Wrong Room

Jade

I held my wine glass, and I laughed at the right moments, and I answered questions about the spring collection when Talia asked, and I did everything the evening required of me with a composure that I had paid for in a hallway twenty minutes earlier and was not going to waste.

When everyone moved inside after the dinner things were cleared, the group fractured naturally into smaller conversations. By ten-thirty it was clear the weekend had shifted into the slower rhythm of the late evening. Leo suggested the outdoor pool at Gurney’s, the boutique hotel a five-minute walk down the bluff, where they had all booked rooms for the night. The house had been dinner-only.

The pool at Gurney’s was heated and open to the sky and the kind of thing that looked extraordinary in photographs and felt even better in person. I got in because the alternative was standing at the edge watching everyone else, and I was not willing to spend a weekend being that version of myself.

I stayed for forty minutes.

I could not relax.

The water was warm, and the night air was cold above the surface, and I spread my arms out and stared at the sky and tried to feel nothing specific and managed to feel everything specific instead. The weight of the hallway. His voice saying thank you for being clean about it. The three years of things I was never going to put into words sitting behind my sternum and refusing to be anything less than exactly what they were.

I got out. I wrapped a towel around myself and found a lounger near Brooke and closed my eyes and listened to the water and the voices and the particular ambient music of an expensive evening proceeding the way expensive evenings did.

It was Lena who came over.

She sat on the edge of the lounger beside mine and leaned toward me with an apologetic expression. “Can I ask you something terrible?”

I looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

She made a face. “My period came early. I’m completely unprepared, and I’ve already asked the hotel, and they don’t stock anything, and the nearest pharmacy is a ten-minute drive.” She held up her key card. “My room is on the third floor. Suite 304. I have everything I need in there, but I can’t really walk through the hotel like this right now.” She gestured at the towel. “Would you mind stopping at the gift shop on the way up and grabbing a box? They should have something basic. I’ll pay you back.”

It was a small thing. The kind of favor women did for each other without making anything of it.

“Of course,” I said. I took her key card. “Anything else you need?”

“You’re a lifesaver.” She squeezed my hand and stood up.

I changed in the poolside cabana and went to the gift shop near the lobby, finding what she needed plus a bottle of water and a packet of crackers because the gift shop had them and the swim had made me hungry. I took the elevator to the third floor, walked the corridor to 304, and pressed the key card to the reader.

The light went green.

I pushed the door open.

“Come in, just leave it on the table.”

The voice stopped me completely.

I stood in the doorway with the gift shop bag in my hand, and I processed what I was hearing with the particular slowness of someone whose brain was refusing to accept new information.

That was not Lena’s voice.

The suite was dim, one lamp on near the window that showed the dark ocean beyond it. The living area was empty. The bathroom door to the right was closed, and light showed under it, and I understood in the space of three seconds that I was not standing in Lena’s room.

I was standing in Hayes Calloway’s room.

I should have left immediately. Set the bag down, backed out, pulled the door closed behind me, and was gone before anyone had to acknowledge that this had happened. That was the correct response.

Instead, I stood in the doorway for two seconds longer than I should have because my feet were doing something independently of my brain, and then I made a decision, set the bag down quietly on the table by the door, turned around, and reached for the handle.

The bathroom door opened.

He came out in a hotel robe, a towel in his hand, looking down at his phone screen. He walked two steps before he registered that the person in his room was not the person he expected.

He looked up.

We stared at each other across the suite.

“Why are you here?” His voice was not raised. It never was. But it had the particular quality it got when something had caught him off guard and he was deciding how to address it.

“Wrong room.” I kept my voice even and my hand on the door handle. “Lena asked me to drop something off. She must have given me the wrong number.”

I held up the key card.

He looked at it.

Something moved across his expression that I could not fully read in the low light. His eyes went from the key card to my face and stayed there in a way that had a different quality than his usual blank registry of my existence.

I held his gaze for exactly as long as it took to make clear that I was not embarrassed and had nothing to apologize for, and then I pulled the door open.

“I’ll let her know,” I said.

I walked out and pulled the door closed behind me.

I stood in the carpeted corridor for a moment with Lena’s key card in my hand and the gift shop bag still in my other hand, and I breathed once.

Then I pulled out my phone and typed Lena a message.

I think you gave me the wrong room number.

The three dots appeared immediately. Then her reply:

Oh my god. I’m so sorry. I’m in 306. I must have mixed them up. Was it awful?

I looked at the message for a long moment.

It was fine, I typed back.

I walked down the corridor to 306 and knocked, and Lena opened the door, looking genuinely mortified, and I handed her the bag and told her not to worry about it and went to find my own room.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark for a moment before I turned the light on.

The ocean was audible through the window. Distant and rhythmic and completely indifferent.

I got up and got ready for bed, and I did not think about the expression on his face in that low-lit room when he looked up from his phone and found me standing in his doorway.

I almost managed it.