Out of Orange (16 page)

You didn’t have to wait forty-five minutes for such a simple order.

I had barely gotten a clean shirt over my wet head when the goodies I had ordered arrived. I opened the door to let a young woman with her treasure-laden tray into my room, and I followed her to the desk where she set it all down. She gave my room a horrified glance. Instead of instantly signing the check, I held up a wait-one-minute finger, poured the hot milk into the espresso, and guzzled down the
first coffee. I removed the other coffee, my juice, the water, and the warm baguette from the tray, signed the check, and handed the tray back with all of its unnecessary additions still onboard. I wanted to minimize the proof that I had just ordered overpriced room service. Phillip didn’t need more evidence of my extravagance.

I found my pill bag in the safe and popped a couple of the codeines I had been saving, skipping the aspirin. The first surge of caffeine, sugar, and hot liquid fortified me in an instant. I took a seat by the open window, where I could see the street below and keep my eye on the café and the tobacco store, the two places Phillip might visit before returning if he’d actually left the hotel. I also watched for the rest of my crew to appear. A wisp of fresh air on my damp face and wet hair countered the warm sun and felt refreshing.

I lit a cigarette and took a long, deep drag, exhaled, and then drank down the cold orange juice. I felt the chilled elixir of vitamins and health going down, coursing through my veins, and reanimating every alcohol-poisoned and dying cell it encountered. A clear agenda for the morning was finally forming in my addled brain: deal with Phillip, find Piper, put last night’s debacle to rest, find the guys, and defuse the situation as quickly as possible.

I had woken with the nauseating certainty that I had blown up or done something bigger than just oversleeping and leaving Phillip at the airport.

I recalled coming back to the hotel by taxi the previous night, pissed off at myself for losing my control in the restaurant, feeling dejected, embarrassed, and disappointed. The concierge had asked about my friend, and it had irritated me further. I hated the eruption of irrational feelings that kept coming up, and I had wanted to quiet them, knock myself out, and start over. I had lined up all the little bottles containing brown liquor to drink them. I had awoken to find them empty. I recalled crying but not the exact reason for it or whether I’d had company. The last thing I could remember was Piper’s angry expression spinning over my head.

My stomach did a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-to-me flip,
sending up a coffee and orange juice burp that tried to be more and almost destroyed my resolve to refuse a hangover residence in my body. I needed to eat something solid or I would be sick. I started to worry that maybe old codeine hadn’t been the best choice, wondering what happens when prescriptions expire.

The baguette was thankfully still warm, its crust thin but crunchy, its center moist, soft, and bakery fresh. Instead of gently cutting a piece off and preparing it, I ripped one from the soft loaf, slapped butter on the end, and added a dollop of strawberry preserves. I inhaled the chunk in one bite, then repeated until the loaf was gone and my stomach felt settled. I took a sip of my second cup of coffee, which was no longer piping hot but still warm and delicious.

I finally spotted Phillip taking a seat at the café below my window. He looked up and saw me. He nodded but had no discernible expression to gauge his mood by, just a blank expression. He was joined by Piper. She looked up to see who Phillip was nodding at, smiled, and waved. I couldn’t read anything from her either. If she was angry, disgusted, or uncomfortable with me, I couldn’t decipher any of this from her wave or smile, and she looked away when Phillip said something.

I got up from my seat, intending to head straight down to the café and make sure Piper did not share whatever happened the night before with him. But when I stood, the room felt as though it had tilted slightly. I felt like a ball in an arcade game. I rolled left instead of right and ran out of floor, toppling back onto the bed. Once I was down, that was it. The fluffy bed hugged me and felt so good. I knew getting back up wasn’t happening; going back to sleep was a much better idea.
Screw everything,
I thought.

I recalled what had triggered my reaction the night before: Some woman hitting on Piper had asked her whether we were a couple. Piper said no, emphatically and with no hesitation. The emphasis of her response pissed me off. We weren’t girlfriends, not even pretend ones anymore, and I knew that. But she acted like it was absurd to even consider the idea of our being together, and it stung.
I had thought of little else since we’d left Bali. I remembered wondering if her animated response meant that she was ashamed of being presumed my girlfriend.

The possibility that she was actually into the woman we were talking to and didn’t want my presence to get in her way triggered my unexpected jealous response to the situation. It came to the surface as alcohol-infused, bitter, vitriolic nonsense. It sounded exactly like one of my mother’s rants when I replayed it in my head. Piper had looked at me as if I’d had four heads and had told me to go fuck myself. So I had. I’d walked out and left her at the restaurant.

The ruse about being a couple that we had played in Bali had ended when we’d left there. But I couldn’t help myself. I was unable to turn it off. There had been more than one occasion since we’d left Bali when it seemed possible that I was not alone in this, that she was feeling the same mad attraction. Silly little incidents happened repeatedly where my heart suddenly fell into the pit of my stomach and turned into butterflies.

I had started anxiously anticipating these moments like a kid on Christmas Eve waiting for morning. I had thought we were close to one of those moments where instead of nervously retreating, still not quite convinced my feelings were reciprocal, I would know they were mutual. I would kiss her, she would grab me, clothes would fly, and the angels would sing, or something to that effect. The point is, I thought we were on the verge of falling in love. I thought it had almost happened on the flight to Paris from Bali and again when we reconvened in Chicago. The last few days had been the most exquisite torture. I had assumed that once we sat still for more than a moment, the inevitable was going to occur. But her actions at the restaurant had proved to me that I was wrong.

I pulled myself out of the bed and sat up again. Phillip being pissed at me was icing on my bitter cake. But it was what I needed: a cold slap in the face, reality, reality, reality. I had spent over twenty thousand dollars in Bali. After Craig and Molly, the next two bags we had been waiting on never came. Our delivery had been canceled
and I had just spent a month at the resort in Bali supporting Garrett, Edwin, Donald, and Piper. Were it not for the money trip, we would be in serious trouble. Something somewhere was going very wrong in Alajeh’s world and he had wanted us out of Bali, out of Jakarta, and out of Indonesia, entirely and immediately.

We were not safe there anymore and he would not tell us more. That was why we were not slumming in Yogyakarta at the moment. That was why the night before could even happen. That was why Phillip was pissed at me for spending too much money on my friends and emptying the minibar. The last thing he needed to hear was that he had been funding my attempts to bed Piper.

Now that I knew nothing was ever going to materialize out of our faux marriage in Bali, I wanted to make sure Phillip never found out about my little jealous scene the night before. In fact, I didn’t want anyone to ever know about it. I wished Piper hadn’t seen it. What I could remember was embarrassing and humiliating. I stepped over to the window to see if the two were still at the café. They were not.

I knew I had been up until daylight the night before. I had reassembled most of the previous night now from the wreckage in my head. Not much more had occurred after my insolent exit from the restaurant. I had gone back to the hotel and gotten stupid drunk and written in my journal—another brilliant practice for a criminal, keeping a personal journal on the unsecured PowerBook I toted around the world with me. At some point I must have passed out and ended up on the floor. I woke there at one point early that morning. Piper had been there, standing over me, pissed off. I remembered that. She must have helped my sorry ass to the bed Phillip had found me in when he arrived.

I saw my laptop sitting on the desk. I went to see if and what I had written, how much, and at what time I had closed the file, if I had. My laptop was asleep, not turned off, and it was plugged in, thank goodness. I had run into technical problems before, letting the battery die without closing everything and shutting the computer down properly.

I tapped a key to wake the laptop. There were no open files, but
there was a new file, which was good. That meant I could see what time it had been saved and no one else would have seen my writing, almost certainly an example of literary genius. That would tell me approximately when I had last been functional enough to properly save the document. Reading my writing might also jog my memory and shake loose the rest of the night’s events.

I found the system time stamps on the document. It had been created at 3:14 and last modified at 6:23
A
.
M
. Considering my typing speed, this likely accounted for all of the time. The subject of the document was no surprise: Piper. There were no mentions of any other contact with Piper or the world, thank goodness. If all I had done after what I had said to her was leave her in the restaurant and make her find her own taxi home, I hadn’t said or done anything unforgiveable.

I returned to my bed without toppling over this time, crawled in under the soft down comforter, and curled into a ball. I actually felt a little better. I was still dead tired but no longer felt as though I was going to be sick, and my headache had gone. The codeine even made me feel a little bit euphoric. I set the alarm on my watch to four
P
.
M
. If Phillip did not come back and wake me, I didn’t want to end up sleeping any later than that. But I did want to sleep now.

I woke to Phillip’s voice. He was on the phone with Alajeh, talking about money and Zürich, Switzerland. I lay still and didn’t open my eyes. I was not at all ready to talk to Alajeh or even Phillip for that matter. I peeked and could see Phillip was in his boxers, his bed was in a different state of disarray than it had been earlier, and the room was dim, not dark. The call lasted longer than usual. Alajeh was generally very brief and to the point in phone calls—no chatty banter, just quick instructions and goodbye.

Phillip laughed, said thank you, hung up the phone, and hooted like he had just won the lottery. He said Alajeh had agreed to reimburse us for all that we spent. Alajeh hadn’t even objected to the
fact I had spent so much. He had also told Phillip that we were going to be traveling in three days, and not back to some far-flung corner of the world. We were going to Zürich and, from there, home. “Are you hungry?”

“Starved.” I stood up, stretched, and did a little
Flashdance
run in place. I was so happy to be going home. Hopefully, I could stay a little longer this time.

“What time is it?” It looked like it could be either
A
.
M
. or
P
.
M
., and my glasses had fallen off the bedside table and under the bed.

“It’s a little after seven.” Phillip noticed my blank stare and added, “It’s dinnertime. I told those guys we would eat about an hour ago.” He had already pulled his pants on and was fumbling with his belt and stepping into one of his shoes at the same time.

“I need a minute.” I ran into the bathroom, stripped, and jumped into the shower before he could object. A few minutes later, I heard the door open and could hear Piper’s and Garrett’s voices. I rinsed the conditioner out of my hair and heard the door close when I turned the water off. I listened, but there was only silence. I grabbed a towel, dried off, and wrapped it around myself in case I had company, but there was no one in the room when I opened the bathroom door. Phillip had left a note on the desk instructing me to go to Le Bistro and how to get there.

After I dressed, I felt much better about the world in general, and more important, I thought I was almost up to facing Piper again. It couldn’t be avoided, and I hoped it would be uneventful or at least quick and painless. I popped one of the last two codeines, thinking it would smooth my edges and give me courage.

I made the quick walk to Le Bistro. I stopped and took a deep breath before entering the crowded restaurant, like one might do before jumping off a cliff or out of an airplane. There were two things that were true about the many restaurants in Brussels we frequented: they were small and they were dark. Two other things that were true then about restaurants in Brussels: they were smoky and crowded. I’m certain the same is true now, except for the smoking. I bet in another twenty years there will be a table, just like ours
was, full of young drug smugglers, but it will be tobacco-sniffing dogs they fear.