Shimmy Bang Sparkle(80)
More carats than a bag of carrots. Amirite? #SheikhLife
The image was him with the Ritz pool behind him, and he was holding the stone in one hand. He was kissing the angled edge of the stone. The North Star sparkled in the sunlight, the same sunlight that was shining through our window. The gem was so big, it hardly looked real at all. On the far right of the frame was the guard, in his shiny cheap suit, with his hand to his forehead in the universal sign of, I don’t get paid enough for this. Not even close.
“He’s got it,” I said to Nick, and showed him the image of the North Star.
“Fuck,” Nick replied, and ran his hand down his stubble.
This was happening. We were doing it. And once the plan was in motion, it would be our only shot. I looked at Nick, and Nick looked at me. We held one another’s gaze for so long, my screen went dark. The waves crashed, and Priscilla snored. Butterflies of all different sorts fluttered around in my stomach, colliding and heading off in opposite directions. Until finally Nick said, “You ready?”
“I think so.”
Nick nodded in return. From the hot, sunny windowsill he took the yogurt. It had sat in the sun all day, and now the foil lid was slightly puffy. He took a spoon from the minibar shelf and put it in his pocket. From the bathroom he took two hand towels and tossed one over to me. “You ever wiped a place for prints?”
I stared at the towel in my hand and shook my head. “Never.”
“Then follow behind me,” he said, and began with the handles of the sliding glass door. From there we went to the bedside table. To the lamp switches and the phone. To the minibar, to the closet, to the bathroom. Erasing all evidence that we had ever been there, erasing all the traces of the two of us there together.
Finally, when we got to the front entry area, I hooked Priscilla to the leash and took a deep breath. He took my face in his hands and gave me a long and tender kiss. It was a kiss unlike any other we’d had. One moment it was sweet, the next it was desperate. It was urgent, it was sad. It was joyful, and it was terrifying. And it made me sick because it felt very much like a goodbye, even if neither of us said so. I was too nervous to say anything at all.
Parting from him gave me a terrible pinch in my heart. Because there was a very real chance, if something went wrong, that this was the last time we would ever . . .
I couldn’t think about it. I just couldn’t. With all my strength, I pushed those thoughts away. I sealed them up and shoved them aside. For now. And, hopefully, forever.
Nick opened the door using the towel to keep his prints off the knob and lock. He wedged the door open with the toe of his boot. He leaned out of the room to check that the coast was clear and cleaned off both sides of the knob again, as well as the edges of the door itself and its frame. We tossed the towels into the bathroom and left our room, side by side, as the DO NOT DISTURB sign swung from the knob. We headed for the elevators and waited together in nervous silence, holding hands. The door slid open, and I was relieved to find it empty. We stepped inside and looked at one another in the reflection on the door.
“I love you,” he said softly.
My heart was in my throat, and I was so full of every sort of emotion that when I opened my mouth to answer him, no words came out. I was too nervous to tell him what I needed to say. And so I squeezed his hand as hard as I could, hoping he could feel that everything inside me was saying, I love you too.
38
NICK
As I approached the balcony, I gave her a call. She didn’t say anything when she answered. She had me in her earbuds, and I pinned my burner phone between my shoulder and my ear. I took my position immediately above the spot where the path from the pool met the edge of the lobby. I watched couples pass underneath me. A little girl with pigtails chased a ball, and a white-haired guy talked into a headset, pacing back and forth.
Stella’s slightly nervous breathing filled my ear. She made a little kissing noise. Below me, to the left, I watched Priscilla abandon her interest in a wastebasket and gallop along after Stella, shooting forward with her ears back and her tail wagging.
“Who’s a good girl?” Stella cooed, and Priscilla answered with an open-mouth pant.
In the distance, still poolside, was the sheikh. The crowd had thinned, as we knew it would in the late afternoon. No longer did he have droves of adoring girls to take photos with him and the North Star. Now it was just him, his guard, and a pool maintenance guy trying to extract something from one of the filters.
The sheikh held the North Star up to the setting sun, then turned so I couldn’t see what he was doing. But soon enough I heard Stella gasp in my ear. “He just posted again. ‘Laters, baby,’ it says. He’s the worst.”
From my vantage point, I could just see the guard as he bent over and held the case out to the sheikh to put in the combination. The top of the case glinted in the sun, and the sheikh put the North Star inside, scrambling the numbers. “Guard has it,” I told her.
She said a very quiet, “Yep,” to confirm.
She led Priscilla over to a cluster of rocks that was now in the shade. She shortened Priscilla’s leash and pretended to be busy looking at her phone. The guard shuffled toward the path where she was standing, and I said, “Ready . . .”
Stella stuck her hand into the treat bag, still pretending to be busy with her game of Bejeweled and making like she was completely unaware of Priscilla, now standing on her hind legs with her paws on Stella’s calf, looking longingly at the beef jerky between her fingers.