Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,15

make sure he’s right with himself. He knows how to keep his balance better than almost anyone else Lulu knows.

“That makes two of us,” he says, and slips between the canvas flaps.

Lulu looks up at the darkness of the sky above her: all of that limitless black. In the context of infinity, it’s easy to think that there’s no right thing to do, at least not right now, at least not tonight.

She follows Owen in.

* * *

Once they’re settled, Owen takes out his phone to try to play music, but Ryan makes him put it away again—“No phones at The Hotel,” he says, and Cass echoes him. No phones at The Hotel.

At first the quiet that surrounds their conversation unnerves Lulu. You can hear each of them tuning in and out again. The moments in which no one has anything to say stand out, stark and unmissable.

Eventually, though, in the later, woozier hours, she starts to find it comforting. There’s a rhythm to this, she thinks. What we’re doing here together. The way conversation falls away and then finds itself again, if you let it.

Lulu wraps herself in a blanket; she tips sideways into Owen’s lap. His hands tangle in her hair. She remembers digging her fingers into his thighs, his back, the back of his head.

“Are you guys together?” she hears Ryan ask. The words sound like they’re being spoken somewhere very far away.

“Nah,” Owen says. “We were.”

“You look so pretty like this, though,” Cass says.

“Lulu and I love each other,” Owen says. “That’s all.”

Lulu hears bodies shifting, rearranging themselves.

Cass asks, “That’s all, huh?”

Lulu wishes she were awake enough to read Cass’s tone.

“That’s all,” Owen says. “That’s all there is, right?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

LULU WAKES UP because her face is too warm. She blinks and blinks. She must have fallen asleep in the tent last night. Now the sun is falling over the lip of the pool’s edge, streaming through the thin canvas. Owen is next to her. Ryan and Cass are gone.

She stumbles outside, only barely managing not to step on Owen. The day is beautiful: clear sky, clear air, exactly the kind of fresh, sweet a.m. hour that makes having a hangover feel especially depraved. Lulu wishes she had her sunglasses, at least.

The lobby has a bathroom, but its fixtures haven’t been installed yet: Three toilets sit, attached to nothing, in the stalls. Lulu heads upstairs and then hesitates. Ryan said something the first time she was here about spending time in room Three, but she’s only ever seen him in Four. He’s probably still there, right? And it probably has a functioning bathroom, right? Cass said there was running water now.

Lulu is in luck: Three is deserted and the toilet works. There’s toilet paper, but no soap to wash her hands with, which is better than it could have been, at least. She doesn’t even think about the sound of the flush in the otherwise silent morning until she emerges back into the hallway and finds Cass there.

Cass is wrapped in a blanket, and above its woven fabric, her pale shoulders are bare except for one dark tank top strap.

Oh, Lulu thinks. Well, that makes sense. Good for them.

“Sorry,” Cass says. “I know we kind of abandoned you guys out there last night. You were very insistent about sleeping under the stars, and—”

“It’s fine,” Lulu says, though she has only the vaguest memory of this part of the conversation. She definitely overdid it on the vodka. “I’m good.”

“You found the bathroom okay?”

“Yeah.”

Ryan appears over Cass’s shoulder. He’s dressed, or at least wearing sweats and a T-shirt.

“You gonna invite her in?” he asks.

Cass looks flustered.

Lulu doesn’t want to make her feel weird. “I should probably,” she says, “go.”

“Don’t be silly.” Ryan steps back and gestures for Lulu to join them. “Come on.”

Ryan’s bed is unmade. An enormous digital camera is sitting in the nest of its sheets.

“I was just taking advantage of the light,” he says.

“Ryan’s a photographer.” Cass flops onto the bed and lets the blanket fall from her grasp. She’s wearing a pair of sweats that look identical to Ryan’s except they’re enormous on her, fabric pooling shapelessly between her waist and where she’s scrunched them up on her calves.

Cass grabs the camera and aims it at Lulu and Ryan. “Click!” she announces.

Ryan isn’t interested. “Cass. C’mon.”

She rolls her eyes and hands it to him.

Light is streaming in through the windows. Cass’s face falls in shadow, and her hair, still sleep-mussed, is an electric halo of