STELLA
After we ate a leisurely breakfast in bed, we rolled the room service cart into the hallway, locked the door . . . and got busy rearranging all the furniture.
Using a lamp as a stand-in for the potted palm and one of the damask-upholstered chairs in place of the bench, we re-created the walkway that went from the lobby out to the pool. We had a good view of it from our balcony, and we were able to duplicate the layout precisely. When all the furniture was in place, we armed Priscilla with our secret weapon—a twenty-foot hot-pink retractable leash that still had the sale sticker from Marshalls attached. I’d bought it the same day I’d gotten her water bowl. On the side it said PROPERTY OF THE QUEEN, which I had decorated in rhinestones.
Nick pretended to be the guard, walking back and forth across the room lengthwise. I stood in front of the bureau that held the TV and tried to get her to dart across and snare him. But we couldn’t get it to work. Her frog didn’t cut it and neither did one of her treats. Every time, she ignored whatever I’d thrown and ran right to Nick. Getting her to cross his path without stopping for a kiss and a wiggle was impossible. Nick crouched down and gave her tummy a little scratch. His muscular legs made the fabric of his boxers pull tight over his ass.
“Can’t say I blame her,” I said. “You’re very hard to resist.”
Nick laughed. “Good to know I’m more attractive than a liver treat. But what are we going to do about this, little one?” He scratched Priscilla’s belly, and she flopped over onto her back. “What . . . are . . . we . . . gonna . . . do?” he cooed at her, poking her belly lightly with each word. In response, she wriggled against the carpet, shoulders and hips scrunching. It was so adorable, so lovely, that it made my knees a little weak, and so I took advantage of the bed behind me and had a seat.
Nick looked up at me, still scratching Priscilla’s belly. We stayed there in a thinking silence, eyes locked. Then he raised one finger. “Hang on. Hang on. Last night when I was grabbing a drink . . .” He headed for the minibar and crouched down again. Priscilla ran over to help and put her paws on his leg and her head under his arm. From the shelf above the fridge he produced a black plastic bag with white-and-red writing and a see-through window in the front.
Beef jerky. Teriyaki flavor. “Between the yogurt and the jerky, you’re a regular minibar MacGyver.”
Nick ripped the top off the bag off with his teeth and opened it. Priscilla jammed her face inside and inhaled so hard that it took the shape of her snout.
“Bingo!” I said.
“All right. Get in position,” Nick said, and I reattached Priscilla to her leash and took our place by the bureau.
He pointed toward the bathroom. Very softly, he confirmed the plan. “Sheikh is way down there.” Then he pointed to the ceiling, which was standing in for the balcony, “And I’m up there. Ready?”
I nodded and crinkled the bag for Priscilla. Nick began walking toward me. Just about one foot before he crossed my path, I tossed a tiny piece of jerky across the room. Priscilla bolted after it at full speed. The leash unwound, filling the air with a sound like an unspooling fishing line, and pulled tight in front of Nick.
He stopped before he got himself tangled, with the nylon rope just pressing into his shin. “We’re in business.”
Yes, indeed. We definitely were.
It was almost showtime. I was so nervous I could barely think straight. I felt like I was four double espressos in, and yet the strongest thing I’d had to drink that day was a glass of iced tea with our room service lunch. In the shower, I found my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t even unscrew the lid on the little bottle of complimentary shower gel. It always happened to me before a job—the nerves. But this was different. Everything about this felt different. It was the end of my time as a thief. And it was the beginning of my time with Nick.
In my head, I heard him saying it again and again. I’d been hearing it all day. I love you, Stella. And I always will. The sound of the toilet seat being raised broke my daydream, and I cleared a gap in the steam on the shower door.
He paused with his pants halfway undone. “You OK?”
“Sort of,” I said. I slid open the door an inch and handed over the shower gel. “I can’t get that open.”
It was hardly a jar of pickles, but he didn’t give me a hard time about it. It took him half a second to get it undone. As he handed it back to me, his expression softened, that secret unspoken language that I think maybe we’d been speaking all along. “Don’t worry.”
The water splashed at my feet, but I didn’t step back into the stream. “I know.”
“I’ll look after you like I’m Ruth and Roxie all wrapped up in one.”
As if it would anchor me, I ran my finger along the seal between the shower frame and the glass panel. “Nick. We haven’t talked about what happens if . . .”
His focus got laser sharp, and he shook his head. “Don’t you dare. You say those words, and you give them power. We will be fine. We’ve got this. You know we do.”
I swallowed hard and drizzled the flowery smelling gel into my palm. “OK. Promise?”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” he said, reaching into the shower, touching my wet cheek. “Whatever I say to you, whatever it is, it’s a promise. We clear?”
As if he’d thrown a warm blanket over me, I stopped shivering. All the uncertainty, for one blissful instant, disappeared. And all I knew, all I had to know, was him. And his confidence. It was contagious and wildly addictive. Working with him was different than with Roxie and Ruth; not better, just different. Because with him, I didn’t feel like the only one with a plan. I felt like a partner, an equal. Not the point of a triangle, but one half of a whole. “OK,” I said, and I shut the door and found myself alone in a little world of swirling steam.
But as I lathered up with shower gel and shampooed my hair, my shower thoughts unwound in their usual chaotic directions. The best-case scenario wasn’t hard to imagine. We get in. We get out. We drive east all night and all day and are back in Albuquerque in time for breakfast burritos. I cleave the diamond down the middle and rough out as many decent-size stones as possible. We move the raw stones. We divide the proceeds four ways and hide the cash. Within a few months, I’m out on the Big Wide Open with Nick. Mr. Bozeman is living it up at a retirement community outside Flagstaff. Back in the 505, Roxie is making macaroni and cheese for her son three times a week in a little adobe house with a carport. Ruth is in a sparsely and elegantly decorated yoga studio, saying “Ohmmmmmmmmm . . .” with a roomful of pregnant ladies and their dogs as they all get into triangle pose and look at the ceiling.
That was the goal.
But, I thought, as I put half a dozen very generous squirts of my conditioner into my palm . . .
There was also a worst-case scenario to consider. He didn’t want to talk that over, but I had to think it through. And it looked like this: We get caught. Nick and I spend the night in a county lockup, awaiting charges, as Priscilla is, hopefully, returned to Mr. Bozeman. Ruth and Roxie cannot pay this month’s rent and have to move to a less-safe apartment across town. The Big Wide Open goes to someone else. Mr. Bozeman is still in debt, and I can’t be there to help. The magnificent love story of the last little while explodes in a tragic spray of dull embers, and all the happiness we were all so close to having vanishes forever.
All is lost. Game over. Nobody gets their happy ending. Nobody comes out better in the end.
Toweling myself off, I tried to center my thoughts by focusing on a line in the bathroom wallpaper where two flowers were slightly mismatched, but it didn’t help. The worst-case scenario felt like it was right there in that line—the split between what was and what would never be. But I pushed those thoughts out of my head and cleared a place in the mirror to look at myself in the steam. You can do this, Stella. You can do this. You can.
As I stepped out of the bathroom in my robe, I found Nick zipping up both my suitcase and his own, getting them set to go by the door. We’d paid our bill already and arranged for a late checkout. Taking the pile of clothes I’d left on the bed, I shimmied very slowly into my panties and my leggings. We went about our routines in a nervous silence, interrupted only by the ding of my phone. It was a notification from Instagram.
More carats than a bag of carrots. Amirite? #SheikhLife
The image was him with the Ritz pool behind him, and he was holding the stone in one hand. He was kissing the angled edge of the stone. The North Star sparkled in the sunlight, the same sunlight that was shining through our window. The gem was so big, it hardly looked real at all. On the far right of the frame was the guard, in his shiny cheap suit, with his hand to his forehead in the universal sign of, I don’t get paid enough for this. Not even close.
“He’s got it,” I said to Nick, and showed him the image of the North Star.
“Fuck,” Nick replied, and ran his hand down his stubble.
This was happening. We were doing it. And once the plan was in motion, it would be our only shot. I looked at Nick, and Nick looked at me. We held one another’s gaze for so long, my screen went dark. The waves crashed, and Priscilla snored. Butterflies of all different sorts fluttered around in my stomach, colliding and heading off in opposite directions. Until finally Nick said, “You ready?”
“I think so.”
Nick nodded in return. From the hot, sunny windowsill he took the yogurt. It had sat in the sun all day, and now the foil lid was slightly puffy. He took a spoon from the minibar shelf and put it in his pocket. From the bathroom he took two hand towels and tossed one over to me. “You ever wiped a place for prints?”
I stared at the towel in my hand and shook my head. “Never.”
“Then follow behind me,” he said, and began with the handles of the sliding glass door. From there we went to the bedside table. To the lamp switches and the phone. To the minibar, to the closet, to the bathroom. Erasing all evidence that we had ever been there, erasing all the traces of the two of us there together.
Finally, when we got to the front entry area, I hooked Priscilla to the leash and took a deep breath. He took my face in his hands and gave me a long and tender kiss. It was a kiss unlike any other we’d had. One moment it was sweet, the next it was desperate. It was urgent, it was sad. It was joyful, and it was terrifying. And it made me sick because it felt very much like a goodbye, even if neither of us said so. I was too nervous to say anything at all.
Parting from him gave me a terrible pinch in my heart. Because there was a very real chance, if something went wrong, that this was the last time we would ever . . .
I couldn’t think about it. I just couldn’t. With all my strength, I pushed those thoughts away. I sealed them up and shoved them aside. For now. And, hopefully, forever.
Nick opened the door using the towel to keep his prints off the knob and lock. He wedged the door open with the toe of his boot. He leaned out of the room to check that the coast was clear and cleaned off both sides of the knob again, as well as the edges of the door itself and its frame. We tossed the towels into the bathroom and left our room, side by side, as the DO NOT DISTURB sign swung from the knob. We headed for the elevators and waited together in nervous silence, holding hands. The door slid open, and I was relieved to find it empty. We stepped inside and looked at one another in the reflection on the door.
“I love you,” he said softly.
My heart was in my throat, and I was so full of every sort of emotion that when I opened my mouth to answer him, no words came out. I was too nervous to tell him what I needed to say. And so I squeezed his hand as hard as I could, hoping he could feel that everything inside me was saying, I love you too.