Little Secrets(34)
Derek doesn’t even come upstairs to the apartment when he picks her up. If she’s not at the curb when he arrives, he texts. He doesn’t even get out of the goddamned car to use the buzzer in the lobby. He once snapped, “I’m not a goddamned Uber driver,” which tells her that he’s never taken an Uber. Those guys don’t get out of the car, either.
They then sat beside each other in his uncomfortable, flashy car for a half hour until Kenzie suggested stopping for McDonald’s. As bougie as Derek can be, he grew up on fast food like she did, and she knows he never minds a mass-produced burger and fries. Also, he was in a terrible mood, and she thought the food might chill him out a bit. Instead, it’s having the opposite effect, since all they’re doing is sitting here in this sticky booth while he complains about the burger she bought him with her emergency money.
She notices his Big Mac is still untouched. “Derek, if it’s that big a deal, I can go ask them to change it.” She puts her chicken burger down and heaves a big, overly dramatic sigh.
Ladies and gentlemen, they’ve now reached the Who Can Be the Bigger Person? stage of the verbal sparring competition, where points are tallied mentally and passive aggressively until somebody wins. Who will it be? She wants it to be herself, because she likes to win as much as he does, but if they won’t replace the burger for free, that means she’ll have to buy another one with the only five bucks she has left to her name until she gets paid at the end of the week. Which means, in the end, she loses.
“It’s fine,” Derek says. Now they both have points on the board.
He takes a big bite of the burger he insists he didn’t order, which means another point for him for eating something he doesn’t want to eat. Then he grimaces to show he doesn’t like Big Macs, which means a point for her, because he said he was fine with it. But then he finishes chewing and swallows, which, shit, means another point for him because he’s actually going to digest the thing.
“Do you want my chicken burger? I can eat the Big Mac, I don’t mind.” Ding ding ding. She can hear the bell chiming in her head, tallying the score. An offer to switch burgers is surely worth three points, and just like that, Kenzie takes the lead. See, she’s good at this game, too.
“I said it was fine.”
Either she loses a point or he gains a point, she doesn’t know. They eat in moody silence, and nobody wins. Nobody ever wins. She doesn’t know why they play this game. She doesn’t know why he even wanted to see her tonight. If he really didn’t want to go home, he could have stayed in Portland.
Ten minutes later they’re back in the car. He jacks up the music, something he always does when he’s not in the mood to talk, which is more and more lately. Derek used to talk to her all the time. It’s how they started, after all. Conversation was their jam for those first couple of months, until they started having sex and discovered how much they enjoyed that even more.
His playlist hasn’t changed in the six months she’s known him, and his musical tastes mainly comprise Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana. Great Seattle bands, sure, but they’re all before her time, and they remind her of her dad, who used to play those albums loud until the summer he moved out. They also remind Kenzie that Derek is older, and while at first those differences were a turn-on, it’s a loose thread that they both keep yanking on, and their relationship is starting to unravel.
It can’t unravel. Kenzie’s invested too much into this.
The Cedarbrook Lodge is a hotel thirty minutes outside Seattle, right by Sea-Tac. When Derek first told her about it, she assumed it was going to be one of those generic airport hotels. But it’s surprisingly nice. It has a fancyish restaurant and a luxury spa, and the suite Derek books is nearly as large as the apartment Kenzie shares with her roommate Tyler, but with a fireplace. The property surrounding the hotel is well tended and lush, and it’s rather romantic. But that isn’t why Derek likes it. They come here because he isn’t likely to run into anyone who knows him, and if he does, he can always say he’s got an early flight the next morning.
Whatever it is they’re doing has zero to do with romance.
Derek pulls into the parking lot and instructs her to wait in the car while he takes care of the front desk business and picks up the key cards. He’s back a few moments later.
“We’ll use the side entrance,” he says to her, and now he’s smiling, cheerful, trying to distract her from the fact that he doesn’t want the desk clerk to see her. They’ve used the side entrance every time, and it’s insulting that he still feels the need to remind her, as if she’s a child who requires consistent repetition to learn something.
They enter through the side door, Derek carrying his overnight bag, and she carrying hers. In the beginning, he would always carry both bags, and Kenzie loved the chivalry of it. Somewhere along the way, though, he stopped offering. She commented on it once, and he laughed at her.
“Come on, Kenz. You’re a millennial and a self-described feminist. You can’t be those things and then expect a man to carry your bag for you.”
Maybe he’s right, but it’s not about expectations at all, and she doesn’t know how to explain this to him without making it a bigger deal than it is. She wants Derek to want to be the guy who carries her bag when they’re entering a hotel. She wants him to be the guy who holds her hand on the sidewalk, who comes upstairs when he picks her up, who takes her to dinner at places his friends might be, who takes a selfie with her that she’s allowed to post on Instagram.