Page 6 of One Night Only
Stupid Grayson Group and their stupid cultural center. Stupid Matthias and his stupid visionary mind. Stupid me and my stupid dull one.
I fling my suitcase onto the bed and unzip it. There’s still some sand inside from last summer when Annie and I visited her family in Florida. We spent a lot of time eating shrimp and drinking beer and drunkenly video calling Paul at 2 a.m. his time.
It was a good weekend.
Now I shake the sand onto the floor. I have a few planned outfits I want to wear but what about everything in between? The majority of my closet is office based, the rest of it embarrassingly casual. None of it is suitable wedding-week attire.
Uninspired.
“Within budget” is what they meant to say.
“Following the brief with practical yet stylish adjustments” is more like it.
You wantinspiredyou whack on another million bucks, Grayson.
My phone buzzes on the bed and it takes me a moment to locate it underneath all the clothes. It’s a text from Dad.
Bon voyage!
I stare at it, feeling a little guilty. We were supposed to be going camping soon, our annual father-daughter tradition, but with the trip to Ireland, I can’t afford to take any more time off work. He said he didn’t mind but I know he’s disappointed. He’s been on his own since I moved to the city, and though I try to visit when I can, it feels like every year we’re seeing less and less of each other.
“I’m alive!”
I quickly message back as Claire’s voice sounds from the hallway and emerge to see her eyes glued to her own phone as she untucks her blouse from her tight pencil skirt. She’s already swapped her heels for a pair of sleek black trainers.
Claire is a lawyer for one of those large corporations that no one has heard of but that quietly runs a million companies and probably a small country somewhere. She tried to explain her job to me once. Something with taxes. A lot of reading. A lot of meetings. No actual court experience. “I’m a sellout,” she said seriously to me once. “But a sellout who is going to retire by forty.”
She’s rooming with me to make as much money as she can to buy her own place and I’m grateful for it. She gets the bigger room and insists on paying a lot more rent than I do. There’s no way I’d be able to afford this place otherwise. It’s a decent two-bedroom on Avenue A with sunlight and closet space. The neighborhood gets a little rowdy on the weekends, but I love it and it’s near enough to everything that I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
“What crawled up your butt?” she asks when she sees me.
“Nothing.”
“You packed yet?”
“No.”
She rolls her eyes and gestures me back into the bedroom, where she collapses into the flea market armchair I squeezed beside the bed.
“Doesn’t it rain all the time in Ireland?” she asks, examining my suitcase with a critical eye.
“Yes, but it’s nearly June. And Paul says that’s a myth.”
“Throw in a fleece. Do you have an adapter?” She sighs when I shake my head. “I’ll give you mine.”
“Thanks.” I dump a pile of T-shirts into the case, followed by my jeans.
“Bad day at work?”
I glance at her in surprise. “How did you know?”
“No reason,” she deadpans as I kick a discarded jacket out of the way.
I frown down at my clothes. Do shoes go in first or last? “Turns out I’m not the creative genius I thought I was,” I explain. “Our new client doesn’t like my design and, as it turns out, neither does my boss.”
Her face falls. “I’m sorry.”
“Yay, vacation time, I guess.”
