Chapter 3

(Ava's POV)

"I think I'm getting the hang of this..." I mutter to myself.

Bed making is a relatively easy task and as a student of hospitality and hotel management, this should be a walk in the park however, when I am shown the way a typical bed is made here, my anxiety peaks a notch.

This isn't going to be easy.

Bed making is simple.

Clear the bed, put off fitted sheets, add the top sheets, get your comforter on and pillows with whatever accessories you seem fit to be added. That's practically it.

But when you combine that with the luxury of a five-star hotel and the extravagantly large bed, it looks completely tedious. We have to literally be paired to work on rooms.

Just masking the bed with the fitting sheets is difficult enough since the sheets are made to fit. Perfectly. The strain to get one diagonal corner in place would see me leaving this place by the end of the three-month period as she hulk.

"I wasn't built for this." Lily collapses to the ground as soon as we are done putting on the fitters.

"Don't worry, Lil." I groan as I straighten my cracking spine. "This is the difficult part," I assure her. I call her 'Lil' because asides from the name being an abbreviation of her's it also represents 'little' which she is, making it the perfect nickname. It took some time before she eventually gave up pestering me to not call her that though. Short people never admitted to being short...until it suited them. Humans.

"We have twelve rooms on this floor!" She whines.

"Well, the sooner we finish all of them, the sooner we rest. Grump-ball said so himself. Besides, I doubt all the rooms are vacant."

"Who's grum..." She tilts her head in confusion before realizing who I was talking about. "Oh. You have a very provoking nicknaming scheme." She mutters wryly.

"I know right? I love the look of irritation on the face of others. Now let's do the top sheets." I implore her. She hesitantly gets up from the cushion soft carpet and grabs the end of the fabric I threw to her.

We have to walk several steps to get to each corner and do the super-sized version of the hospital corners that should lock the top sheets properly in place to avoid them losing on edges. On such a big bed this is a nauseating task, but we manage our way through it. As I said. The fitting sheet was the most difficult part. The rest is relatively lighter work.

Once we're done, Lily wheels the trolley to the toilet to begin work there.

"Hey, Ava, I think we forgot bleach." Lily groans about five minutes later. The supply room is in the staff quarters. We're on the ninth floor.

I double check the cleaning trolley to ascertain that we really had no bleach on us and sigh when I confirm her claims. She starts out the door, but I stop her.

"You stay here. I'll go. I can't have you running marathons in this place." I grunt and step out of the room.

Apart from some selected floors which I haven't explored yet, pretty much all the living areas are identical on each floor, hence very easy to master... provided I went from each room straight through the hallway and to the elevator.

Once down, I try my possible best to avoid Dylan, but he just manages to be everywhere I don't want him to be.

"Ava? Ninth floor, You? Ground floor, here, why?" He asks in one worded sentences that are easy to understand but I feel is proof that he doesn't have to take me seriously.

"I forgot bleach." I say simply and continue on my way.

"Uhun. Two minutes to get down there and be back on that elevator." He threatens and I dismiss him with a close of the staircase doors.

The elevators didn't lead to the staff quarters because we needed make sure guests didn't have access to that part of the building. When I opened the door, I made a beeline to the supplies room and for the bleach. It sat there, majestically on a ledge where Lily must have put it as she readied our trolley.

When I open the door I figure to use an alternative route to quickly access the stairs since Dylan gave me a time limit and when I take three turns, none of which I remember in exact cardinals I realize my mistake.

More turns lead to more halls...but no staircase door. In fact, I don't even think I'm in the same section of the building. That's when it dawns on me.

"I'm lost." I huff and sag my shoulders.

Took me long enough. I knew this would surely happen.

I think of a way to at least trace myself to any exit of the building and go around to the front from there, but only end up opening doors to places I have never seen before.

"Why ever does this place have to be so tormentingly gigantic?" I moan to no one in particular. No one was in the hall anyway. I see a wooded door at an extreme end of the hallway and think to myself that that must be an exit.

'Out of this section, at least.' I reason and head for it. Getting there reveals a beautiful room that almost tricks me into thinking I'm back on the upper floors.

"I'm super lost!" is all I get from the information my eyes took. But something about this room makes me not want to come out immediately. It has a smell I can't quite place, but is oddly familiar. I take a brief glance of the place and eventually summarize that it belongs to a man. The color is neutral and there's very little to no decorations on the wall.

For the few months Lily and I are staying in ours, there was already a poster of random cut out art including our favorite celebrities in the meanest of poses.

Besides, there is a Playstation on a computer set up that just screamed "Testosterone!"

“Nope!” I say out loud, shake my head and turn around. What am I even doing here in the first place? The last thing I want to do is see someone coming out of the bathroom as clothed as the day he was born, engaging himself in some weird fetish.

I open the door again to get the hell away from whoever’s privacy this is…when the open door reveals a figure right in front of me.

"What are you doing here?"

I am surprised how my head didn't touch the ceiling as I jump, because it is a literal leap in the air accompanied by a high-pitched screech that startles even the inquisitor.

"Dylan, what is wrong with you!? Why in the name of Abraham Lincoln are you everywhere!?" I yell when I see that he's the one.

"Why am I in my room? Am I the one supposed to be asking that question?" He folds his hands across his chest.

"This is your room?" I ask in exasperation. Still recovering from my palpitations.

"Is it yours?" He asks with restrained annoyance."

"I thought it was for a guest and I just...I don't care! You almost gave me a cardiac arrest!" I place my hand on my chest in a not so bright effort to mellow it's frantic thumping.

"It's about to be an actual arrest if you don't tell me what the hell you're doing here." He says without missing a beat. He isn't playing.

When it dawns on me that I’m the one at fault and he’s not taking it be a joke, I actually lower my voice to meet apologetic standards "Okay, I’m sorry. I actually got lost trying to look for an alternative route from the supplies room to the stairs.”

"And somehow, here you are, my wardrobe open and you glancing feverishly through my collection. How am I sure you don't want to steal something?"

What the...

"Hey, that wardrobe was open before I got here. I didn’t touch anything." I wave at the wardrobe set up with an array of expensive clothing now that I can properly observe it. I’m not a sucker for identifying expensive things, but expensive clothes have a way they look…especially when they’re really expensive.

“Wait a minute…so, this is all yours?” I look at him dully. “I don’t believe you. I’m not downgrading the hotel’s pay, but I know they can’t possibly be paying you enough to afford this amount of luxury. I mean…look at these!” I pick up the watch cask and attempt to wave it at him, but he rushes to me in the next second and stops me from doing so.

"Hey, stop, okay. Just stop. Sheesh!"

That's why the smell was so familiar. He’s close enough to him for me to catch the vanilla embellishment on his shoulder just below his neck. So awkwardly close.

“This is your room.” I say with conviction now.

He stares wide eyed at me. “Well, what gave it away?” he hums, since we’re too close for him to talk with normal intensity.

It is a rhetorical question, but I have an answer to it actually. “That vanilla with a touch of musk depth. That's the room scent. That's your scent. It’s hard to miss.” I say without missing a beat, not caring if he thought I was a weirdo for recognizing his scent. Odd how I like it?

I’m too close to him to care. He’s close enough for me to feel the sweet breeze of his exhale and that alone sends tingles in my lower abdomen. He moves his face closer to me and angles it, giving me a better view of his approaching lips.

Is this really happening!?

I don’t fight his coming closer, no matter how hard my morality is screaming for me to stop him. He seems to listen to his morality more, because he snaps out of the trance fast enough for us to have gone too deep in the lock, pulling away from me suddenly like he had been pushed.

"You're supposed to be on the ninth floor aren't you?" He widens his eyes at me. I hold his gaze for a while before stomping around him and out of the room.

"You forgot your bleach!" He calls from inside. Without breaking my pace, I stomp back into the room and grab my bleach bottle, making my way back out in a weird mix of vexation and discontent.

"I don't even understand the bed, but..." That's all I hear him say before I slam his own door shut with him inside.

I make only a few steps before I curse and wait for him to come outside. When he does, he looks at me like I've grown five heads.

"What are you still doing here?"

I look at him for a few seconds debating whether I should directly call him an amn***ac or look for a more subtle way to say it.

"I told you I was lost, remember?" I settle for saying. I'm not in the mood to draw verbal blood with a superior, even though I am finding it incredibly difficult to restrain myself with this one.

His angry face softens upon realizing I wasn't actually lying but he doesn't say anything about it. Instead, he breaks into a soft peel of laughter that grows upon the full realization of my pathetic state. I roll my eyes at him, but can’t help the soft smile that forms on my face as well.

“Are you usually this funny on purpose?” he shakes his head amidst the chuckles.

“I dunno.” I shrug. “I just seem to put myself in precarious situations…and peril can get really hilarious.”

"Just follow me." He shakes his head and begins walking in the direction I came from before getting to his room. "...and keep your eyes peeled. You're too old here to be getting lost."

'It's been three days, you...hold yourself, Ava.'

He takes me through some corridors until I recognize where I am. As soon as I do, I overtake him and continue the stomp I should have done outside his room, slamming the door to the stairs just as he too was about to enter, albeit unknowingly.

"I'm the one assigning your tasks, aren't I?" I hear him laugh from the stairs. I offer a grub apology I’m not even sure he hard and continue my way anyways. He should have just kissed me.

When I get to the room we were cleaning, I meet Lily on the carpet, snuggled in some spare sheets, sleeping soundly. All of a sudden, all the heat from my previous engagement with Dylan dissipates and a warm smile creeps across my face.