by Amelia Wilde
The Bliss Resort is not that kind of place, and the Club…
Well, it’s a very small world if Charlie Bliss walks by my house on the regular.
I have a vision of myself running across the street, wild in my harem pants, and resist the urge to drop my head back onto the broken wicker. No wonder he wasn’t happy to see me. That kind of behavior is so not Charlie, so not what he was interested in putting up with, and I just confirmed that I haven’t changed at all. Charlie, I’m sure, is the kind of man who still believes in a modicum of decorum. Being decorous has never been my thing.
I stand up from the chair and brush at my pants, though there’s nothing there to brush away. It’s not like I rolled in the dirt, Charlie.
Time to stop thinking about him. I can get in, get out, and get on with my life without spending another second on him.
Right?
4
Leta
In the deepest, darkest part of my dreams—the part that involves cotton candy and somehow also a decaying funhouse, even though the last funhouse I was in was a shoddy trailer at the country fair a thousand years ago—I hear it.
Water.
Rushing through the pipes, singing out onto porcelain, an incessant whoosh. What this has to do with the funhouse, I have no idea. It’s obviously the worst funhouse in the world if getting sprayed with water is on the agenda.
It sounds so real.
The noise drags me up from the weirdo funhouse oblivion into something resembling consciousness.
Hold up.
There is water running somewhere in this house. It’s not for show, it’s not part of a dream—there’s water running, and there shouldn’t be. Jesus, it’s loud.
I leap up from the bed, tangling myself in the sheet in the process, and stumble blindly onto the floor. Water water water. What sink did I leave on? My heart thumps in an offbeat carnival rhythm. This would happen. Of course it would. I would flood the house the third night here. I claim to be a solitary artist, but in reality my survival skills are lacking if I can’t keep a house from flooding.
Moonlight carves a path through the hallway and glistens on water that’s seeping into the hall from the upstairs bathroom, one guest room removed from the one I’ve been sleeping in.
“Shit,” I shout, then clap my hand over my mouth. The other houses are pretty close. “Fuck,” I shout into my hand. They water is frigid and my bare feet recoil when I step into it. And then, like an idiot, I open the bathroom door.
There’s water spewing from the toilet.
I shriek at the sight of it—it seems that impossible.
“What are you doing?” I wave my hands at the toilet, pleading at the top of my lungs. “Stop. Stop.” I can fix a clogged toilet any time, day or night, but this catastrophe doesn’t involve a mishap of the diet or an overabundance of toilet paper. It’s the wall. The water is coming from inside the house. Inside the wall.
Towels. My first thought is to get a towel, so I wrench open the narrow linen cabinet built into the wall and pull out a stack of towels. They come free along with the familiar scent of my aunt’s laundry detergent. “I’m so sorry,” I murmur to her past self’s efforts. This is not how she intended them to be used, I’m sure. “So sorry, Mari.”
The towels do nothing but stanch the flow. They’re soaked almost immediately, and I have no earthly idea what to do.
“Think, Leta. Don’t be a fucking idiot.” I crouch next to the toilet, my pajama pants soaked, and peer behind the bowl. A chunk of the wall has come loose. No—it’s paneling. It’s a purposeful panel, framed with white trim, and it’s burst under the pressure of the water.
Someone has to have planned for this. There’s no way a group of professionals came together and put in plumbing with zero foresight.
I summon all my mental fortitude and shove my hands into the water.
“Holy shit.” It’s cold. It’s really, really cold, and god knows what’s behind it. Probably pipes. I’m praying that there’s a valve that I can turn. My hand connects with a thin piece of metal and I scream out loud. It’s so creepy.
I turn it with all my strength.
It doesn’t budge.
Lefty loosey, righty tighty.
Other direction, genius.
I wrench it to the right.
The water slows, then stops.
I sit back on my ass with a wet squelch, the cold water connecting directly with my crotch. “Okay, no. Bad idea. No.”
With as much dignity as a person can have when covered in toilet water, I rise from the floor and go into the hallway. At the edge of the water I strip off my clothes. Everything is tainted by the water now, from my tank top down to the hemmed ankles of my pajama pants. I leave the clothes I n a pile and walk solemnly downstairs.
I should never become a homeowner. Renting is for me, now and forever, because if I have to be in charge of fixing this shit…
Maybe I don’t have to be in charge of it.
I’m not sure why I’ve come into the living room until I spot the piece of paper from the door on the coffee table, right where I left it earlier. There was something there that could help me. I’m sure of it.
And yes—there. The second thing on the list.
Bliss Maintenance, (518) 555-2547
Surely, they have an answering machine. Surely, a place like this might even have someone on-call for emergencies. In the adrenaline haze of saving the house from imminent toilet collapse I take the stairs two at a time and rush into the bedroom. My phone, blessedly, has not fallen victim to any of this situation and when I snatch it up from the bedside table it does exactly what it’s supposed to do: it lights up and prepares to do my bidding.
I dial the number by the light of the phone screen and hit send.
The call connects.
One ring.
Two.
Halfway through the third, a muffled clicking comes over the line and then a man’s voice, far away at first. “—lo?” He clears his throat. “Hello. Bliss Resort & Club.”
“Hello. Yes.” I stand up straight, my own nakedness making this phone call seem weighty in a way it absolutely shouldn’t. “My toilet has exploded,” I begin. “No. The wall by my toilet exploded. There’s a bit of a flood, and I haven’t managed to get dressed yet.” I shake my head. “It’s a flood-mergency.”
“Can you give me your name and address?” That voice. It’s so low and husky and tired, and it makes me want to curl up inside of it and take a nap. A very filthy nap.
“Leta Quinn,” I say. “149 Cherry Street. I really need to find some clothes. Can you send someone to deal with the flood?”
Charlie
Emergency calls from the club side are rare, which is probably why Roman insists on keeping it on our personal rosters instead of farming it out to the security team right away. Some of these calls do go to the security team, but the Bliss Brothers are always the ones to make the call.
But three things shut down my brain:
Leta Quinn.
I really need to find some clothes.
Can you send someone?
“Leta,” I say gruffly, still caught somewhere between restless sleep and a waking dream that now involves the naked curves of her body. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her that way, backlit by the moon with her hips in my hands, and every muscle in my body tenses toward that vision. I’m harder than a rock. On the next street over, she’s standing there naked or half-naked and waiting for someone to come help her.
Damn it, and I swore I would wait her out. I swore I wouldn’t let myself get involved with whatever it is she’s doing at Bliss.
And now, less than forty-eight hours later, it’s my duty to jump back into the flames.
“Charlie?” Her tentative voice almost undoes me then. “Oh, god,” she groans. “I wouldn’t have called if I knew you were going to answer.”
That’s a knife through the ribs. A perfectly justified knife. Nope, I said to her two days ago like the p
lanet’s biggest asshole.
I open my oath to tell her I’ll get someone else. I don’t know which of my brothers I’ll haul out of bed, but I don’t care.
“That’s not what I meant,” Leta says in a rush. “I only meant that…my toilet exploded.” A burst of high-pitched laughter. I can’t help but recognize it as Leta’s nervous laugh. I’ve done my best to keep her out of my memories and obviously I have failed. “Like, the wall. I should have listened to the note.”
What note?
“Anyway, there was a number for Bliss Maintenance. I thought it would be a repairman who was on call, not that anyone can fix this tonight. It’s the middle of the night. I just thought—”
“I’m the one on call.”
“You answer calls like this in the middle of the night?” Total disbelief rings through her tone. “Aren’t you, like, one of the co-owners of the resort? Aren’t you guys way too rich for this?” A muffled grumbling. “That’s not what I meant to say. What I meant to say is—”
Everything she’s said catches up to me in one instant. “Leta, did you say your house is flooded.”
“Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, not the whole thing, but I feel like that’s a matter of time. There’s water in the hallway, and I don’t have enough towels to catch all of it, and if it goes down the stairs—”
“I’ll be right there.”
I knock on Leta’s door less than five minutes later.
I hope she’s dressed almost as much as I hope she’s still undressed. It’s terrible and wrong to think of how sexy it would be if she were still clothes-less, hair slightly disheveled from whatever insane thing that happened, but I think it anyway.
The door opens to reveal…
Leta. With disheveled hair, an enormously fluffy robe draped over her shoulders and tied tightly closed around her waist.
“Hey.” She holds the door a few inches open, looking out at me like I dropped by unannounced.
“Hey.” I hate how easy it is to talk to her like this. I hate how easy it is, in the middle of the night, to feel my own body slipping into those old habits. “Did you want me to come in?” I brandish my phone like it’s proof I’m only here because of her exploded toilet. Or the wall. Or whatever.
Leta blinks at me, taking in a huge breath through her nose. “Yes. Right. Yes. Come on in.” She steps back and beckons into the living room.
“Where’s the problem area?”
“You always cut right to the chase, don’t you?” Leta chuckles.
“It’s three in the morning.”
“I know.” She puts a hand to her forehead. “This whole thing has me way off-balance.” It’s not the exploded wall that makes me feel off-balance. It’s standing this close to her, wondering what’s beneath that bathrobe. Knowing, in a way, what’s beneath the bathrobe and not being able to see it. “It’s up here.”
I grit my teeth. If there’s one thing I know from managing the resort’s finances, it’s that anything upstairs is going to be worse than downstairs. There’s more to wreck beneath the surface when it’s on the second floor.
Leta pads up the stairs, her bare feet quiet on polished wood, and I’m seized with the memory of lying in bed with her in my dorm room. It was early—the kind of morning sunlight she preferred not to see—but somebody coming in drunk had woken us up. The way she bent her knee so that her toes could brush against mine…
It gives me a full-body shiver, even now. It doesn’t help that her ass is right at face level. I look studiously away.
She reaches the top of the landing first, and I step up beside her. “I’m sure it’s not—oh.”
The hallway is a mess of towels, sheets, other cloth. It’s almost an inch of water she’s trying to keep contained to the bathroom with a makeshift dam.
“I turned off the water,” Leta says. “But…”
I wade into the sheets, my feet sinking in with every step, and make my way over to the open bathroom door.
Leta was right. The wall behind the toilet did explode. She did turn off the water. But she turned it off way, way too late.
The creaking is what warns me first.
“We have to go,” I tell her.
“What?”
“The water went through—” The first chunk of floor falls through. “Go. Go go go.” I stumble back over the sheets, take her by the arm, and rush her outside.
Leta can’t stay here anymore. The whole damn house could cave in. We stand on the sidewalk, looking up at it like a strong gust of wind could blow it right down.
“Well,” she says, into the night noises of Cherry Street. “What now?”
5
Charlie
The options are limited.
It’s fully three in the morning. Leta stands outside in a bathrobe, her hands shoved into its pockets. The floor of her house has been compromised. I don’t know how bad the damage is, because I’m not a fucking carpenter.
What I do know is that most of the houses on the club side are not new. In fact, a lot of them qualify as historic homes in the state of New York. The designation comes with a small stamped-metal plaque that’s usually displayed on the wraparound porch. This property wasn’t new when my father bought into it and added on the resort, and it hasn’t gotten any newer. This house—the one Leta has her hands on, somehow—is in the realm of eighty years old. I would doubt it was built to withstand a catastrophe involving the force of modern plumbing. Walking around underneath waterlogged wood and plaster and god knows what else isn’t going to happen.
And the bottom line—the bottom line for right now—is that my house is one street over and the resort hotel is across the property.
“We’ll go to my place.”
She turns her head, and though her face is in shadow from the streetlight behind her, it’s obvious her eyes are wide. “What happened to nope?”
“What happened is that your house is a hazard zone.” I cross my arms over my chest. “You’re barefoot, in a bathrobe. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to make you walk all the way to the hotel and get a room at three in the morning.”
“What if it were the afternoon?” Leta muses. “Would you make me walk across the resort then?”
“Still no.”
“I don’t know.” She looks back toward the house. “It’s probably going to be fine. Sturdy house and all that. At the very least, I should pack some clo—”
The word is truncated by the sound of something falling—crashing—from the second floor to the first. I’d bet my last dollar that it’s the toilet, going through the floor.
Leta nods like the toilet has made the decision for her. “Okay. Where’s your place?”
I never thought she’d be here.
In college, in the abstract, I thought it was a possibility in the way that any future seems like a possibility when things are good. And things were so good.
At the door Leta brushes by me at the door and I get a breath full of the scent of her hair. Her shampoo is still the same and the combination of mint and something vaguely floral and Leta herself tugs at something low in my chest.
“I never thought I’d be here,” she says to my back while I close and lock the door behind us.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
A silence. The fact of her standing there, her bare feet on my floor, makes the atmosphere in the room seem thinner. I’ve never been mountain climbing—pursuits like that would take too much time from Bliss—but I read once that it’s possible to acclimate to higher altitudes gradually. There is no acclimating to being with Leta. It’s like finding myself at Everest’s peak, wondering how the hell I got here and whether I can survive.
Which memories is she thinking of in this moment? What does my house look like to her? I come into the room and switch on a low table lamp so nobody falls and kills themselves. Leta blinks twice, then her eyes settle on mine.
“You don’t have to do this,” she says softly.
“It’s the right thing to do.”<
br />
A wry grin. “Don’t you own, like, an entire hotel?”
“Not technically.”
She laughs. “Not technically. Only a fifth of it, right?”
“I’d own a sixth, if that’s how it went, but the property isn’t divided into shares like that. It’s more complicated.” I’ve traced the setup of the resort more times than I can count since the beginning of the summer, but I still can’t stanch the flow of money going out. I can tell, even now, that Leta’s struggling not to grimace. “Don’t worry. I won’t go into detail.”
“Oh, I—I’d love for you to go into detail, but—”
“Liar.”
A genuine smile flashes onto her face. “So we’re not strangers after all.”
“How many years does it take before people are strangers?” I feel those years like a tangible weight across my shoulders. “I think we’re there.”
She presses her lips together, looking down. Shyness isn’t a quality I’d normally associate with Leta. She takes a deep breath and runs her fingers through her hair, one hand still clutching her robe closed. “All right. Well…should we have a conversation now? I’m assuming I can stay here tonight, but when the sun rises we’ll go our separate ways.”
Something in my chest tumbles and falls. “Going our separate ways is probably for the best.”
“Is it, though? This light is terrible.” Leta pads over to the lamp and turns it off.
A laugh rises in my throat and I swallow it down. She was always thinking normal things were terrible, shaping the world around her to fit her idea of what was good. And what was good was usually some kind of chaos.
Tonight, the moonlight on her hair doesn’t seem much like chaos. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Leta Quinn, is that’s you just never know.
“Is it for the best if we go our separate ways?”
“Is it for the best if we…don’t talk. Don’t you ever think the universe is trying to give you a hint? I mean, what are the odds that—” She stops herself, and my heart skips a beat. Leta used to talk to me nonstop. In paragraphs. I’d wake up to find her already in the middle of a story. The only time she was silent was when she was working on a piece of art, and even then, you could see the thoughts from her mind coming right out onto the paper.