5. Monique
Monique
"You?"
It comes out sharper than I intended.
Weston doesn't flinch. He just looks at me steadily, like he's already prepared for whatever the response is.
My brain is doing several things at once, none of them useful.
Six years ago. A harbor. A bench. A man in a funeral suit with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging between them, sitting at the far end like he needed somewhere to put himself that wasn't a hotel room.
I never expected him to be standing there at the hotel front desk, let alone be its owner.
"You've been coming back every Friday," I say. My voice is even. "For eight months."
"Yes."
"Because of a bench."
"Because of you," he says. Simple. No performance in it.
I look at him. He looks back like this is perfectly normal.
The lobby is very quiet, and Juan is very far away. The rain is doing its patient thing on the windows, and I have absolutely nowhere to put this information.
"Why didn't you say anything?" I ask. "When you first recognized me. Why not then?"
He's quiet for a moment. His hands are in his jacket pockets, and he's standing still.
"Because you didn't recognize me," he says finally. "And I thought if I told you, before you'd found it yourself, it would feel like something I was doing to you. Not something that happened to both of us."
I don't have an immediate answer for that. I look at the counter and then back at him.
"Do you ever think about that day?" he asks.
The pause that follows is too long to be a no. We both know it.
I watch him register it, the small shift in his jaw. Keeping my hands flat on the counter, I don't say anything, which is also an answer.
"Well, I do," he says, quieter now. "More than I should." He holds my gaze, direct and unhurried. "I wish I had gotten your full name."
My chest is doing something I'm going to ignore for now.
"I wish…" He stops. His voice softens. "I wish I had kissed you."
The words land in the lobby, and neither of us moves.
He stands there, steady and present, like he's been waiting long enough that he can wait a little longer. And the thing is, I understand it, but I need time to process what happened.
I turn to the monitor, where a guest inquiry waits patiently in the queue.
"I should get back to work," I say.
He nods once, watching me with that steady, waiting look.
This is a very mature and sensible response to a situation that I’m handling extremely well.
I spend the rest of my shift being the most competent person to ever work a front desk. I catch a billing discrepancy that has been running undetected for two weeks. I handle a complaint about the thermostat in room 218 by pulling the HVAC log.
I’m doing an extraordinary amount of excellent work, and none of it is solving what is actually going on with me, but that's fine — that is what work is for.
Juan appears at my shoulder around the third hour of this. "You okay?"
"Working," I say.
Juan lingers long enough to make sure I’m okay, then drifts back. I appreciate that about him more than I can say.
The drive home is short and quiet. I count red lights instead of blocks without meaning to.
I think about Weston saying, I wish I had kissed you.
I don't know what to do with it yet. I go upstairs and spend most of the night replaying the conversation in a hotel lobby.
In the morning, Rosa is downstairs, elbow on the counter, pretending to fold the same napkin she's been folding since I walked in.
She looks at me for one second. "You're thinking too hard about a man again."
"Good morning."
"You have the face." She slides a coffee across the counter and follows it with the almond pastry. "You also didn't sleep."
"I slept."
"Four hours is a nap you're too stubborn to call a nap." She reaches for the napkin and pushes her sleeve up — the cardigan is pale green, worn soft at the cuffs — and does it without looking.
I look at the sleeve for one second.
Diana.
For a moment, I'm back in the kitchen with my mother. Same flick of the wrist. Same sleeves pushed to her elbows. Same cardigan from the bedroom chair, folded every night — the one thing in the house she could always keep where she put it.
I hold the memory for a breath, then let Rosa's voice return and carry it away.
"The man." She tilts her head. "Is he decent?"
"He's careful," I say.
She considers this seriously. "Careful means paying attention," she says. "That's good." She pushes the rest of the pastry toward me. "Eat. You look like you're building a case against something that hasn't done anything wrong."
I eat the pastry. It doesn't resolve anything. It helps, marginally, and I'm not going to tell her that.
Georgia is already at Harbor House when I arrive, mid-laugh about something with the woman with the reading glasses, her voice carrying easily through the doorway.
She looks up when I come in, eyebrows up, face already moving into a smile. She reaches over and squeezes my hand the moment I sit down.
The room steadies like it always does when she's in it.
She talks about the upcoming auction Noah is organizing, about wanting me to come, about her family being there. She talks about life opening up lately, and the surprise in her voice is more familiar to me than she realizes.
I almost say something twice. The first time is when she says outward instead of contracting, and I think about a chair three seats from the door and the fact that I moved without noticing.
The second time is harder. It's something about the way she talks about her people, and I think about an apartment with nothing on the walls and boxes folded flat behind the couch.
The distance between those two pictures is wider than I usually let myself see.
I let both moments pass.
I drink bad coffee, and I listen. When we leave, Georgia squeezes my arm at the door and says she'll send the link tonight, and I say okay. I mean it more than usual.
I carry more home than I came with.
At home, I close the blinds against the afternoon and lie down before my body asks me to. Sleep comes in pieces.
When the alarm pulls me up into the blue hour before my shift, I'm not rested, exactly, but I'm steadier. I shower, eat something standing up, put on the overnight-desk version of myself, and go.
The Langford is in its evening rhythm when I arrive, the lobby settling into the quiet stretch before overnight. I'm three steps from the desk when Priya finds something interesting in her keyboard.
When I come around the desk, Juan meets my eye and gives me the small nod that means we'll talk about it later.
"How bad?" I say quietly.
"Not bad," he says. "Just present."
Keeping my face level, I pull up the queue and work. The whispering isn't subtle as I catch pieces of it across the lobby, voices that drop when I come near and rise again when I pass.
I know what they're saying and what it looks like from the outside. Overnight desk agent, graveyard shift, owner coming down every Friday, sudden visibility.
That’s how the story reads. The only answer is the work, so I do it impeccably, keeping my shoulders level and letting it run.
The lobby quiets when Iris arrives, dropping into the chair nearest the desk with her legs stretched out and her eyes on the ceiling.
"Do you ever think this lobby is laid out wrong?" she says.
I look up. "Architecturally?"
"The flow. You come in from the street. Everything pulls you left toward the elevator, but the restaurant is right, and the spa is back left, so you basically have to loop the whole — "
"The entrance is off-center from the street sightline," I say. "Guests find the restaurant by sound and smell. The spa loses some of its potential traffic because there's no visual pull from the entrance — you'd have to already know it was there."
Iris has stopped stretching. She's looking at me.
"There's a ventilation issue in the east corridor stack, too," I say. "Rooms 304 through 312. Rooftop unit running out of balance. I traced it six months ago, wrote it up, but nobody fixed it."
Going back to my screen, I add, "The lobby isn't weird. It's just never been looked at by someone with authority to change anything."
A pause.
"Have you told my brother any of this?" she says.
"Only the admin, so nope." I catch her eye and offer a helpless shrug.
Studying the lobby, she nods slowly. I return my attention to the screen before she finds another question.
“Hmm…give me your number." She holds out her phone, already open to a new contact. "You're the only person in this building who says smart things."
“Sure.” I look up and put it in without wondering why it doesn't bother me.
Her phone pings twice while I type. It was a message from Beckett.
She glances at me and takes her phone. “Thanks.” Then she reads the text and stands. "Anyway, gotta go and meet my boyfriend. See ya later."
I just nod and give a small wave, my smile not quite reaching my eyes.
She goes outside the lobby.
The tennis court is lit when I pass the glass doors on my way back from the supply room later.
Weston is already there, jacket off, racket in hand, throwing a ball against the back wall. He turns when the door opens.
"Play with me," he says, bouncing the ball into his palm.
I should say no. I'm on shift, I'm not wearing tennis shoes, and this is a terrible idea. The last time I talked to him, I found out the harbor bench I’ve carried for six years was ours.
I smile despite myself. "Okay."
I borrow a spare racket, and we play.
For a while, it’s just tennis — the sound of the ball, the boundaries of the court. I’m not bad. I played in high school, the only free extracurricular, and my body still remembers.
Weston is better than I expected, playing like he does everything, direct and efficient. He’s always two steps ahead.
Without a word, we find a rhythm, the rally lasting longer than it should for first-time partners.
At one point, he steps in behind me to fix my grip. His hand covers mine on the handle, his chest warm near my shoulder, and he quietly explains wrist position.
I focus hard on what he’s saying — which is about tennis. He holds the grip a beat too long, then steps back.
"There," he says. "That’ll give you more angle crosscourt."
I hit the next ball into the net.
"You read the court the way you read people," he says, coming back to his side. "Fast. Already ahead of the moment."
I bounce the ball once and prepare to serve. "I've just played before."
"That's not what I said."
I serve. He returns it.
The rally goes on, and the night is quiet around the court.
Neither of us talks, and somewhere in the rhythm of it, I stop thinking about what I'm doing and just do it.
This is the most settled I've felt since he said I wish I had kissed you in the lobby, and I walked away like that was the sensible thing.
The ball catches the net, and the rally stops.
We're both breathing harder than we should be for how long we've been playing. We've drifted toward the net without meaning to.
He comes over with that small, familiar smile.
The court light is overhead and slightly harsh, and it doesn't matter. His racket is loose in his hand at his side.
His expression hasn't changed since the lobby. It's as if the conversation never really ended.
He stops a few steps from me, holding my gaze. "I still think about it."
I don't ask what. I know what.
"That day," he says. "And what I should've done."
He doesn't look away. He's already committed to whatever comes next, and we both know that, too.
"I should've kissed you."