I pouted as we left my parent’s house and we drove out of the mountains, back to the boring regularity of the highway. It took me about an hour into the trip to notice that I wasn’t the only one pouting.
Jack was pouting too.
How dare he? What did he have to get angry about? I was the one whose parents had betrayed her and tried to matchmake me with my mortal enemy. He was the one who had been treated like a long-lost son. But he was the one sitting there with a dark glower on his face and a muscle in his jaw leaping and his chin set stubbornly.
How dare he? I refused to be the one who spoke first. Particularly since that dark glower looked very good on him, and it was an offense of nature that someone should be so blessed with everything good and beautiful and be sitting next to me alone in a car for a day of confinement. I didn’t know what I wanted to do to him more, throttle him or kiss him. And I didn’t know who I was angrier at, him or myself.
By the time the snow started falling, it just emphasized the silence between us. The Joni Mitchell I had playing on the stereo was lovely and lyrical and for some reason, pissed the hell out of Jack. He snapped the music off and glared at me when I tried to change it. Fine. No music. We’d just sit here and stew in a silence that got heavier and heavier.
I crossed my legs in my seat, an awkward position for my long legs, and closed my eyes, trying to center myself and find some sort of balance. If I didn’t have yoga, I may very well have murdered someone in my life, probably Jack. I certainly got the maddest at him, and only sometimes did he deserve it. I knew it was a failure of mine, my aggressive need to fight the world because it could be so much better, and I wanted to make it so. But that did not lead to world peace, did it?
I recognized that I probably had a hand in building up this enmity with Jack, and maybe it was all my fault that we were enemies, even if he had been the biggest jerk I’d ever met seven years ago. I couldn’t deny that he had gotten better, even grown on me. I reached for a wisdom that went beyond my ego.
“I honor the place in you that is the same as the place in me,” I murmured under my breath, eyes closed, spine straight, “I honor in you where the whole universe resides. I honor the place in you of love, of light, of peace and truth,” I could feel myself connecting to the universe, to myself, to humanity. My lungs filled with air. I slowly let it out.
“Dammit!” Jack swore.
I jolted out of my peace. “I honor the place in you that is the same as the place in me. There is but one,” I said out loud so he could hear how he messed up my centering. “Namaste.”
“Namaste nothing. I can’t see a damn thing in this blizzard.” He slammed the steering wheel with a palm.
I blinked and peered out the windshield. I blinked and looked again, not sure if my eyesight had taken a turn for the worse or…
“It’s a whiteout.” It was almost as vehement as the curse. “We’ve got to find somewhere to stop for the night.”
“No, no, no.” I couldn’t be trapped with him all night. I had to get back to Brooklyn and get some distance from Jack before I did something stupid like jump on him and ravish him. “We have to get back to Brooklyn. You said we had to. I’ll drive. I’m from upstate. I know how to drive in the snow.”
“The hell you will. You just had eye surgery. I know how to drive in the snow. And besides I—”
The car in front of us skidded and nearly spun out of control. Jack evaded them and continued on, confidently, but I could see the tension in his white knuckles. “That’s it. We’re stopping at the first vacancy and getting hotel rooms.”
“Jack!”
“No more arguing. I’m not risking your life in conditions like this. I’ll pay for your room, don’t worry.”
“No, I mean, there’s a vacancy sign. You’re right. We need to stop.” He glanced at me like he was shocked. But I wasn’t so stubborn that I wanted to die just to get away from him faster. “We can get separate rooms, and that will keep us from killing each other. I’ll get my own room, thanks. I’m not helpless.”
He nodded and pulled off the highway. “We should have listened to your dad and stayed with them.”
I snorted. “And get stuck in the mountains for days until the roads are cleared? No thanks. This is fine. We’ll do the breakfast buffet in the morning and be back before my yoga class at one. Turn now.”
“I guess your eyes are feeling better?”
“I guess.” We parked and went into the hotel, an odd little local motel, but we weren’t the first. I went to get us a couple of cups of coffee while Jack waited in line, and when I got back, he was talking to the clerk.
“That’s not going to work for us. Do better.” He was using that pompous billionaire voice, the one that definitely always got him what he wanted.
I stepped up and shoved his cup of coffee in front of him, making him back off just a little. “So sorry for my friend here.” It was always best to be polite with service people. They were just trying to do their jobs. “I’m sure what you have is fine.”
“Well miss, you see, he asked for two rooms, but we only have one.”
“One? Impossible.”
“I’m sorry; there’s a spring festival that is very popular, and our accommodations are full except for the honeymoon suite.”
I felt my eyes pop out of my head. “The honeymoon suite?” The strangled words were barely recognizable as words.
“And there’s only one bed,” Jack added, one eyebrow raised.
“We can just get an extra cot,” I said because this was ridiculous. Did Mama set us up or something? The Honeymoon suite?
“They are apparently all out of cots. So, like I said, that’s not acceptable. You’ll have to do better.”
This was all impossible, but I’d be damned if I’d let him make a poor hotel clerk feel bad. “We’ll take the suite.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Give the man your gold card. We’re adults. It’ll be a king sized bed. We’ll go to sleep, and it will be fine.”
He shook his head. “This is a bad idea.”
I looked at him, shocked. “I thought you said we were friends? If we’re friends, we can do this.”
He clenched his jaw but put down his card. I was wrong. It wasn’t a gold card. It was a black card. He paid for our room, and we got our keys and headed up. He opened the door and stopped right in the middle of the doorway, swearing.
“What?” I shoved him into the room, and we both stumbled in.
“What kind of hotel did we stumble into? This is their best room?”
There was a large heart shaped hot tub in the middle of the room, tiled in bright red on a platform surrounded by mirrors that threw our shocked expressions back at us.
“Well that’s definitely larger than a king sized bed,” I said, pointing at the bed that was easily big enough for an orgy and covered with some sort of shag bedspread.
“Is that a disco ball?” He pointed up.
“Yes. Yes it is.” A disco ball on a mirrored ceiling and some sort of velveteen red and hot pink brocade walls.
I started giggling and so did he. A disco ball. Soon we were both bent over double, laughing. I collapsed on the shaggy bed. “Oh, I have got to document this,” I said, and took out my phone to take photos, starting with me on the bed and the mirror on the ceiling with the disco ball in the corner. “For posterity. And Lissie and April.”