Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Avril
I’m the first one to arrive at the building on Fifth Avenue. I wanted to get out of Ben’s apartment this morning. He left long before I did, but I got ready and out as soon as possible. It just felt like too much.
“Hey,” Poppy says from behind me. I spin round and give her a hug. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s good to see you.”
“How was the weekend with Ben?” she asks. “I messaged you last night but didn’t hear back.”
“It was fine,” I say, scanning the sidewalks to see if Worth or the realtor is about to arrive.
There’s no doubt that this hotel would be a good option if we were going to open a second hotel in New York, which is why Worth is coming to this second viewing.
I thought it would take a week to arrange. No such luck.
“Did you bang?” Poppy asks.
“No.” I give her an exaggerated eye roll.
Poppy wants to know if we’ve managed to keep it professional.
The problem is we might not have banged, but sex would have been easier in a way.
I’ve gotten to know him better over these last couple days.
Not just because we talked, but because I’ve been in his space, I’ve shared his world. I understand him better…and I like him.
I really like him.
“He’s hot. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“The entire point of this week is showing him that we can keep things professional.” An image of Ben taking the nail polish off my feet creeps into my brain. Hardly professional. Neither was lying in bed together.
“So, what did you do?”
“Not much. On Saturday, we rescued a cat. Went for lunch.” She doesn’t need to know about the whispering gallery.
“You rescued a cat?”
“Kinda.” I tell her how we were supposed to be going to Ben’s gym, but ended up taking a cat to the vet.
“That’s cute. You think he was trying to impress you?”
I think about it for a second. “I don’t think he would have seen the cat if I hadn’t pointed it out. He would have walked right past it. Not because he’s a bad guy, but just because he would have assumed it had an owner that was looking after it and it would be fine.”
“Are you sticking up for him?” Poppy asks.
“No!” Even to me, I sound defensive. “I just don’t think he did it to impress me.”
She shoots me an I-think-you’re-lying look, just before Worth and Sujoy, the realtor, arrive together, and interrupt us.
“So, this is the place?” Worth says. “Great location.”
There’s no doubt that the location is great for any hotel, but even better for us because it’s far enough away from Hotel on Ninth Street so that it won’t cannibalize any guests who want to stay downtown.
“I’ve walked by this place so often,” Poppy says. “I’ve never even noticed it.”
We walk up the steps and enter the lobby.
“Welcome to Hotel Miss Havisham,” I say.
Worth turns a whole 360 degrees. “You two are the design brains around here, but this is good, isn’t it? The space I mean.”
My shoulders sag a little. I shouldn’t have agreed so easily to this second viewing with Worth. I know Worth and Poppy don’t want to lose time before they make a decision on the second hotel, but I just need to get through this week and get Ben to do whatever he does to make this Boston hotel work.
“It’s great,” Poppy says. “Can we see what’s around the back here?
” she says, as she steps behind reception toward a door.
“Oh wow. We could even open this out. This space here is too big for a cloakroom. We need to get architects in and construction, but we could just have a reception desk on the other side and open this entire place out. It would be really impressive.”
“I like it,” Worth says.
“You shouldn’t be rushing into anything just because these investments of yours are maturing or whatever.
” Worth will have some cash available because one of his investment companies is being sold, so he wants that money invested and not sitting around in cash.
If we’re not careful, we’ll miss our window with him, and he’ll invest the cash elsewhere, and we might have to wait years before we get the chance to have him invest again.
“Maturing or whatever? Your financial vocabulary is impressive,” Worth says with a smile.
I know he’s trying to be light-hearted, but it stings all the same. I’m a college dropout to Worth. Even though I don’t regret walking away, I still feel like I let Worth down because I’m sure there’s part of him that thinks he failed because I didn’t graduate.
Maybe I should have stuck it out. It just didn’t fit me.
I wasn’t happy there. I wanted to roll my sleeves up and get to work.
College felt like a huge waste of time. I wanted to get on with life.
I saw what Hotel on Ninth Street could become when it was still just a residential building.
Who wouldn’t drop out of college if they had the opportunity to create a hotel and a family business?
Why waste time in college lectures when you can learn from life?
But I still have a sense of shame for not finishing college. For being a quitter.
I hate this hotel. I’m not sure how it manages to stir up so much.
“Has the Boston realtor had any luck trying to get the owners to reengage?” Poppy asks me, obviously sensing my discomfort.
“Not at all,” I reply. “They’ve completely disappeared. Not even their realtor can get to them.”
“So how would Ben East help?” she asks.
“Have you approached him?” Worth asks. “Ben? I can if you like. Although this place looks like it might work.”
“Yes, I’ve spoken to him,” I say to Worth. My brother would hate the fact that I’m staying the week in an almost-stranger’s apartment, who I’ve previously had a one-night stand with, just to get his help…so I’m going to tell Worth the bare minimum.
“What did he say?” asks Worth.
“He’s seeing if he can help. If he’s got time. Or something. I’ll follow up.”
Poppy raises her eyebrows in my peripheral vision, and I pretend I haven’t seen her. I hate lying to Worth, but I just need to get through to Monday, have Ben work his magic, and this will all be okay.
“Okay, well, we should still look around this place,” he says. “The location is excellent and I think it’s got plenty of potential.”
“Potential is the key word here,” says Sujoy. “I like to call it the bones of a place. You can’t beat the location and the room sizes are generous for what was a budget hotel.”
“And the building facade could definitely fit midtown five-star hotel,” Poppy says.
Usually Poppy and I are a united front against Worth. Even as children, when Worth was doing far more than he should in terms of looking after us, Poppy and I would go to him, aligned with whatever we wanted, whether it was to go ice-skating that weekend or to skip dance class.
My stomach shrinks at the memory of what a burden it all must have felt like to him—two girls asking for money to go ice-skating when, at eighteen, he was trying to make sure we had food on the table.
And he’s never once thrown it back in our faces or called us ungrateful.
He just accepted it and did the very best he could.
That’s the brother he is. The man he is. He’s goodness to his core.
“It definitely would,” Worth says, agreeing with Poppy, and I shrink into myself.
If Poppy and Worth both want this place, there’s nothing I can do to change their minds.
And it’s not like it will be a disaster.
I can make another hotel in New York work.
But it feels like the easy way out. I’ll have my sister and my brother right by my side.
I want to go to Boston. I want to prove to my siblings that I can be successful without them, that I can stand on my own two feet and make something really great happen.
And I didn’t need a college degree to do it.
Maybe that makes me selfish. Maybe I should go to business school and learn how to put profit before everything else.
But Hotel on Ninth Street was never entirely about profit.
I can’t shake the feeling that Worth only agreed to turning the place into a hotel because I’m his little sister and he wanted me to be happy and occupied.
He wanted to look after me, just like he always has done.
“Let’s see upstairs,” Poppy says.
“I see what you mean about the different architectural details,” Worth says, taking in the wooden doorframes and the intricate architraves.
“The building was constructed in 1881, so it’s one of the older buildings in New York.”
“We could lean into that in the design though,” Poppy says. “We can still make it cool. It’s not like Hotel on Ninth Street is a slave to the Art Deco age.”
“I’m sure the designer can come up with something,” Worth says, who won’t be focused on what the place looks like.
“But we need to make sure that there’s a consistent story between the two hotels,” I say.
“Right, but it’s not like you’re going to find an Art Deco hotel in Boston,” Poppy says. “So we’d have the same problem there. The building we liked there was Victorian, wasn’t it?”
I hate how she refers to the Boston building in the past tense, like it’s over and done with and now we’ve all moved on to New York.
“I guess.”
“We could have Art Deco features added, couldn’t we?” Worth asks.
Poppy and I stay silent, because adding Art Deco details to a Victorian building is a stupid idea, but neither of us want to embarrass Worth.
He stares at us, waiting for an answer.
“Maybe,” I say with a shrug.
“Maybe?” he asks. “What does that mean?”
“I think we should lean into the period of the building—Victorian,” I say. “Same for Boston.”
“What does lean in mean?” Worth asks.
“And I’m the one without a college degree?” I ask.
“Help me see it, Avril,” he says, his tone shifting to the one that says quit being sassy.
I sigh and turn around, taking it in properly. “Lots of forest greens and berry reds. Oak reception desks with brass lamps.” I pull in a breath. “But we don’t want to go too dark, so the walls should be…I think stone with murals, maybe.”
“Murals?” Poppy and Worth exclaim in unison.
“Hand-painted.” I gesture over to the east wall. “You could have a wisteria painted over here that would stretch across the back of the reception desks.”
“That would be very pretty.”
“You could solve the problem with the uniformity of the rooms that way,” Poppy says. “By having hand-painted murals in the rooms.”
“Sounds expensive,” Worth murmurs.
But I try and work through the idea in my head.
“It doesn’t have to be. We can get art students to do it.
And we don’t have to do it in the entire bedroom—or maybe we do the suites.
In the standard rooms, we could just do it in the bathrooms. Or the hallways.
No, the hallways have too much traffic. But we could find a way of incorporating it into the rooms without it being too costly. ”
I hate it, but Poppy’s right. It would be a good idea for putting our stamp on the hotel and making it stand out from the midtown competition. It wouldn’t be Art Deco but it would be design led.
“Maybe you could name the rooms too,” Worth says. “Like the Pelican Room and the Elephant Room.”
“Except we will never name our rooms after animals,” I reply.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Poppy says.
I snap my head around to see if she’s joking. “A pelican room?”
“Well, not the animal names, but to name the room rather than just have a number. It makes it feel more personal.”
She’s right. So is Worth, and it just makes me sink into my shoes. I really didn’t want this Fifth Avenue building to be a possibility.
“But Boston is a good option too,” Poppy says. She must have seen my expression. “It’s worth waiting to see how your meeting with Ben goes.”
“How much interest is there in this place?” Worth asks Sujoy.
“It’s been on the market a while, but I do have another very interested buyer who has seen the place,” Sujoy replies.
“And what is their timeline?” Worth asks.
I’m not quite sure why Worth would ask a realtor questions that the realtor has a vested interest in exaggerating.
“I’m waiting to hear back from them on when they can get more members of their team to visit,” Sujoy says.
I catch Worth’s eye and frown at him. What’s he doing?
At that moment, Sujoy’s cell rings and he leaves us to go and take his call.
“No doubt that call will be from the other interested party,” I say.
“I was just taking his temperature. I think there’s someone else in the mix, but at the same time, I don’t think we have to move quickly. Why don’t we get the designer in here and the contractor and they can give us some rough estimates of costs?”
“Can’t we just wait until we hear from Ben East?” I ask.
Worth shrugs. “We can do both.”
But the more invested Worth and Poppy get in this building, the less likely they’re going to want to have a hotel in Boston, that requires a plane or a train ride to even visit the place.
I’ve got to make sure Ben and I keep things completely professional—and then he needs to prove he’s the miracle worker he says he is. I want the Boston hotel.