Page 147 of Ice Cold Chemistry
“Tomorrow.”
“What if there’s an emergency?”
“There won’t be an emergency.”
“You don’t know that.”
He puts his book down and looks at me with patience, despite everything. “Win. We’ve been here five hours.”
“I know how long we’ve been here.” I knowexactlyhow long we’ve been here.
He picks his book back up.
I sit on the porch with my phone held above my head trying to find a third bar and think about the Four Seasons website I looked at briefly, innocently, purely academically, when Banks first mentioned the cabin two weeks ago. Indoor plumbing.Complimentary robes. A deep soaking tub that I had immediately closed the tab on because I am a supportive girlfriend who respects her partner’s vision for this getaway.
I open the tab again and pray for it to load.
Hour six is when the spider happens.
I won’t go into detail. What I will say is that it was large, it was in the bathroom, and my response was, in Banks’s words,not proportionate to the threat, which is easy to say when you are six-foot-four and the spider is not your problem. To be fair, he may have thought I was getting murdered.
“I’m not sleeping here,” I tell him.
“Win—”
“I’m not. I can’t. I will lie awake all night thinking about where it went.”
“I removed it.” He shrugs.
“You moved itoutside, Banks. Outside, where it lives. It’s going to come back.”
He scrubs a hand over his face, and I watch him do the internal calculation of whether this is a hill worth dying on, and I can see the exact moment he decides it isn’t.
“What do you want to do?” he asks.
I pull up my phone. The Four Seasons tab is already open. “There’s availability tonight. Forty minutes from here. They have a suite with a soaking tub and twenty-four-hour room service, and I already looked up the thread count on the sheets, and Banks, it’s a thousand.”
He stares at me. “You already looked it up.” Raises one eyebrow. “How long ago?”
“…Two weeks.”
He’s quiet for a long second, and then he laughs—this low, genuine laugh that fills the cabin and does what it always does to me, which is make me forget I was ever annoyed about anything. “Get your bag.”
“Really?”
“Get your bag, Win. I want my baby to be happy.”
I have my bag zipped in forty-three seconds.
Banks
The hotel is, I’ll admit, significantly better than the cabin.
I’m not going to say that out loud. What I am going to do is sink into this obscenely comfortable chair and pretend I’m assessing the room with neutrality while Winnie opens every cabinet and drawer like she’s conducting an inventory, narrating her findings.
“There’s a Nespresso machine.” She holds up a pod. “And oat milk pods, Banks. They thought of oat milk.” She looks at me like I’ve personally wronged her by not thinking of oat milk. I had no idea she liked oat milk.
“I’m glad you’re happy.”
