Page 42 of People We Meet on Vacation

“If we can’t get it to work...” I trail off as the full force of our situation hits me. I was going to say that, if we couldn’t get it to work, I’d just book us a hotel room with theR+Rcard.

But of course we can’t.

I could put it on myowncredit card, but, living in New York, in a too-nice-for-me apartment, I don’tactuallyhave a ton of expendable income. The perks of my job are arguably the biggest form of income. I could try to score us a room through an advertising trade, but I’ve been slacking on my social media and blogging, and I’m not sure I still have enough clout. Besides, a lot of places won’t do that with influencers. Some will even screenshot your email requests and post them online to shame you. It’s not like I’m George Clooney. I’m just some girl who takes pretty pictures—I might be able to land us a discount; a free room’s unlikely.

“We’ll figure something out,” Alex says. “Do you want to shower first, or should I?”

I can tell from the way he’s holding his arms slightly away from his body that he’s desperate to be clean. And if he hops in theshower now, maybe I’ll even manage to get the temperature down a few degrees in the meantime.

“Go ahead,” I tell him, and he slips away.

The whole time I can hear the water running, I’m pacing. From the foldout pseudo bed to the plastic-wrapped balcony to the thermostat. Finally, it drops down to eighty-one, and I reset the goal temperature to eighty and keep pacing.

After deciding to document this so I can report it to Airbnb and try to get some money back, I take pictures of the chair bed and the porch—the construction upstairs has mercifully ceased for the day so at least it’s quiet, the hum of conversation and splash of water drifting up from the pool—then head back to the thermostat, down to eighty now, to take a picture of that too.

Just as I’m resetting the temperature for seventy-nine, the shower turns off, so I swing my suitcase up onto the foldout chair, unzip the bag, and start rooting through it for something lightweight to wear to dinner.

Alex steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam with a towel wrapped around his waist, one hand securing it at the hip as the other swipes through his wet hair, leaving it sticking up and out messily. “Your turn,” he says, but it takes me a second to compute through the haze of his long, lean torso and the sharp jut of his left hip bone.

Why is it so different seeing someone in a towel than in a bathing suit? Thirty minutes ago, Alex was technically more naked than this, but now, the smooth lines of his body feel more scandalous. I feel like all the blood in my body is just bobbing to the surface, pressing against my skin so that every inch of me is more alert.

It never used to be like this.

This is all because of Croatia.

Damn you and your gorgeous islands, Croatia!

“Poppy?” Alex prompts.

“Mm-hm,” I say, then remember to at least add, “Yeah.” I spin back to my bag and grab a dress, bra, and underwear at random. “Okay. Bedroom’s all yours.”

I hurry into the steamy bathroom and shut the door as I’m stripping off my bikini top only to freeze, stunned at the sight of a huge blue-tinted glass capsule that occupies the entirety of one wall, complete with a reclined seaton either side, like it’s some kind of group shower fromThe Jetsons.

“Oh my god.” This, I’m sure, was not in the photographs. In fact, this whole room is unrecognizable from the one on the website, transformed from the subtle, beachy grays of its former self into the glowing blue and sterile whites of the hypermodern sight before me.

I snatch a towel off the rack, wrapping it around myself, and throw the door open. “Alex, why didn’t you say anything about the—”

Alex grabs for his towel and pulls it around himself and I do my absolute best to pick up where my sentence stumbled off and pretend that didn’t happen. “—spaceship bathroom?”

“I figured you knew,” Alex says, his voice hoarse. “You booked this place.”

“They must’ve remodeled since the photos were taken,” I say. “How did you even figure out how to work that thing?”

“Honestly,” Alex says, “the hardest thing was just wresting control from the2001: A Space Odyssey–style artificial intelligence system. After that, the biggest issue was just that I kept mixing up the controls for the sixth shower head with the ones for the foot massager.”

It’s enough to break the tension. I dissolve into laughter and he does too, and it stops mattering so much that we’re standing here in our towels.

“This place is purgatory,” I say. Everything is just nice enough to make the issues that much more glaring.

“Nikolai is a sadist,” Alex agrees.

“Yes, but he’s a sadist with a spaceship bathroom.” I lean back into the bathroom to study the many-headed, multiseated shower again.

I burst into another fit of laughter and lean back out to find Alex standing there, grinning. He’s pulled a T-shirt on over his damp upper body but hasn’t risked swapping the towel out.

I turn back to the bathroom. “Okay, I’ll leave you to dance naked around the apartment in privacy now. Use your time wisely.”

“Is that what you do?” Alex calls. “Dance around the apartment naked whenever I’m in the other room? You do, don’t you?”

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