Page 34 of Something So Strong

Into a corridor that stretches so far you can barely make out the end of it. I lead Jesse—pressing my hand against his lower back because I crave how his muscles tense when I touch him there. “This is the back of the house,” I tell him, guiding him to the left. “The General Manager’s office is way down there. And this is us.”

Reaching out, Jesse opens the door and is instantly met with the perturbed faces of a family surrounded by designer luggage and excessive amounts of ski equipment.

“So sorry about the wait,” I perk up, leaving Jesse in the doorway. “I’ll have you checked out in no time. May I have your room keys?” Accepting the key cards, I scan them and begin the process of removing these people from my life.

I can do this shit in my sleep.

Plaster on a fake smile. Call them by their surnames. Ask them about their stay. Drop an arbitrary compliment, that’s total bullshit. Take their credit card. Sign on the dotted line. Next.

“What?” I chuckle at the expression on Jesse’s face.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Your new man.”

Jesse makes the cutest, most timid, little sputtering sound and tries to cover it up with a cough.

“Here.” I walk to the end of the narrow office space and pull out a drawer. A pack of gum, a half-eaten Snickers, a box of condoms, and a lighter slide around. “This is the shit drawer. Toss your phone in,” I instruct as I pull my own from my back pocket. “No cells on the floor. But this drawer—and if you stand right in the corner—is a blind spot for the cameras.”

Jesse nods, almost skeptically, and I leave him to make his decision on whether I’m lying or not.

Moving to the middle of three computers, I navigate my way around the hotel’s booking system before opening a document file and selecting to print. “Right. It’s about to get hectic in here. Fifty-seven different rooms are checking out today.”

“How many rooms are there?” Jesse steps beside me.

“Here, there are one-eighty. But Misty’s has three hundred.” Leaving Jesse, I head to the printer. “Each set of keycards has everything you need to know on it, and cash is accepted nowhere except the nightclub.” Collecting the pile of paper, I staple them together and hold them out for him to take. “The operating system is straightforward, but if you forget anything I’m about to tell you, it’s all in there.”

Back at the computer, I put the system in training mode and grab an all-red keycard from the stationery tray beside the pen cup. “To complete checkout, you scan all the cards connected to the individual booking, and all the totals will combine here.” I scan the practice card and point to the mock-up on the screen. “You click print. Get the bill from the printer. Ask the customer to sign. Once the payment’s gone through, you click ‘accept’, and then they fuck off.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s literally it. It’s the easiest job in this joint.”

“But surely the guests come here to complain.”

“True. But it’s easy to not give a shit when you have no soul.” That was probably a little too real, Kai. “Look, most of the time I just give them what they want ‘cause it’s not my money. But some of them I will go to the ends of the earth to fuck with. It’s one of my life’s only pleasures. And I’ll do it all the while with a smile on my face just to piss them off more… Anyway, by the time checkout’s over at eleven, you’ll have everything down pat.”

“Then what?”

“Then it’s concierge time.” I gesture to the computer by the shit drawer. “All bookings can be made directly from their rooms, but these fuckers don’t like to do anything on their own. Even though it takes them longer to walk down here, they’d still rather have us do it for them. Oh, and heads up. Be prepared to be hit on by more women your grandmother’s age than you can poke a stick at.”

“Okay…”

Oh, bless him. His adorable, flustered face is back.

“So when does check-in start?”

“Three. But that’s not our concern. The next shift starts then, runs for eight hours till eleven, then Wade and Celeste come in to do overnight.”

“Do they really need two people at three am?”

“Nope. Not usually. But we do attract a lot of A-listers who like to enter in the dead of night, like anyone actually gives that much of a shit about who they are.”

I glance at the top right-hand corner of the computer screen, I’ve not moved from behind for the past four hours.

It’s ten past eleven, and guest number fifty-seven has finally decided to grace us with her presence. Clip-clopping her way towards the desk in a pair of giant heels with a fur coat draped over her shoulders, it is one of the most ghastly examples of mutton dressed up as lamb I’ve ever seen. Choosing me, she dumps her designer handbag on the black marble countertop, and I half expect a rat dog to pop its head out. But instead, she huffs indignantly and starts digging around inside it like it’s the bottomless bag from Mary Poppins.

Snickering at my potential misfortune, Kai takes a few steps closer. Standing behind me and just off to one side, he looks over my shoulder at the screen. Or pretends to, anyway. The weight of his presence is so immense it takes me several seconds to realize the guest is waving her room key in my face.

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