Cammie opened her eyes and blinked the fogginess away, her gaze fixing on the rough polyester fabric of the airplane seat in front of her. A sleepy smile slides across her face, pleased with the surprisingly amazing nap she had just taken. She shifts her shoulders and looks out the window at the cerulean-blue sky. Suddenly, she notices an arm draped across her hips. Cammie cranes her neck backwards and looks at Zach, who she was leaning against.
"Have a nice nap?" he asks with the smirk that Cammie has grown to love and hate. Except with more love than hate… it was a good look for him.
She sits up and curls up in her own seat. "Um… yeah. Thanks," she says awkwardly. The pilot's voice came over the speakers and tells the passengers to re-attach their seatbelts for the landing. Cammie snaps her seatbelt across her torso and peers eagerly out the window. Zach had never said where they were headed to…
There seemed to be plenty of palm trees, and the sun was extremely bright. Out in the distance, the bright blue ocean matched the same cheery color as the cloudless sky. Her stomach dropped once more as the plane landed on a black asphalt runway. Heat waves glimmered off the blacktop from the heat from the sun. "Welcome to sunny Miami, Florida!" the flight assistant announced in an overly-peppy voice.
"Ohmygod, we're in Miami?" Cammie practically shrieked, turning to Zach.
"Yeah. But remember why we're here," he answered grimly. He stood up and removed his carry-on from the compartment above their heads. The plane was now relatively empty of passengers. Cammie unbuckled herself in a rush and followed Zach out of the plane. His mood swings were weirding her out, and he had nothing to blame it on, unlike PMS for her.
Right when they arrived to the baggage reclaim, Zach immediately pulled their luggage from the conveyor belt. It was as if he had memorized her luggage… or unless he had an extraordinary memory for detail, like any good spy should have. They grab their luggage and leave the airport, where they were greeted by a long line of honking taxi cabs. Barely a few steps outside, the sun was already baking pale, New York skin. She was glad she had on the miniskirt, but her Uggs felt like Death Valley.
Zach leads her to an empty taxi, where they cram their suitcases into the back seat and sit down. "The Four Seasons Hotel," Zach tells the driver while he slams the car door behind him. The cab pulls away from the curb and merges into traffic. Cammie looks out the windows, mesmerized by the skyscrapers, palm trees, and the ocean sparkling in the distance.
"The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort,
had never been terribly pertinent."
- Aldrich Ames
Eventually, the taxi pulls up to the Four Seasons. Zach pays the driver, steps outside the taxi, and holds the door open for Cammie, who freezes in place on the sidewalk. "Holy. Shit," Cammie gasps, even though she rarely swore. But the hotel was huge! It towered over the other skyscrapers at 70 stories high, the silvery windows and metallic walls reflecting the dazzling sun. Palm trees surrounded the hotel, waving in the gentle breeze.
"Come on, Cam," Zach tells her, snapping her out of her reverie. The luggage was already piled on a luggage cart and a helpful bellboy was wheeling it into the lobby. They follow the bellboy into the lobby, and Cammie gasps. There was a rocky wall behind the reception desk where water trickled down from the massive ceiling. All along the walls, Latin American sculptures sat on neat pedestals.
Zach went up to the reception desk and began signing in. Cammie, meanwhile, slowly circled the room looking at the various artworks. Most of them looked strange and foreign, obviously, but others looked semi-normal. Just as she was examining a sculpture of an obese naked woman made out of obsidian, Zach walked up to her. "Hey, I still have to sign a few more papers at the front desk, but you can go ahead to our room and start unpacking. We're on the fifty-sixth floor, room 343," he explains, handing her one of the room keys.
"Sure," she replies. The bellboy was waiting next to the elevator for her, and Zach returns to the front desk. The elevator door opens and Cammie steps inside with the bellboy right behind her. "The fifty-sixth floor." He presses the button, and the elevator begins rising up.
When they finally reach the fifty-sixth floor, Cammie walks down the hallway and stops in front of room 343. She swipes her room key and opens the door, walking into a huge suite. The bellboy rolls the luggage cart in behind her and Cammie hands him a few dollar bills from her hobo bag. After he leaves, she shuts the door and turns to face the suite.
There was a huge king-size bed with creamy silk covers and dozens of pillows against one wall. The walls were a light yellow color, and the floors were covered in plush white carpet. Colorful ruby rugs were laying on the carpet here and there across the room. A huge window took up a whole wall and the flimsy white-silk drapes were pulled aside, revealing a view of downtown Miami and the Miami Beach. Two huge dressers were shoved to the wall and a plasma screen TV hung from the wall. Black-and-white pictures of tropical plants and beaches also decorated the wall.
In the next room were yellow-orange overstuffed sofas and lounge chairs. A dark mahogany coffee table sat in the middle with a bowl of decorative gold apples. Side tables by each arm of every seat held a wooden lamp with a yellow lampshade, which gave off a warm glow. The ceiling was high and had crystal lights dangling in zig-zag lines back and forth. A bar counter was against one wall, and had a vase of daisies on it. Behind the counter was a full-stocked minifridge. And by fully stocked, that meant stocked with various liquors, water bottles, and energy drinks.
The final room was a master bathroom with shiny marble floors and a tan granite counter. Plush white towels hung from gold hooks, and an antique bathtub with four legs was in the corner, surrounded by a flimsy gold-tinted curtain. Dozens of lightbulbs ran around the wall above the mirror, which ran completely around the room. It was almost as if the walls were made of mirrors, except there were still some slivers of yellow wallpaper showing here and there. A toilet with an old-fashioned handle for flushing dangled from the ceiling.
Cammie walked past the king-sized bed to the huge window and studied the beaches that were practically mobbed with surfers, tanners, and volleyball enthusiasts. A huge grin spread across her face and she leaped up onto a high-backed wooden chair. "Yessss!" Cammie exclaimed, bellyflopping from the chair onto the bed. She squeezes her eyes shut giddily and kicked her Uggs in the air.
"Well somebody's happy to be here," Zach comments from the door.
Cammie bolts up in the bed, clears her throat, and calmly fixes her hair even though her heart was beating rapidly. "Um… just exactly how much of that did you see?" she asks, casually checking her nails then looking at the carpet.
"Just the part where you jumped onto the bed and started flailing your legs," he answered with a smirk. Her cheeks flared up a bright red color and she stood up from the bed, nonchalantly smoothing the wrinkles in the bedspread. Cammie clears her throat again and walks into the living room, sitting down on a yellow couch. Now would be an excellent time to reread her cover, especially to get her mind off that awkward moment.
She pulls the mission folder out of her hobo bag and was just pulling out her cover file when Zach stole the manila folder from her hands. "Yeah, I'll be needing this back, now that you're done with it," he explains.
"Wait! Okay, I promise I read everything in my apartment, but I was so tired that I forgot my cover. Can't I just reread that one part real quick?" Cammie begs.
Zach raises an eyebrow as he glances at her. "Fine," he says. With a flick of his wrist, he tosses the mission file into her lap like a Frisbee. "But to give you the gist of it, you and I are a filthy-rich couple vacationing in Miami just to get away from all the pressures of being successful lawyers in New York City."
Cammie nods absentmindedly while digging her cover file from the mission folder. Zach hesitates a second until he finally walks back into the bedroom, probably to unpack. Suddenly, something about what Zach says makes Cammie freeze up. Wait, she thinks, Zach and I have to pretend to be a COUPLE?
"Worthy or not,
my life is my subject,
and my subject is my life."
- Giacomo Casanova
(Author's Note: If you guys haven't stayed in Four Seasons Miami on vacation or whatever, I highly suggest looking up some pictures of it on Google Images. It's gorgeous. It's even better if you stay there on vacation ;) Lol. But seriously, check out some pictures of it. It'll help you understand the story when I describe some things later on in the story.)
