"I swear luck is not a word in my vocabulary," Paige utters her under her breath and Emily quietly agrees. As the pair pull into their Reno hotel looking forward to a few hours in "The Littlest Big City in the World" something seems off.
Emily gets out and walks around to the driver's side, ready to help Paige if her back kept her from getting out easily. Paige gives her a look clearly telling her to back off so Emily turns and glances around the parking lot hoping to figure out what was amiss.
She figures it out soon after – no lights.
"It's a blackout," Emily says. Paige sighs. "This is not a good start to this whole thing, is it?"
"Sort of shoots some of our plans to hell."
"I'm sure they have generators and stuff. We can still hit the casinos, I bet."
Paige looks skeptical.
Emily knows how tired Paige is – the stress of the day and the pain from her aching back was etched in every muscle in her body. She offered to drive for a few hours into the day but Paige adamantly refused, probably because it was the easiest way to avoid letting her mind wander places she didn't want it to go. "Lucky her," Emily thought at the time.
"Do you really want to do that, hit the hot spots?"
"We can skip it, I guess. I've just never been here before and we are supposed to have fun along the way."
Emily suddenly smiles driving a dagger of fear through Paige.
"What?" Paige asks.
"You wanna try out that list your dad made, don't you?" Emily teases.
"Oh dear Lord, fine, let's go find somewhere to eat and blow some of our parents' money."
There really is nothing like a casino buffet. Every food under the sun, all designed to make you too physically ill to leave the building – the perfect ruse to get patrons to gamble and gamble badly.
Emily feels like she needs a cart to carry her out of the buffet, she ate that much. Paige follows close behind feeling pretty close to the same way. She cannot resist bottomless plates of crab legs.
"That was a mistake," Emily sighs.
Paige can only reply with a groan and what Emily assumes is a combination of a hiccup and burp. Knowing just how awful Paige must feel she decides not to ask if they can hit the casino tables across the foyer.
"Let's head up to the room," she offers instead. Paige nods and the pair tries to refrain from crawling to the elevator bank.
Arriving in their room they collapse onto their beds. The room is quiet except for the a/c unit cycling clean air through the room. It's a typical hotel room – writing desk, two queen beds, big TV. The curtains are partially drawn giving the room a sunset glow from behind the neighboring Sierra Nevadas.
The low moans from Paige's bed almost drive Emily into hysterics. The Paige she knew never overdid anything – now that she has broken free of the discipline from swimming Paige must have tried many food and activities she wouldn't have before. The idea of finding those things out intrigues Emily – another question to add to the list she started during their ride today.
Emily takes a breath and just as she readies to ask her questions Paige moans loudly and rolls off the bed onto the floor. This time Emily cannot keep her amusement to herself.
Paige hears Emily's laughter and gives herself a few seconds to take it in. Her laugh is wonderful, like the wind chimes on her patio back home. She used to lie by the pool just gazing at the stars and listening to the chimes ring softly in the breeze. So many of those nights Emily was the focus of her thoughts, wondering where she was, who she was with... As she entered high school she let go of those fanciful thoughts and immersed herself in swimming and her studies. But fate and Kati Perry stepped in and turned her world upside down.
Okay, I'm not going there, Paige thinks. She gets to her knees and crawls over to her suitcase removing her swimsuit and iPod before rising to her feet. She turns to Emily who is still having a hard time controlling her hysterics.
Jeez, she must not have laughed much in the last few years.
"I'm going down to the hot tub, gonna try to loosen up this back."
"Still giving you problems, huh?" Emily asks.
"Yeah, probably always will, at least if I'm not careful." Paige turns and enters the bathroom to change, exiting a few minutes later with a towel in one hand and her iPod in the other.
"I will be back in a while," she says. She hesitates but turns and leaves.
Emily sits on her bed staring at the door that ushered Paige out of the room. This is all too odd. One moment they are back to where they were years ago and the next second Paige draws the blinds, shutting herself off from the outside world.
When she gets home to Rosewood Emily swears she's going to kill her parents.
Paige lies back in the hot tub resting her head her folded towel. Luckily the pool area is deserted so she can relax without help from iPod. She closes her eyes and allows her mind to drift back to pools, summertime and wind chimes. As hard as it was loving Emily from afar it was doubly difficult to sit five feet from her and cram all her feelings into the little box she created for them in her heart three years ago. Her hope to compartmentalize her feelings was crashing big time.
She clenches her jaw in frustration because she knows her insecurities are the same as they were back when she was a kid. Time gave her no respite from her feelings of inadequacy with Emily. She was perfect and Paige…wasn't. Granted, she did feel like she had things to offer someone but she didn't have anything on the scale of what Emily needed and deserved.
It was so hard to break away when she transferred. She immersed herself in an unexpected passion: computer programming. She was awful with math and other science courses in high school but a switch flipped her sophomore year and it all just finally made sense. She figured out that programming is less like math and more like a puzzle because the data needs to follow a certain pattern or it just becomes a jumbled mess. The intricacy of programming appeals to her meticulous nature – patterns and structure make sense to her. She wasn't really sure just what direction she wanted to take with a career but she isn't in a hurry to find out since she was accepted for grad school at the University of Colorado. She planned on doing research for a few years, maybe then she would find a path that felt right to her. In the interim she'd live in Boulder and ride her bike every place she could. The city is a haven for outdoor sports enthusiasts so she was looking forward to riding in the foothills and maybe even joining a cycling club. Man, she couldn't wait for the next couple years.
She emits a deep sigh and opens her eyes. The hot tub is gratefully taking hours of tension away from her joints and muscles but the warm water is also lowering her defenses. She is just so mentally tired. She's tired of fighting her feelings. She's tired of feeling like she's not worthy. She's tired of putting Emily on such a tall pedestal. Paige knows Emily isn't perfect but she maintains this idea because this way it's easier to keep her at a distance. She can't let her in again. It might just be the end of her if she does.
When Paige sees she's cherry red from the hot water she wraps herself in a towel and heads back to the room. Freezing air cold-cocks her when she opens the door. Paige trembles but quickly remembers Emily likes to sleep in a freezing cold room because she likes to curl up in her blankets like a bear hibernating in winter. They used to curl up with each other this way. Of course, Paige always ended up kicking off the covers no matter the room temperature which always resulted in a lecture from Emily on the dangers of hypothermia. Paige never minded the argument though – Cranky Pants Emily was one of her favorite Emily's.
Once more Paige gives herself a mental shake. What the hell was wrong with her? Kindly remove yourself from the time machine, McCullers, she says to herself. She grabs some sweats and a baggy long-sleeved t-shirt and heads to the bathroom to change into her pajamas, determined to build up her defenses better tomorrow.