“Oh. All over. Here and there.” I pointed to the Victorian wing on the map in front of me. “If it’s the oldest part of the hotel, that explains why it’s also the stuffiest.”
“I beg your pardon?” Archie said, positively offended. But offended meant he was off the scent.
“Beg me all you want, it’s stuffy and needs a freshening up.” I sighed in relief when I saw the little vein pop out on his left temple. That meant he was ready to argue and would forget asking me questions about where I grew up. I never knew how to answer those questions—you start telling someone you lived in foster care most of your life, and the pity parade started immediately. I hated parades.
But lucky for me that temple was throbbing. “Do you have any idea how much the antiques in those rooms are worth? And you want to bring something new, something cookie-cutter, in there?”
“I’d love for you to tell me when exactly I mentioned the words ‘cookie’ or ‘cutter,’ because that’s the last thing I want to do.”
“You say words like ‘freshen up’ and I hear modern and streamlined and boring and suddenly we’re an airport Marriott.”
I slammed my spoon down, oatmeal flying. “Yes, that’s exactly why you hired me, so I could turn this place into an airport Marriott. Would you give me just the slightest amount of credit here?”
“How can I possibly when you are literally turning my entire world upside down?”
He flung his own spoon down in response, and a grapefruit wedge plopped into my coffee cup. We stared at each other as if in a standoff, both of us breathing heavily, faces flushed, fists clenched. Our waiter circled nervously, no doubt waffling back and forth between quickly cleaning up the mess his boss had made and not intruding into a heated conversation.
Archie’s glare made up the waiter’s mind, and he scurried away with a muffled “I’ll just give you two a moment.”
I folded my cloth napkin gracefully, stood up, and threw it onto my empty seat.
“There’s no one staying on the third floor in the Victorian wing right now.”
He looked back at me, his expression saying, Am I supposed to know what that means? “Go get a key for one of the rooms and meet me up there in twenty minutes,” I instructed. “I’m going to show you exactly what I mean.”
There it was. The fire. Hidden behind the tailored suit and the preppy glasses. “Make it fifteen,” he shot back.
I walked quickly back to my room to grab my camera. I wanted some pictures of these tired old rooms to show them to a few designers for some feedback, get some fresh ideas for how to renovate these rooms, bring them into the now instead of keeping them in the creaky old past that this guy seemed to want to live in!
Damn this guy! There was no way I’d be able to do my job with him fighting me at every turn, not to mention get any work done when the same fighting made not only my blood boil, but other parts of me also get warm in the storm.
Did he know when he was irritated he chewed his lower lip?
Did he know when he was angry his skin paled and his freckles jumped out?
Did he know when he was frustrated his voice lowered and got all kinds of gravelly?
Did he know it was all I could do to stop myself from launching over the breakfast table and wrestling him to the ground amid oatmeal flakes and plopping grapefruit?
I ran out of my room, down the main stairs, and across the lobby, getting more worked up as I went. Never had I ever encountered such a roadblock as this fucking guy. This breakfast meeting was supposed to be the beginning of a collaborative effort to save this place, and it was already beginning to unravel because I wanted to make necessary changes and he wanted to just keep on arguing. How can I work like this? How can I function?
I hit the main staircase on the opposite side and ran up two flights, arriving on the landing just in time to see Archie come around the corner at the other end.
He held a gold key on a ring, which he spun around his finger. We walked toward each other.
“Room three-seventeen good enough for you?”
“Perfect, nice and stuffy,” I replied. I dipped my head toward the door, indicating he should open it.
“What you think is stuffy, Ms. Morgan, is what we like to call classic,” he said, slipping the key into the lock smoothly and turning the knob.
“Whatever, just get me inside and out of this spooky hallway.”
He shot me a look over his shoulder, then pushed the door, holding it open for me to go first.
The rooms were smaller in this part of the hotel, lacking actual closets but having large armoires to house clothes. No Murphy beds either. But given that this was the Victorian wing, every single surface was covered in a lace doily. The cabbage roses that were in my room were here, times eleventy. Damask rose–printed wallpaper, portraits on the walls depicting fruit bowls and water pitchers framed by flowery gilt edging, and small uncomfortable-looking ladder-back chairs were flanking the window.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Grandma Esther’s room.” I walked the length of the room, pausing to admire the view of the mountains in the distance. No matter the stuffy, each room still had a helluva view. It had just started to rain, just barely a pitter-patter, but the mountains were still there.
“Every piece in this room is an antique,” he said, standing in the doorway.
“Every piece in this room is an antique,” I agreed, playing with the fringe on an old lamp, “but it also looks like Nellie Oleson might go running through here at any second on her way into the mercantile.”
“Who is Nellie Oleson?”
“Forget it,” I said, crossing over to the bed, “my point is, look at this bed. It’s an antique, but, for God’s sake, it’s a full size. Not a king, not even a queen, but a full. Who the hell sleeps in a full-sized bed anymore?”
“People. People do it all the time.”
“No, they really don’t. Unless you’re grad students in your first apartment, couples want at least a queen. And speaking of doing it, you need to be courting the weekend-away guest, the married couples who want to get away from their kids and spend a romantic weekend up in the mountains. Believe me, when they get here, they’ll want to do it in a big bed. A king, ideally. Doing it in a full-sized bed just feels like you’re still making out at your parents’ house.”
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” he said, shaking his head.
“Believe it, hotel boy, people fuck when they go on vacation.”
“Ms. Morgan, I don’t think there’s any need for language like that, please keep your voice down.”
“And they don’t want to fuck at Grandma Esther’s!” I said just as Mrs. Banning from housekeeping walked by.
“Well hello, what’s going on here?” she said, her eyes lighting up like a cat who just saw Tweety Bird.
Archie’s jaw clenched. “Nothing, Mrs. Banning. Just discussing some ideas Ms. Morgan has for breathing new life into our stuffy old hotel rooms.”