Chapter 241: Vacation Time
The flight had done something to Liam that he was not going to admit to anyone but that his body was still processing an hour after landing.
It wasn’t fear exactly.
More like his body had spent the entire duration of the flight running a quiet background assessment of the situation and arriving at the same conclusion on repeat, which was that human beings had no business being that far off the ground in a metal tube and that the people around him who were reading magazines and sleeping were either braver than him or had simply made peace with something he hadn’t made peace with yet.
He had said nothing about this to Kelvin.
Kelvin had slept for most of it.
Now they were standing in the corridor of the hotel on the fourteenth floor and Kelvin was holding his luggage with the relaxed energy of someone who had done this many times and found it unremarkable, wearing a clean fitted shirt and trousers that had somehow survived the journey without a crease in them.
Liam was rolling his bag to catch up.
Kelvin stopped in front of a door and put the keycard to the lock and pushed it open and held it.
"Welcome," he said, "to our hotel room."
Liam walked in.
He stopped walking.
The room was large in the way that certain rooms were large, not just in square footage but in the quality of the space itself, the ceiling high enough that it changed the air, the furniture positioned with the specific intention of someone who had thought about where things should go and why.
A wide bed against the far wall, white linen, the kind of white that had been laundered enough times to achieve a specific perfect weight. A sitting area with two chairs and a low table. A desk near the window with a lamp that was on already, casting a warm circle of light across the surface.
And the window.
Floor to ceiling, running the full width of the room, looking out across the city at whatever hour this was in the afternoon, the buildings arranged below and across from them, the light sitting on the glass faces of the ones opposite, the whole thing laid out like someone had planned it specifically for this view from this room on this floor.
Liam stood in front of it.
He looked out at the buildings and the sky above them and the street fourteen floors below that had cars moving through it like slow insects.
"Why," he said, "have we never done this before."
Kelvin set his luggage beside the wardrobe and straightened up. "We weren’t like this then," he said. He said it simply, the way you said something that was just true.
Liam looked at him. Then back at the window. "True."
He nodded once and kept looking at the city outside. There was something about being this high up that was different from the plane, something that had ground underneath it and walls around it and didn’t move. He could feel the difference in his body. The plane had been the plane and this was something else, something he was finding he actually liked.
Kelvin had moved to the small table near the entrance where the hotel had left the welcome arrangement. A bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, two glasses beside it, the whole setup with the particular polish of places that had been doing this long enough that it looked effortless.
He picked up the bottle.
"Cheers," Kelvin said, working the cork with both thumbs, "to a fun vacation." He angled it away from the window and the cork came out with a clean pop and the champagne moved up the neck of the bottle and he got the glass under it in time and poured, the foam settling, and poured the second and held one out toward Liam.
Liam took it.
Kelvin raised his. "To us."
"To us," Liam said.
They drank.
The champagne was cold and good and nothing like the beer they usually had and Liam stood there with the glass and the window and the city outside and thought that Kelvin had been right about all of this in a way he hadn’t fully understood until right now standing in it.
He finished what was in the glass and went to the bed and sat on the edge of it and then lay back and looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling was high and white and clean and the lamp from the desk threw a soft edge of light across the lower part of it.
"I’m still feeling it," he said.
"The flight?" Kelvin said.
"Yeah."
Kelvin poured himself a second glass and leaned against the table with it. "You get used to it. After the third or fourth time it becomes nothing."
"The third or fourth time," Liam said to the ceiling.
"Give it two more and you’ll be sleeping through it like I do."
Liam thought about Kelvin asleep in the seat beside him for the majority of the flight while Liam had been sitting very still with his hands on his knees watching the wing outside the window for any indication of a problem.
"How were you just asleep," he said.
"Closed my eyes," Kelvin said. "That’s it."
"There’s nothing else to it?"
"There’s nothing else to it."
Liam lay there for another moment. Then he sat up and reached for the champagne glass on the bedside table and finished it and set it back down.
"Okay," he said.
Kelvin looked at him. "We should go explore."
Liam looked at him. "We just got here."
"We’ve been in this room for twelve minutes," Kelvin said. He set his glass down and straightened his shirt. "There’s a whole hotel. We haven’t seen any of it."
Liam looked at the bed beneath him. The linen had that quality of hotel linen that was specifically designed to make the idea of lying in it seem like the best available option at any given moment.
"Where do you want to go," he said.
"Food first," Kelvin said. "Then everything else."
Liam’s stomach confirmed the food before his mouth did. He hadn’t eaten since the airport and the airport had not been a success in that regard.
"Okay," he said. He stood up and straightened his hoodie. "Food first."
Kelvin moved to the door and held it open.
They went out into the corridor together, the door clicking shut behind them, and took the elevator down.
They left the room and walked down the corridor to the elevator. Kelvin pressed the button and they waited and the doors opened and they stepped in.
Two girls were already inside.
Both dressed well, the kind of dressed well that said they had somewhere to be or had just come from somewhere worth dressing for. They looked up when Liam and Kelvin got in and something shifted in both their faces, the specific shift of people who had just registered something they found interesting and were deciding what to do about it.
They smiled.
At both of them, but the smiles had a quality to them that was doing more than being polite.
Liam looked up briefly.
70/100 above one. 65/100 above the other.
He looked back at the doors.
The elevator moved down. The girls said something to each other quietly and one of them laughed, soft and brief. The doors opened at the lobby and the girls stepped out first and moved off into the lobby without looking back.
Liam and Kelvin stepped out after them.
Kelvin watched them go for exactly two seconds and then turned to Liam. "See," he said quietly. "Told you. They are something else here."
Liam smiled and said nothing.
Kelvin looked at him and then looked at the corridor ahead. "We are going to have the best time," he said, with the certainty of someone reporting a fact rather than making a prediction. "I’m telling you right now." He pointed left. "Restaurant is that way."
They moved through the lobby and into the corridor and through the glass doors and into the restaurant.
The restaurant kind of quiet that expensive restaurants had at this hour, not empty but unhurried, the tables spaced generously, the lighting warm and low, the sound of the room a soft continuous murmur of other conversations that never got close enough to make out.
A man in a dark jacket met them at the entrance and led them to a table near the window, this one looking out at street level, the city at eye height rather than from above, the people on the pavement moving past outside the glass.
They sat.
Kelvin picked up the menu with the ease of someone who had sat at tables like this before and knew how to read them without being read by them.
He looked through it with genuine interest, his eyes moving down the page, occasionally making a small sound that indicated he had found something worth considering.
Liam picked up his menu and looked at it.
It was the kind of menu that was confident enough in itself not to have pictures. Just names and descriptions and prices that were listed without apology.
He read through it and understood most of it and accepted that he wasn’t going to understand all of it and made peace with that.
"What are you getting," he said.
Kelvin didn’t look up from his menu. "The steak. And the soup to start." He turned a page. "You?"
Liam looked at his menu. "The same probably."
Kelvin looked up at him. "You don’t have to get the same thing as me."
"I know," Liam said. "But the steak sounds right."
Kelvin looked at him for a second and then looked back at his menu. "Fair enough."
A waiter came and they ordered and the waiter left and they sat with the window and the street outside and the quiet of the room around them.
Kelvin leaned back in his chair. "So," he said. "What do you think so far."
Liam looked around the restaurant. At the other tables, the other people, the lamp above them and the ceiling above that and the fourteen floors above the ceiling where their room was sitting with its wide window and its clean linen.
"I think," he said, "that I should have come on one of these a long time ago."
Kelvin smiled. Not the big one. The small one that came out when something landed the right way. "Told you," he said.
"You didn’t tell me anything," Liam said. "You complained about coming."
"I complained about coming with my dad," Kelvin said. "I never said the trips themselves weren’t good." He picked up the water glass in front of him. "There’s a difference."
Liam looked at him.
Kelvin had said something earlier in the hotel room, the we weren’t like this then, and it had sat in Liam’s head in the easy way that true things sat, not demanding attention but present.
He thought about it now, sitting in this restaurant in a city he had arrived in for the first time a few hours ago, and thought about where they had both been before all of this and how different this chair felt from that.
"Yeah," Liam said. "There is."
The soup arrived.
They ate.
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