Page 42 of Off Plan
Fenn
I wastoday years old when I learned that hotel room maintenance and guest satisfaction were part of my job description.
“Fenn, I need you to fix the air conditioner in a guest’s room,” Big Rafe had informed me this morning over the phone.
A guest. It hadn’t taken me long to mentally flip through our extensive list of visitors and figure out who had complained.
“Busy,” I’d informed him before hanging up and pulling my pillow back over my head.
He’d called back and started speaking like there’d been no interruption. “Mason’s leaving for work in ten minutes. You know he’s an early bird.”
“I know nothing of the kind.” In fact, I’d made it a pointnotto notice the way he’d left the motel before seven o’clock every morning in the week he’d been here. Or the way he’d come home by five o’clock in the evening. Or the way he kept his lights on each night until way late, like maybe the night-light I’d given him hadn’t worked.
I also hadn’t noticed him calling my name before I drove off last Friday night. And I most definitely hadn’t noticed him knocking on my door for nearly an hour earlier in the week. In fact, it was surprisingly easy not to notice a person, when you put just a bit of effort into it.
Not thinking about that person, though… that was harder. In the case of Mason Bloom, it was fucking impossible. The fact that thinking about him got me hard slightly more often than it pissed me off was the icing on the cake. One more thing to blame the straight guy for.
“—and I promised him it’d be fixed today, since it’s supposed to rain overnight.”
“He can keep his window cracked open to catch the breeze like the rest of us. Come on.”
“He shouldn’t have to,” Rafe shot back. “We take guest satisfaction seriously.”
“Thought he was an employee.”
“He’s both.”
Convenient. I sat up, dislodging the pillow. “And why is thismyproblem? Today’s supposed to be my day off. Gotta change the oil in the Charger and buff her up. Have Beale do it.”
Rafe sighed deeply, like the answer was obvious. “Bealecan’t. And if you spend any more time with that Charger, people are gonna start to talk. You’re our mechanic,Fenn—”
“Still not a mechanic.”
“—and air conditioners are mechanical, ergo this is your wheelhouse.”
Rafe and his fuckingergoswere gonna drive me demented.
But in the end, who’d levitated his sleepless ass off the bed, gotten in the shower, grabbed his screwdriver and Rafe’s vacuum, and dragged himself down to Mason’s room? Who’d pulled up a YouTube video on air conditioner repair and figured out how to remove the clogged air filter so he could wash it?
Yep. You know it.
So maybe “mechanic” was a thing onedidas opposed to a thing onewas.
“This isdisgusting,” I said to the empty room as I pulled out a flat, rectangular thing that could possibly have been alive at one point, based on the amount of fur covering it.
But per the instructions online, I just vacuumed the filter off, vacuumed the rest of the inside of the machine, too, for good measure, and reinserted it. Then, because I reasoned that a good mechanic would stick around to make sure it worked,right?I sat on the floor and allowed myself to do what I’d been dying to do since the moment I’d gotten into the room: I surveyed Mason’s space.
Holy shit, the place was relentlessly, hopelessly, horrifyinglytidy.
The nightstand held a phone charger, a chunk of transparent rock that looked like something I could have found in Beale’s room, and a dog-eared pirate thriller. The bed had been made without a single wrinkle, and I had the sudden urge to throw myself down and make snow angels.
The closet doors were open, and it was clear that Loafers had actually unpacked his bags—which was fucked-up, in my opinion, since I’d been here five years and still mostly lived out of a suitcase—and hung his many, many polos and button-downs in the closetin precise rainbow order. More than that, he’d clearly brought his own hangers, since they were all the exact same color and all faced the same direction. He’d put a couple of his big suitcases on the shelf at the top of the closet, and on the bottom he’d lined up his shoes like expensive little soldiers: six pairs of shiny leather ones in varying shades of brown and black, a single sand-covered pair of track shoes, and some high-end sandals.
Andwhichof us supposedly gave off serial killer vibes, I ask you?
For a second, I wished he were there just so I could give him shit about that, because he was so fun when he was riled…
And then I remembered I’d been avoiding him for a week preciselybecausehe was so fun to rile thatIgot easily riled, and I couldn’t afford to be riled around him because he was so very, very, very, verystraight.
