“Oh, uh…” Sutton chokes.
Jennifer laughs. She punches me in the shoulder affectionately, like she has since we were kids. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to answer that. Have a good night, kids. I’m out of here soon.”
“So that you can get up early and open your mountains of gifts?”
“You bet. Why else does a person get married? It couldn’t actually be for love, could it?”
That earns a smile from me, but I roll my eyes too. Jennifer saunters away, grinning broadly, to check up on a few of the other guests and say goodnight to her friends and all the family. The party is still going strong—if you can count this as a party—but I guess, for some people, it’s a night out, and maybe for them, that’s their definition of a party.
“You’re horrible,” Sutton hisses under her breath. “Now, I’m pretty much going to be forced into staying, or this whole thing will look like a sham if I’m not there in the morning, at least to say hi and then disappear.”
“I could make excuses for you. Say you had somewhere to be.”
“On a Sunday morning.”
“The dryness in your tone is unmistakable.”
“Good!” She storms off towards our table. She’s surprisingly fast when she’s pissed. Surprisingly hot too. Maybe that’s not much of a surprise. Maybe it’s more of a given because she’s beautiful all the time.
I catch up with her as she snatches her clutch off the table and grabs one of the still full bottles of wine.
“What do you think you’re going to do with that?”
“Use it to get through a painful night,” she grinds out. “Or maybe bottle you if I have to.”
“I didn’t think sleeping in the same room as me would be such a hardship.” I lean in close. I can’t help myself. I am a straight-up asshole when it really counts, and I guess this counts because I want to match her feistiness in every way.
Sutton snatches the envelope out of my hand and marches off. So…I guess that’s her way of saying she’s going to stay. I like that she’s pretending to be angry about it. Whatever. If she has to justify it that way to herself, I’ll let her. I’m starting to know Sutton, and I know she’s too nice to keep this up for long. She can’t be that mad. She was probably looking for an excuse to stay anyway. She didn’t exactly tell me no back there when I asked her. She just listed off the reasons she couldn’t, which mostly had to do with her grandmother expecting her back and the fact that we work together—like that really stopped her before. That’s not fair, shithead.
I don’t want to lose Sutton down the hallway, so I jog to catch up with her. She’s standing beside the elevator, which is down the hall past the ballroom and other meeting rooms. Her foot is tapping anxiously, and her arms are crossed, the wine bottle cradled protectively in her arms.
“Are you going to call your grandma?”
“Shut up,” she spits. “Of course, I’m going to call her. As soon as we get up to the room that I don’t want to stay in.”
“Maybe there’s a Jacuzzi tub. Would that change your mind?”
“Not if it’s out in the open, which they usually are. A bath wouldn’t fix any of my problems. You know what would? If you jumped out the window and disappeared forever.”
My lips wobble a little at her forced tone. She doesn’t really mean any of it, I can tell. She’s just sparring with me because she doesn’t know what else to do. I shouldn’t be happy about it either. I realize I’m treading on some extremely thin ice, about to plunge into some frigid water. Hypothermia and near-death are imminent.
What am I going to do after tonight? Even if I do sleep on the floor or the couch or whatever. Just go back to the endless tossing and turning? My regular insomnia? My regular life? Am I supposed to go back to being curt and bad-tempered at work? To the usual stress and strain and killing myself trying to live up to something that I’m never going to be?
The elevator dings thankfully, and I get to cut off my shitty introspection. We get in together. The door shuts, and the elevator is silent. For a fancy hotel, the elevator looks like shit. It’s got the token laminate flooring, back mirror, and a panel of buttons, but that’s it.
Sutton must have already looked at the floor and room number because she punches eighteen on the button pad, and the elevator starts moving. The silence gets more and more oppressive with each passing floor, which is fine with me. I’m good with the oppressive silence.
When the door opens, Sutton charges out like the elevator is crawling with venomous spiders—I know, I’m all about the dangerous, creepy comparisons tonight—and rushes down the hall. Her hips sway suggestively with her power walk, and I have to bite down hard on my bottom lip not to laugh. If only she knew how attractive she was, she wouldn’t be walking in front of me. Or like that. But I know if I laugh or say anything, she’ll turn and flip me off and tell me to close my eyes and navigate down the hall that way. Now I am smiling since it’s funny to think of her issuing orders like that.