Cooper dug me out of the crater I’d made with not giving a shit. I was trying to skate by on my looks and name, and he helped me rebuild a semblance of balance with football, school, and my sanity that the fans and hype that comes with being a football player at Brighton hacks at nearly as often and hard as the paparazzi when I’m in London. And because Cooper has had a crush on Vanessa Robinson since before his balls dropped, I couldn’t tell him no when he proposed the plan to go across the country with them to allow him to get closer to her.
Call me motherfucking Cupid.
“Which stop are you most excited for, Chloe?” Cooper asks, twisting around in his seat so he can see her. “Vegas?”
She scoffs.
I glance up into my rearview mirror to catch her reaction, surprised to find a contradicting smile. “You know me so well.”
Cooper chuckles, but the joke is lost on me. While Cooper is like a brother to me, Chloe is still his best friend. The two of them are close, which makes her actively avoiding me that much more apparent.
“She’s been looking at all the best places to eat in each city,” Vanessa says. “She has a list of dessert shops she wants to stop at.”
Cooper’s laughter grows. In the rearview mirror, I catch the gentle lift of Chloe’s shoulders. “And coffee. Don’t forget coffee.”
“Cooper already knows you’re an addict. I’m sure he assumed.” Vanessa moves her feet, the shine of her sandal catching in my peripheral vision. I consider how much they’re going to talk and request to stop. How Cooper and I will be responsible for them in the cities we stay over in, and how my car’s going to smell like a girl’s perfume by the time we reach Seattle. The mounting warnings have me considering driving through the night and trying to shorten this trip and tell my dad that the hotels were all fine. I’d take his wrath and disappointment, accept his look of condemnation at the dinner table over Christmas break if it meant I wouldn’t be stuck in a car for two and a half weeks with shrill giggles and social media updates and selfies.
Then I consider how the dominoes might fall if I were to do that, how my dad is grooming Scott Lewis at this very moment to know everything about the Banks Resort and Luxury Hotel chain from the ground up. They’re currently in London, visiting our original hotel that was opened over a hundred years ago by my great-grandpa. They’re going to be traveling across England and up into Scotland, then over to Ireland before going through much of Western Europe. Our American hotels represent nearly seventy percent of our company’s revenue, but Dad insisted on taking Lewis abroad to teach him the history of the company as well as understand where the mission statement for Banks Resorts and Luxury Hotels was born and how it became the world-renowned chain it is today. Lewis wasn’t a bad choice. He’s worked for our family for ten years and has an impressive resume packed with awards and accomplishments that will take me, at minimum, a decade to achieve. In addition to being smart, he’s savvy, well-liked, and he delivers one hell of an interview—something I can’t do even with a written and rehearsed speech in my grasp.
Dad claims Lewis is the backup plan. However, I’ve seen the writing on the wall since I was a kid, when I preferred tossing the football around with my uncle Kip to sampling which flavor of coffee or what thread count of sheets should be used. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, it’s just I had two loves—the hotel chain that’s been in our family for three generations and football—and my father never understood how I could love anything more than money.
During these next two and a half weeks, I will be stopping at several of our hotel sites, checking in with a few of our poorest performers, and some of our best. My goal is to reconcile the differences between them, learn what our top performers are doing right, and leverage that with ones that are struggling. I’ll report my findings and ideas for improvement to my dad on August twenty-eighth when he and Lewis fly to Seattle to discuss how their European tour went. And I plan to be prepared because while Lewis has me beat in practically everything except for his last name not being the one on the buildings and letterhead, ingenuity and innovation are where I strive. This was why when I was twelve, I made a thousand bucks one summer while staying with my parents in Miami by recognizing the need for our neighborhood to have a drink stand outside of the fitness and pool center. To me, it seemed like a no-brainer—Miami is hot as hell. People were working out and sweating. Boom. Not only did I make a thousand bucks, I only worked for the first week, and then neighborhood kids worked for me, and I paid them while I lounged by the pool. My mum found this opportunistic and made me give the kids I’d employed more money when she’d found out. Dad, however, tripled my profits and invested the money for me, telling me I had a keen eye for business.
“What about you, Tyler? How was your summer?” I have to look in my rearview mirror to see which of the sisters spoke. Vanessa smiles at me. She’s pretty, beautiful even, with long brown hair highlighted around her face, wide green eyes, and a mouth that could make any man have wet dreams.
I glance at Chloe, expecting to find the mirrored version of Vanessa like I had when Cooper first introduced us. At the time, I’d seen every guy’s teenage dream flash before me as the two laughed at something, my lack of familiarity drawing an identical image of the two. Now, it’s easy for me to tell them apart. Chloe has the same hair color, the same eyes, the same erotic mouth, even the same jawline—but their voices are different, Chloe’s a bit grittier, and she’s a little taller, her lips slightly rounder.
It’s their similarities that had the football team making so many threesome jokes when a rumor circulated about our kiss after one of the potheads shared the news.
“Life in Miami is basically living the dream,” I tell her as I sit back in my seat, one hand gripping the wheel as I fall into the role I created—the role my family created. “Sun, beaches, parties. I can’t complain.”
“Ty spent half his summer on a yacht and the other half at poker tables.” Cooper glances at me, envy shining in his eyes.
I smirk in response, knowing my tanned skin and the different photos of me people shared over the summer fit this narrative perfectly, regardless of the truth.
In the rearview mirror, I catch Chloe watching me, her brows pinched before she notices my gaze and quickly looks away.
“You guys didn’t pack as much as I expected,” Cooper says.
“We left most of our stuff in storage over the summer, remember?” Vanessa asks him.
“Oh, I remember. We talked about how if you do it again, you won’t pack all your books together in the same boxes.” Cooper shakes his head at the memory.
Vanessa laughs. “I’m bummed summer’s over, but at the same time, I’m really glad to be returning to Seattle. I have a feeling this is going to be the best year yet.”
“Did you guys decide on an apartment?” Cooper asks.
“We did.” Vanessa’s tone isn’t nearly as confident as Chloe glances at her.
Cooper laughs. “I take it you won the coin toss?” he asks, looking at Vanessa.
“I just made the executive decision. It’s a little smaller, but we’ll be downtown. We can walk to get coffee, and to the library, fisand to pick up dinner…”