Chapter Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Eight
BY THE TIME WE MAKE IT TO THE PLAZA, it’s after seven a.m. and the sun is rising.
A doorman opens the golden doors for a woman with blue-gray hair and a tiny rat-dog on a leash.
I wait for her to give us the side-eye, but she actually smiles, like she doesn’t see anything wrong with two unshowered teenagers in sneakers loitering outside one of the most expensive hotels in the city.
Peter finishes typing something on his phone, then slides it back into his pocket. “I booked it online, with early check-in. So hopefully they’ll just be cool about this. Wait here, okay?”
I don’t want to wait outside. I don’t want to be two feet—two inches—from him. But I just nod and watch him walk inside to the concierge desk. He leans forward, and in about five seconds the guy at the front is laughing and handing him a pair of key cards.
He turns around and motions for me to come in, so I let the doorman open the door and I step inside.
I’m suddenly very aware of the red cranberry stain on my Converse.
But then Peter slips his arm around me as we walk past the concierge toward the elevators, and I think of course we belong here.
They built this hotel just for us. For this day.
The elevator dings and the gold doors slide open, waiting for us to step inside. So we do, Peter and I each standing on our own P made up of tiny inlaid tiles.
Peter leans over to me and whispers, “Wanna press all the buttons?”
“No,” I laugh. But then I think about how each part of this day is a chunk—little sections of time, building on each other. And I reach out and run my hands over all the buttons, lighting up every single fucking floor.
Peter snorts. “I cawn’t, cawn’t, cawn’t believe you just did that.”
We stand there holding hands, listening to the floors ding off, the doors opening and closing, opening and closing, the two of us suspended in time—not getting on, not getting off.
Just riding up and down together. Eventually, we make our way to our floor and the doors slide open and we get out.
The time in the elevator now in the past.
We walk down the hall and Peter opens the door to our room.
“Nice,” he says, peeking his head inside.
“Holy fucking shit.”
The room is enormous. Like, it has a living room: a blue velvet couch, super-ornate rugs and sitting chairs, and these huge windows letting the early morning New York light in.
It feels like a different world in here.
Peter sets his brown bag from the bookstore on the entryway console, and I slip off my shoes and socks, the carpet soft and thick under my toes.
“This is how rich people live, huh?” I say.
“This is how we live,” Peter says. “At least for today.”
“Peter—”
“Hey,” he says, “there’s this thing I’ve always wanted to do.” He glances back at the king-sized bed and I raise an eyebrow at him. “Come on,” he says. “I’m dying.”
“Oh god, how many times are you going to play that card?”
“As many as I want,” he says, tugging me over to the bedroom.
He stands up on the bed and offers me his hand, pulling me up. “Ready?”
“For what exactly?” I ask.
And then he grabs both of my hands and starts jumping, the mattress bouncing under my feet. “Oh, you have to jump too.”
“I’m not really much of a jumper,” I say, the bed shaking from the weight of him.
“I’m dy—”
“Okay, okay,” I say, and then I jump.
“Come on, Syd, you can do better than that.”
I scowl at him and jump higher, and higher, and higher, until my hair fans up around me and everything in the gorgeous, Kardashian-level pricey room blurs together and all I see is Peter’s face—happy and flushed—looking at me.
I stop jumping.
“Hey,” Peter says, catching his breath, “we’re just getting start—”
“I love you.”
Peter stops jumping. “Are you just saying that because I’m—”
And then I do one more jump, into his arms, and we fall back down on the bed, together.
And we don’t waste one single second of the next three hours.