Chapter 32
CALLUM
Asha walks toward me with a frown. That’s not right. She’s got a whole thing about rainbows and sunshine and unicorns and other things that would occupy the mind of a four-year-old. But now she looks like…well, she looks like I usually do. What happened in the chalet?
“What’s wrong?” I drop the suitcase in my hands and look around to see what’s put that look on her face.
“They only have one bedroom for us. Well, two total for crew.” She includes Laura into the conversation, who is helping unload. “Leon thought only one tour leader was coming when he heard the tours were combined, so he booked what he thought was an extra room.”
“I’m not sharing my room. I need to be well rested before the next drive,” Laura says.
“That’s days away!” I say.
“I need to be well rested the entire time, in case of emergencies. And one bad night of sleep can affect people for days. A tired driver is a dangerous one. If the tour guides don’t get enough sleep, you can read off Wikipedia.”
That’s rude, I have a degree! So does Asha!
This is what happens when a coworker knows they’re the most important person in the entire operation. And while she’s right, it’s still not nice to hear.
The matter resolved, at least in her mind, she nods and keeps unloading suitcases.
“Umm.” Asha turns to me. “I guess that means that we’re sharing a room?” She looks a little lost, holding a stack of key cards in her hand along with her glittery pink keyboard.
“Once we get settled, I can look for a room somewhere else. So you can have your space.” I don’t want to force my presence on her, and I also don’t relish being that close to someone I’m this attracted to, with no opportunity to retreat from her effect for a break.
It would be too much.
“You don’t have to. A last-minute room during the high season will be expensive, if you can even find one, and I doubt Rob will reimburse you. It’s a few days; we’ll be fine.”
Fine. What an innocuous word. It sounds so bland on the surface, so neutral. But it’s always a liar. Has anyone ever been all right when they said they word fine?
Case in point, Asha doesn’t look fine. She looks as uncomfortable as I am at the prospect that we might be spending the next few days seeing each other first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
Watching each other get ready for bed, review notes and emails for the next day, and relax in front of the TV, or whatever she does for entertainment.
“Let’s get everyone checked in and to dinner, and then we’ll worry about the room. They’re getting unhappier by the minute.” I whisper the last part. For professionalism.
“Yeah.” She hands out key cards as I hand bags to their owners. I’m glad for the excuse to avoid looking at Asha. So she doesn’t see the mix of giddiness and terror at the thought of sharing a space with her, overnight.
Finally, the bags are dealt with, the group is done eating a delicious meal of raclette, and they’ve drifted away to their rooms or to the on-site bar. The music is already at the highest volume, shaking the floors of the rooms closest to it.
Now that everyone else is taken care of, we get our own bags from behind the front desk, too busy to put them away earlier, and head to our shared room.
“Oh, damn it.” Asha stops just past the entrance to the room, leaving me in the hallway, peering over her shoulder to see what the hold-up is.
She hasn’t even turned the lights on, but my mind goes straight to an insect, or maybe a rogue Swiss cow found its way into our room. Stranger things have probably happened.
“Staff rooms only have one bed,” Asha whispers, still not moving.
I drop my backpack, no longer trying to get past her. Because, damn it. Staff rooms do only have one bed. A fact I would have remembered if I wasn’t already stressing about the fact that I might see more of Asha than I’m prepared to handle, and then have to hide the resulting stiffy for two days.
And three nights.
Three very long nights.
“I’m going to look for that other room.” I desperately get my phone out as Asha moves farther into the room.
“It’s a big bed.” The sound of her saying “big” does more to me than I want to publicly admit, and I pick my backpack up again, this time to hold it in front of me. However awkward this looks, it has to be less awkward than a hard-on. “Well, for Europe. So it is still kind of a small bed.”
She peeks back at me and I’m glad the bag is firmly in place.
I snap my eyes to my phone, cursing the bad reception out here that’s making this page load so slowly.
It might be faster for me to track down a tourist pamphlet and start calling hotels one by one.
And as a bonus, I could do that away from her.
But when the page finally loads, my stomach sinks. Because the only rooms still available are at a luxury resort at the other side of town and they’re far outside my meager budget. And there’s no way Rob will reimburse me enough to make it happen.
“There aren’t any affordable rooms.” I have to clear my throat to get the sentence out completely. “I could stretch my budget…” Maybe if I only ate one meal a day going forward for the next month.
“This is ridiculous! We can share a bed. My friends and I have taken naps outside an airport and once on hard plastic chairs at an airport McDonald’s so we didn’t have to pay for an extra hotel room night.
I’ve shared beds with friends of friends to save money on rooms. I’ve gone camping with multiple friends and we slept in the same tent.
We can sleep next to each other like professionals. This will be fine.”
There’s that word again.
“Fine.” Two can play at that game. “Let’s share a room.” And a bed.
Asha walks fully into the room, pushing her suitcase to the far side. “I can take this side, unless you want it?”
I give her a blank look. This is going to be torture; I don’t think it much matters which side of the bed the torture happens on. “I don’t care.”
“Even though I’m making you take the danger side?”
“The danger side?”
“You know.”
“I promise you, I don’t.”
“Because it’s the side closest to the door. And if a person with bad intentions were going to break into this room, they would come upon you first. Therefore, it’s the danger side.”
“How much have you thought about this that you have a phrase for it?”
“I’ve been in a lot of hotel rooms in my time, alone, at night. The mind wanders sometimes. There are strange noises. Whatever.”
“That’s genuinely terrifying.” I thought her world was supposed to be all rainbows.
“Are you going to join the group at the bar tonight?” she asks, changing the subject.
“No.”
“Me neither. It’s been a long day. Do you mind if I take the bathroom first?”
“No problem.”
“Thanks.”
She disappears into the room, giving me a moment to breathe alone. I take my bags to the danger side of the bed. Oh grand, now I’m doing it.
I hear the shower turn on, I assume for the express purpose of torturing me with the fact that she’s naked in there. And I’m horny out here, separated from her by one thin, Swiss chalet wall and my own trousers and pants.
Very thin, all of them. And a flimsy door, to boot.
I put in earbuds to distract myself from the temptation and turn on my audiobook. Unfortunately for me, even though they are noise-cancelling and I can no longer hear what’s happening in the bathroom, they do nothing to stop me thinking about Asha in the shower.
Why is this shower so long? Doesn’t she know the environment is not doing well right now? I take out the earbuds because they aren’t succeeding in distracting me.
After she uses all the water in Europe, the shower turns off. That should have been the end of my distraction, but now I can’t think about anything other than what else she’s doing in the bathroom.
Drying herself? Torture. Moisturizing? Torment. Brushing her hair in only a towel, or, saints preserve me, naked? Anguish. Brushing her teeth? Still agony, improbably. Computational calculus? Distress.
Asha finally walks out of the bathroom in her pajamas, some black cotton trousers and a worn T-shirt from Hearst Castle.
Technically, it’s a mansion and not a castle, as it has no fortifications and no history of nobility.
No battlements or even a moat. America truly plays fast and loose with the English language.
And don’t even get me started on the way they say the word water.
But I don’t have the brain capacity to judge her country’s historic sites, because I can see her hard nipples through her thin shirt.
“I’ll use the bathroom now.” I grab my toiletries and change of clothes and walk past her, moving fast to avoid brushing against her arm with mine.
This inconvenient attraction is getting out of hand. I’m going to be taking a very cold shower tonight. And masturbating in it.