Blended TML Ch 16

Mary pulls herself together. “Hi. What can we do for you?”

“This is our place, right?” the shiny one says, wobbling in her heels, but not slurring too badly.

“Umm, I don’t think so. It’s not booked tonight,” Mary replies.

The woman giggles. “Are you sure?”

The other woman says something in Russian.

“Right?” the shiny one replies.

Mary looks uncertainly at Piper, then gets out her phone. “Yeah, I don’t have a booking tonight. But there’s another unit right around the bend, right there.” Mary points. “I think you might have just turned into the wrong one. That’s easy to do at night.”

“Uh uh,” the drunk woman proclaims, nails flashing blindingly as she whips out her phone. She chuckles as she taps, then thrusts it in their faces.

Mary frowns and squints. “OK, yeah—OK, I get it now. You put a hold on it, but that hold expired because you didn’t complete the booking.”

Piper is relieved; it seems like these two aren’t the ones who partied here last night.

The glittery one is confused. “Huh?”

“You paid the deposit, but you didn’t actually book it. Yeah, I know, it’s stupid. Uh… shit.” Mary looks at Piper in panic.

“We pay now,” the other woman says in thickly accented English.

“Uh… yeah, but we’re here. And it’s not ready.”

The glittery waves her hands, bangles jingling. “We don’t care.”

“You don’t?”

The Russian says something else, and they both double over laughing.

Mary pulls Piper away. “Uh…”

Piper sucks her breath in through her teeth. “If we send them away like this, somebody dies. It’s amazing that no one has already. Tragic, Oscar-winning movies start with drunk drivers like this.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I don’t want to go find a hotel right now. I’m tired, Piper.” Mary looks so sad.

“It’s fine. You gotta, look.” Piper makes a box with her fingers, then rotates it 90 degrees. “Reframe. This is funny. It’s comedy. Roll with it.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It is easy. Take their money. Give them a safe place to sleep. And if they’re ridiculous, laugh at it. It’s that simple.”

Mary grabs Piper and squeezes her, letting out what might be the longest breath that Piper has ever heard in her life. “OK. OK. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Definitely.”

“Go grab an agreement.”

“On it.” Piper hurries to the drawer in the kitchen with the copies of paperwork, hearing a cheer from the front of the house as the guests receive the news. She returns, and the glittery one scrawls signatures without reading anything while Mary photographs the IDs and scans the credit card, which looks… fancy.

Rolling suitcases, clomping, bumping, giggling—all Piper can do is get out of the way.

“If I could stop and enjoy life half as much as they are right now just once, that would be like a religious experience,” she mutters to Mary. “Is that you and Jess twenty years ago?”

“Not exactly,” Mary whispers back. “These two make teenage me and her look like brain surgeons.”

“But if you were from our generation?”

“Then yeah. That’s us,” Mary says, eyes distant.