Chapter Nine The Honeymoon Schedule from Hell
Chapter Nine
The Honeymoon Schedule from Hell
SADIE
At eight the next morning, Nico arrived at the villa carrying a gold clipboard and wearing the face of a man about to announce either a royal wedding or a hostage situation.
“Today,” he said, “you begin the curated honeymoon journey.”
Beckett looked up from his coffee. I looked for an exit. Nico placed the clipboard between us. The page was pink.
Not tinted. Pink. Aggressively, medically pink. 9:00 A.M. COUPLES MASSAGE: LEARNING EACH OTHER’S RHYTHMS 11:30 A.M. CANYON PICNIC: A TASTE OF FOREVER 2:00 P.M. DANCE LESSON: TWO HEARTS, ONE STEP
4:30 P.M. VOW WORKSHOP: WORDS FOR A LIFETIME
“No,” I said.
Nico pressed one hand to his chest. “To which part?”
“The timeline.”
“The activities?”
“The font.”
Beckett turned the clipboard around.
“This schedule was approved before the revised contract,” he said.
“It was approved before civilization developed shame,” I said.
Nico remained hopeful. “The dance lesson includes a low-gravity turn designed exclusively for married couples.”
“We have been married for two days.”
“Then your habits haven’t yet become rigid.”
Beckett read the page a second time.
“Clause nine gives Sadie veto authority over romantic activities.”
“I remember,” Nico said sadly. “I laminated the clause.”
“Of course you did.”
He produced a small laminated card from his pocket.
Clause nine had been highlighted in pink.
“Nico,” I said, “do you carry our contract?”
“Only the emotionally significant portions.”
Beckett set down the schedule. “Who is assigned to these activities?”
Nico brightened. “Mina and Dev are waiting in the spa. Jun prepared the picnic himself. Sofia rehearsed the dance sequence with two members of housekeeping, and Priya has agreed to lead the vow workshop.”
“Priya agreed?”
“She used the phrase over my professionally lifeless body, but the calendar invitation was accepted.”
Beckett was already reaching for his tablet.
“If we veto,” he said, “what happens to the staff evaluations?”
Nico’s brightness dimmed by one degree.
“The campaign team records completion rates.”
“For us or for them?” I asked.
He glanced at the schedule.
“Both.”
There it was. The hidden fee beneath the romantic package. Our refusal would become somebody else’s poor performance. I looked at Beckett.
He was no longer reading the itinerary. He was reading the names.
“We are doing all four,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“With revisions.”
He opened the campaign file.
“Mina and Dev receive full completion credit whether we speak or not. Jun chooses the picnic menu and presentation. Sofia teaches one dance at her normal pace without campaign choreography. Priya may replace the vow workshop with any activity she prefers.”
“She is going to choose tax preparation.”
“Then we’ll be financially prepared for marriage.”
Nico stared at him. “That was almost playful.”
“It was risk management.”
I should have been irritated.
I had planned an entire day of surgical mockery.
Instead, Beckett had found the person standing behind every ridiculous activity and moved them out of the line of fire before I could sharpen a sentence.
It was difficult to dislike a man efficiently when he kept protecting people in inconvenient ways.
The spa had been designed for couples who believed privacy required twenty candles and a bowl of floating rose petals.
Two massage tables stood beneath a ceiling of warm glass. Beyond it, the morning sky glowed pink over the canyon. Soft music moved through the room, mostly strings and one flute that seemed worried about us.
Mina and Dev waited beside the tables. They wore pale blue uniforms and matching expressions of professional endurance. Between the tables sat a stack of prompt cards. I picked up the first.
NAME ONE PLACE ON YOUR PARTNER’S BODY THAT FEELS LIKE HOME. I put it back.
“The airlock,” I said.
Dev coughed. Mina looked at the ceiling. Beckett removed the entire stack and handed it to Nico.
“No prompts,” he said.
“They are designed to deepen connection.”
“So is silence.”
The network camera operator shifted near the door.
I had approved three minutes of arrival footage, then a closed room.
The producer lifted one finger. “Could we capture the first synchronized touch?”
“There will be no synchronized touch,” Beckett said.
“The campaign brief says hands meet between the tables.”
“The tables are six feet apart.”
“A symbolic reach.”
“That would require a shoulder injury.”
Mina laughed before turning it into a cough.
Beckett looked at her, then Dev.
“You may run the session as you normally would. The cameras leave now. The campaign records full completion. If either of you would prefer the hour reassigned, it will not affect your schedule or evaluation.”
Mina’s shoulders lowered.
“Normal session,” she said.
“Please,” Dev added.
The cameras left.
Nico took the prompt cards with them.
I lay facedown and stared through the table opening at a bowl of stones arranged in a perfect circle.
Beside me, Beckett adjusted nothing. For fifty minutes, neither of us spoke. It was the most intimate thing we had done.
At the end, I found him waiting outside the treatment room with his sleeves rolled and his hair slightly disordered.
I enjoyed the evidence more than I should have.
“Did you relax?” I asked.
“I remained horizontal.”
“That counts as advanced progress.”
“You drooled.”
I stopped.
“You were in another room.”
“The walls are not soundproof.”
“Drool has no sound.”
“You also snored.”
“You are lying.”
His mouth changed by half an inch.
“That’s deeply unethical during a promotional marriage.”
“Add it to the contract.”
There was one more item between the spa and the terrace, and it was not on the clipboard.
Nico appeared in the villa corridor holding a tablet against his chest the way a man holds a document he has already decided to read aloud.
“There’s one unlisted item,” he said.
“There is not.”
“It wasn’t on the schedule because it isn’t an activity.”
“What is it?”
“An amenity.”
Beckett stopped walking. In my limited experience of him, this was the physical equivalent of an alarm.
“Which amenity?”
Nico turned the tablet around. The screen showed a rendering of the villa bathroom filled with a soft pink cloud, and beneath it, in a font that had clearly been chosen by somebody paid to feel things, the words THE NUPTIAL CASCADE.
“It’s a floral immersion sequence,” Nico said. “Ninety seconds. Fully sponsored. The petals descend in reduced gravity, which the brand team describes as a slow romantic snowfall of affection.”
“Have they tested it in reduced gravity?”
“They tested the concept.”
There is a specific silence that arrives when three people simultaneously understand that something is going to go wrong and only one of them is contractually obligated to proceed.
“Clause nine,” I said. “I veto it.”
“Clause nine covers romantic activities,” Nico said, with the terrible gentleness of a man who has read the document more recently than you have. “An amenity is a feature of the room.”
“That’s a distinction invented by a lawyer at two in the morning.”
“At four,” Nico said. “I was on the call.”
Beckett was already reaching for his tablet, and I watched his thumb move down the sponsor manifest, and I watched his jaw settle, and I understood that the man who had spent all morning rearranging the world so that nobody in it would be humiliated had just discovered a room he could not rearrange.
“The sponsor prepaid,” he said. “Cancellation triggers a make-good the campaign will bill against staff bonuses.”
“Of course it does.”
“Ninety seconds.”
“Ninety seconds,” Nico agreed. “Then it self-clears.”
It did not self-clear.
What happened, in order, was this.
The bathroom lights dimmed to a warm rose.
Somewhere above the glass ceiling a mechanism engaged with a soft industrial cough, and then the petals began to arrive, and for perhaps four seconds it was genuinely beautiful, a slow pink drift turning through the light like something out of a film about people with better problems than mine.
Beckett stood in the doorway with his arms folded, watching it the way an engineer watches a bridge he did not design.
Then the second bank fired.
In one third of Earth’s gravity, a petal does not fall.
It hangs. It considers its options. It selects a direction based on the nearest air handler, and it commits, and eleven thousand of its colleagues commit with it, and what the brand team had described as a slow romantic snowfall of affection became a pink weather system moving laterally through the villa at the speed of a mild opinion.
The petals reached the corridor.
The corridor had a ceiling fan.
“Turn it off,” Beckett said.
“The sequence can’t be interrupted,” Nico said, retreating behind the doorframe. “Interruption voids the sponsor completion credit.”
“Whose credit?”
Nico’s silence was extremely informative.
Beckett walked into the storm.
I want it understood that I did not laugh immediately.
I held it for almost a full second, which in the circumstances I consider heroic, because a man in a two-thousand-dollar shirt was wading through airborne rose petals toward a control panel with the grim posture of somebody entering a burning building to retrieve a stranger’s cat.
He reached the panel. He opened it. He pressed the manual override.
The manual override, it developed, was wired to the humidity system, because the petals had been designed to be misted so they would cling attractively to skin.
The mist arrived.
Eleven thousand dry petals became eleven thousand wet petals in approximately two seconds, and the pink weather system stopped being weather and became upholstery.
Petals adhered to the walls. To the glass.
To the ceiling. To Beckett Vale, comprehensively, from collar to cuff, in a pattern so even that it looked commissioned.
The anniversary music began.