The Wake-Up Call(21)

“Deal,” I say, and hold out my hand to shake his.

Our palms connect hard. The feeling of his fingers gripping my hand makes my heart quicken, like the moment at the start of a race—you’re not running yet, but you know you will be.





Lucas


I arrive at the hotel the next morning to find that Izzy is already here, and has spread a great number of socks across the desk. After a moment, I conclude that this is part of an effort to sort them into pairs, which strikes me as an enormous waste of time—but then, Izzy loves to do what she calls “going the extra mile.”

“I’ve sorted your Mrs. Muller problem,” she says to me, not bothering with a hello.

One of the builders calls, “Hey, Izz!” as he strolls in, still vaping, and she gives him a big smile and a wave, all of which irritates me. Despite the two hours I’ve just spent in the gym, I’m on edge—I have been all week. The stress of working shifts with Izzy Jenkins, no doubt.

“It’s not my Mrs. Muller problem,” I say, very deliberately shifting the clothes heaped on my chair to the already teetering pile on hers. “Any problem Mrs. Muller is having concerns all of us.”

A note from Poor Mandy says that Louis Keele requested a wake-up call for eight fifteen today, so I ring him, hang up as quickly as possible—he is still mid–sleepy grunt—and then wait for Izzy to tell me what she’s done. She just continues sorting socks, humming Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits.” She has stuck a note to my keyboard—something about paint in the store cupboard, but as usual her handwriting is totally unreadable. She has also moved the pen pot to her side of the desk, even though it should live right in the middle. I am disproportionately annoyed by both these things. Maybe I need to go back to the gym after work, too.

“Well?” I say.

“Well what?”

“What did you do about Mrs. Muller?”

She smiles in satisfaction and brings out her phone, pulling up a photo of the paint splattering the wall of Mrs. Muller’s suite. I stare at it, trying to get the point, until she leans forward and zooms in on the bottom corner of the mess. Her hair falls forward, striped in green and blue today, and I make the mistake of inhaling. She smells of cinnamon again.

“See it?” she says.

I lean closer, my head just inches from hers. There is a small sign stuck to the wall. When the Muses Strike, by M. Muller, it reads. December 2022. It is just like the cards you see next to artworks in a museum.

“She was thrilled,” Izzy says. “Honoured, she said. She’s going to stay in ‘her room’ at the hotel every year from now on.”

“So we have to keep that mess there?”

“It’s art!” she says.

A message pops up on the top of her screen. Sameera says . . . Will you just angry-shag him in a spare hotel room already? it reads.

She turns the screen black and steps away from me instantly. “Umm,” she says.

I sit down, directing my attention firmly towards the computer, but my heart is pounding. Who does this Sameera think Izzy should angry-shag? I don’t know of anyone at the hotel Izzy is angry with other than . . . me.

“I assume you saw that,” Izzy says, sorting socks with too much enthusiasm—one goes flying over the edge of the desk onto the lobby rug. “The message.”

“Yes,” I say, scrolling through the hotel’s inbox, and then scrolling back up through the unread emails again, because I don’t think I absorbed a single subject line.

“It’s not . . . My friend Grigg’s wife is just super inappropriate. I’m not going to shag anyone. Definitely not in an angry way. Having sex when you’re angry is never a good idea. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“I didn’t ask,” I point out, keeping my voice as dry as possible. I will my heart rate to slow. The message probably referred to someone from outside the hotel. Just because it mentioned a hotel room doesn’t necessarily mean it was about one of Izzy’s colleagues.

“Morning, Izzy. Lucas.”

Louis Keele. I offer him a polite smile and then return my gaze firmly to my inbox. Izzy can deal with him. He wants Izzy anyway. I type out a few emails to possible ring owners just as the rest of the builders traipse in, trailing wet mud across the lobby floor behind Louis. I reach for the phone to call housekeeping, but Dinah appears, as if conjured by inconsiderateness, and scowls after them, mop already in hand.

I like Dinah. She never goes the extra mile—she goes just far enough, and I have a lot of respect for that.

“I wanted to give you a heads-up,” Louis says.

I glance up again. Louis is not a large man, or a particularly impressive one, but he is just the sort of guy who would put me on edge if I weren’t there already. He’s self-assured and has a warm charm that makes conversation easy. In other words, he is very unlike me.

“Mr. Townsend, the sweet guy with the tremor? As I left my room, I heard him muttering about this ‘miserable place’ and how this will be ‘some Christmas.’?” Louis pulls a sympathetic face. He is always a lot nicer when Izzy is around. “Sorry, I just thought you’d want prior warning . . .”

We all turn as Mr. Townsend appears. He is visibly upset, his head bowed, his movements jerky. I look away—I suspect Mr. Townsend would rather not have everybody in the lobby staring at him—and see Louis’s phone, which rests between his hands on the desk. There’s a photo of the lobby up on his screen. I frown.