People We Meet on Vacation

THE LARREA PALM Springs Hotel is seventy dollars a night in the summer, and even in the dark, it looks like a kid’s Magic Marker drawing. In a good way.

The outside is an explosion of colors—banana-yellow pool cabanas, hot-sauce-red chaises lined up around the water, each block of the three-story building painted a different shade of pink, red, purple, yellow, green.

The room we check into is every bit as lively: orange walls and drapes and furniture, green carpet, striped bedding matched to the building’s exterior. Most important, it’s very cold.

“You want to shower first?” Alex asks as soon as we’re inside. I realize then that the whole drive over—and before that, when we were packing our stuff up, tidying Nikolai’s apartment—he’s been waiting to be clean, suppressing a desire to say over and over again, God, I need a shower, while all I was doing was thinking about what happened on the balcony and going hot all over.

I don’t want Alex to go take a shower right now. I want to get in the shower together and make out some more.

But I also remember him confiding once that he hated shower sex (worse than outdoor sex) because when he was in the shower, he just wanted to be clean, and that was hard to do with someone else’s hair and dirt pouring down you, while the sex part was just as challenging because there was constantly soap in your eyes or you were brushing up against the wall and thinking about the last time the tiles were cleaned, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I just say, “Go for it!” and Alex nods but hesitates, like maybe he’s going to say something, but ultimately decides not to and disappears into the bathroom for a long, hot shower.RêAd lat𝙚St chapters at Novel(D)ra/ma.Org Only

My T-shirt and hair have both dried out, and when I go to sit out on the (non-plastic-wrapped) balcony of our new room, I realize that’s already mostly dry too.

Any sign of the rain that broke the heat has burned off, like it never happened.

Except that my lips feel bruised and my body is more relaxed than I’ve been all week. And the air is lighter too, breezy even.

“All yours,” Alex says behind me.

When I turn, he’s standing there in his towel looking shiny-clean and perfect. My pulse quickens at the sight of him, but I’m aware of how filthy I am, so I swallow my want, stand up, and say, “Cool!” too loudly.

To put it lightly, I don’t enjoy showering.

Being clean, yes. The act of being in the shower, also yes. But everything about having to brush out my tangled hair beforehand, stepping out onto a ratty bath mat or tile floors, getting dry, combing my hair out again—I hate all of that, which means I’m a three-shower-a-week person to Alex’s one to two showers a day.

But taking this shower, after the week we’ve had so far, is absolutely luxurious.

Standing in hot, hot water within a cold, cold bathroom, watching legitimate dirt and grime drip off me and swirl around the drain in shimmery gray spirals, is life giving. Massaging coconut-scented shampoo into my scalp and green-tea-scented cleanser onto my face, and running a cheapo razor up my legs, feels divine.

It’s the longest shower I’ve taken in months, and when I finally emerge from the bathroom feeling like a new woman, Alex is fast asleep in one of the beds, on top of the bedding with all the lights still on.

For a second, I debate which bed to climb into. In general, I love being able to sprawl out in a queen bed on these trips, but there’s a big portion of me that wants to curl up next to Alex, fall asleep with my head in the crook of his shoulder where I can smell his clean, bergamot smell, maybe conjure up a dream about him.

In the end, though, I decide it’s too creepy to assume he wants to share a bed with me just because we hooked up.

The last time anything happened between us, there certainly wasn’t any bed sharing afterward. There was just chaos.

I’m determined that this won’t end up like that. No matter what happened or happens between us on this trip, I won’t let it ruin our friendship. I won’t make assumptions about what any of this means or foist any expectations onto Alex.

I pull the striped comforter up over him, flick off the lights, and climb into the empty bed across from his.