Roseanne
Lisa and I sit alone, staring at each other in shock.
"Dammit," she says. "I just wish she'd stayed five minutes longer."
"Well, there's still tomorrow." I look at my watch. "It's already after midnight though. You should go home. I'll get a hotel up here somewhere and see what she has to say in the morning."
"No way. We're in this together. We'll stay up here and come back tomorrow."
My heart flops in my chest like a dying fish. It's one thing to go get a second opinion with my gorgeous doctor in tow. Jaehyun wouldn't have liked it, but it felt justifiable. As did driving to Baltimore tonight. But staying here with her? There's no stretch of imagination by which that is okay. And yet here I am, nodding in agreement.
We get in Lisa's Jeep. "I'll go on Expedia," I say, pulling out my phone. She's doing all this for me and I can't possibly let her pay for her own room, but my stomach sinks at the cost of one room, much less two.
She shakes her head, pulling onto the street. "That's okay. I know exactly where we can go."
A few minutes later we pull up to the valet stand in front of the Four Seasons.
I flinch. A room here will be a fortune. Six hundred? More? And I'll have to pay for two. I briefly think of all the things I could have paid for with that much money. It's half the mortgage. And how the hell am I going to explain this to Jaehyun? I can't. There's just no way.
"Lisa," I breathe. "I think this place might be a little out of my price range."
She does a double take. "You actually thought I'd let you pay for this?"
"Of course I did," I tell her, frowning. "You've already done way too much. I'm sure we can find something more reasonable nearby."
She hands the valet her key and tucks her head, trying hard not to laugh. "Roseanne, you're not paying. I think you remember the starving-resident version of me from London. That's no longer the case."
"But..."
"Stop," she says. "Consider it payback for the honeymoon in Paris during which I apparently never let you leave the room."
With that, she places her hand at the small of my back and leads me to the registration desk. She asks for two rooms and the bright smile on the clerk's face fades a little. "You don't have a reservation?" he asks. I'd have thought this was obvious, but apparently not. He goes on the computer and makes a sad face when he looks back at us. "We're pretty much sold out. There are three rooms available but two of them aren't cleaned yet. I can get you in a one-bedroom suite if that will work? It has a fold-out couch."
Lisa and I exchange a glance. It's less than ideal for both of us. "Is that okay?" she asks quietly. "I can take the couch."
"I'll take the couch," I argue.
"No, you won't," she says, turning back to the clerk and handing him a credit card. He begins ringing us up. "I promise it'll be every bit as boring as our honeymoon apparently was," she adds under her breath.
The clerk hands Lisa our key cards. "Can we assist you with any bags this evening?"
I feel my cheeks turning pink—even though we asked for two rooms, showing up here with no luggage has cheaters written all over it. "No bags," Lisa says casually. "We got out of a show and decided we'd rather not drive back to D.C. this late."
