3 #2
Turned out, very few tourists stayed overnight on the island, and the local fishing community didn’t require turndown service.
The only actual hotel on the island, as opposed to a few rented rooms in private homes and a handful of small inns, usually stayed open only from April through September.
It was now June, but filming would take place during the winter too, and the couple who owned the place had been persuaded to return anytime filming did.
Upon first glance, the all-suites hotel was nicer than Peter had anticipated. Elegant in its simplicity and not at all generic.
One story constructed of local stone, with panoramic windows everywhere. Gleaming wooden floors and thick rugs. Fireplaces.
King beds. Granite bathrooms. A private outdoor seating area for each spacious suite.
Living there, even for months at a time, shouldn’t prove a hardship.
The older half of the couple, a fiftysomething Black man named Fionn, had cooked for Michelin-starred restaurants around Europe
before coming home to run the hotel’s small, well-regarded restaurant. His pale, freckled husband, Conor, dealt with their
guests’ other needs, so far with impeccable politeness and easygoing charm.
But the damn place boasted five suites. Total.
Five .
Those suites went to him, Maria, the director, the producer, and the cinematographer. Everyone else was scattered around the
island, staying in those tiny inns and rented rooms.
Maria had been given the suite right next to his, fuck it all, and all five of them would be eating the included breakfast
together every morning in the hotel’s small dining area, just like one big, happy family.
Speaking of which, Maria apparently spoke to her family daily. Even now, she was chatting with them in rapid Swedish as she
began to haul her luggage to her door one-handed, piece by piece, her other hand occupied in clamping her cell to her ear.
From all indications, she and her family got along great, and today’s call proved no exception.
“ Ja , Mamma,” she said, then unsuccessfully tried to drag a particularly heavy suitcase over the threshold to her suite as she laughed. “ Fem . Fem! ”
He’d heard her talking with her pappa on their charter plane in the minutes before takeoff, as well as someone named Vincent, who seemed to be her brother. Her
easy, cheerful tone never changed during those conversations. At the end of every call, her wide brown eyes softened with
warmth and affection as she said she loved them—his best guess; he didn’t fucking know Swedish—and disconnected.
He had no idea how it would feel, being in a family like that.
He did know that watching it from the outside hurt.
Her one hand clearly wasn’t up to the task of wrangling such oversized luggage. She’d paused in her attempts to hoist her
bags over the threshold, probably intending to wait until her call ended. But she needed to get inside her suite and away
from him ASAP, and he knew exactly how to hurry things along.
He set his enormous duffel along one side of the hall. Then, placing his hand on her shoulder, using the least possible pressure
and dropping the contact as soon as he could, he nudged Maria out of her doorway. Her rapid flow of words faltered for a moment,
and her confused stare licked at his skin like a flame, but he kept his own eyes elsewhere.
With two hands and one heave, he deposited her largest suitcase five feet within her suite. Then the next largest, and so
on, until all her luggage was resting on that pale wooden floor, against the wall. For good measure, he wrestled the heaviest
suitcase, one she’d evidently filled with bricks, or possibly lead weights, onto the waiting luggage rack.
It wasn’t an apology, but at least it was... something.
And fucking hell, he didn’t want to hear those fond family farewells again, even in a foreign language.
So without a word, he urged her into her suite using the same glancing, minimal contact with her shoulder as before, paying no attention to her sudden silence.
Then he shut the door firmly behind her and set out for a walk that would last until their team’s first official on-location meeting later that afternoon.
He’d admire the panoply of late-spring flowers growing in the grikes. Study the austere stacked-stone walls dividing the island’s
tiny green fields and avoid making eye contact with the cattle and sheep grazing on the grass within those walls. He’d wander
down to the golden-sand beach on one side of the island and climb up to the cliff tops overlooking the pounding surf of the
Atlantic on the other side. If he got tired after a long day of travel, a couple of the local horses were out of luck, because
he’d be hiring one of those jaunties to keep him moving.
Then, if that didn’t do the trick, he’d wade into the freezing surf and encourage Dolphy McBlowholeface to slap him around
a little, or whatever else it took to get a handle on himself and the way he reacted to Maria. Because this was the first
of countless days in close quarters with her, and he needed to keep his shit together.
Worst-case scenario: Seals might not have fins, but they did have flippers optimized for effective slapping. He was pretty
certain he could alienate them too, as needed.
He was good at that.