would be busy with his brother’s bachelor party and whatever else.
“Should we go down to the pool?” I say, a little too loud, because by now my heart is racing and I have to yell to hear myself over it.
“Sure,” Alex says, then turns back to the door and freezes. His mouth hangs open as he considers his words. “I’ll change in the bathroom, and you can just shout when you’re finished?”
Right. It’s a studio. One open room with no doors except the one to the bathroom.
Which wouldn’t have been awkward, if we weren’t both being so freaking awkward.
“Mm-hm,” I say. “Sure.”
10
Ten Summers Ago
WE WANDER THE city of Victoria until our feet hurt, our backs ache, and all that sleep we didn’t get on the flights makes our bodies feel heavy and our brains light and floaty.
Then we stop for dumplings in a tiny nook of a place whose windows are tinted and whose red-painted walls are elaborately looped in gold mountainscapes and forests and flowing rivers that serpentine through low, rounded hills.
We’re the only people inside—it’s three p.m., not quite late enough for dinner, but the air-conditioning is powerful and the food is divine, and we’re so exhausted we can’t stop laughing about every little thing.
The hoarse, voice-cracking yelp Alex let out when the plane touched down this morning.
The suit-wearing man who sprints past the restaurant at top speed, his arms held flat to his sides.
The gallery girl in the Empress Hotel who spent thirty minutes trying to sell us a six-inch, twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear sculpture while we dragged our tattered luggage around behind us.
“We don’t really . . . have money for . . . that,” Alex said, sounding diplomatic (skill of managing international relations).
The girl nodded enthusiastically. “Hardly anyone does. But when art speaks to you, you find a way to make it work.”
Somehow, neither of us could bring ourselves to tell the girl that the twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear was not speaking to us, but we’d spent all day, since then, picking things up—a signed Backstreet Boys album in the used record shop, a copy of a novel called What My G-Spot Is Telling You in a squat little bookstore off a cobbled street, a pleather catsuit in a fetish shop I led Alex into primarily to embarrass him—and asking, Does this speak to you?
《People We Meet on Vacation》
by Emily Henry 从朋友到恋人
只是搬运工加个人笔记。