Today, in honor of 9/11, I wanted to share a scene from one of my recent releases, A Love Affair in Las Vegas. This book is set in Vegas at a hoteliers' conference, but both main characters are from New York.
I lived in New York until my mid-twenties, just outside of Syracuse, and I was pretty young when 9/11 happened, in middle school, and it's something that has impacted my life in tertiary ways ever since then, though I was not directly impacted by it. It's something that I wanted to bring up as backstory for both of these characters, Barnaby and Dawn, because it's still something that touches my life today, and I know it touches the lives of a lot of people, even 17 years later.
This scene takes place about halfway through the book and it's one of the most emotional scenes I've written, and it helps Barnaby and Dawn really talk about real-life things in ways they haven't yet, up to this point in the story. Here it is:
“Hey, a rising tide carries all boats,”
he said.
She rolled her eyes.
“What? It does. I’ve always believed
there’s too much competition in our industry. Particularly in a tourist mecca
like New York. How often do you think hotels go vacant or close down because
they can’t get enough business? Not the roach motels, obviously, but the places
that provide the same level of service as we do. We’re not in competition for a
limited number of guests. Some people travel because they have to, obviously,
but a lot of them do so because they like the hotel experience, because they
need somewhere they can trust to stay when they’re visiting. If we are all so
focused on beating one another out for the same guests, then it’s the guests
who suffer, and we all end up losing in the long run.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone
speak so passionately about what we do. I mean I like helping people, don’t get
me wrong, but for you, it’s more than that. It goes deeper.”
He’d always talked like this about his
job. He’d never had someone notice that it was about so much more for him.
“I was homeless for about eighteen months
when I was a teenager,” he blurted. He hadn’t meant to say it, but there it was
now. Out in the open.
He expected to see pity on her face.
Expected her to shame him for something that had never been his fault. Instead,
after a quick blink of surprise, she smiled. “That definitely explains it,
then.”
He was so surprised by complete
acceptance, without any hint of shame or pity, that for a few minutes, he
didn’t speak. When he went to open his mouth again, the waiter appeared with
their meals. She’d ordered a braised lamb shank with mashed potatoes and squash,
and he was almost jealous until he caught the smell of his steak. They thanked
the waiter for the food, and he finally got brave enough to ask, “Explains
what?”
“Why you love managing the hotel. You
get to provide for people what you never had, even if only temporarily. A home.
A safe place for them to stay, even if only for one night.”
He nodded. Damn. She really did get it.
He wasn’t used to being so transparent. “It’s not something I talk about much.
Most people don’t understand. In fact, so many of them wonder what the hell I
did wrong to become homeless or why I wasn’t taken away from my parents.” His
throat threatened to close up a bit as he talked, and he took a few sips of
cold water.
“I’m sure it’s not easy to talk about.
What helped you get from there to where you are today?”
He finally started cutting his steak,
and she began eating as well. After couple bites, he gave her a little rundown
of what it had been like for him. “My mom wasn’t a great woman. She and my dad
argued a lot. She wouldn’t stay around, always out finding the next best thing,
and when she finally left him for her second husband, and decided to move back
to the UK, he kept me and my brother. She hadn’t really ever wanted much to do
with us, frankly. I don’t think she ever wanted kids. I think she had us to try
to keep my dad around. He was an investment banker when they first married, and
we lived pretty large, shall we say.”
She ate quietly as she listened, giving
him her full attention, and when he took a break from speaking to eat a bit,
she asked, “So she was only really with him for the lifestyle?”
“Yeah. And when the market crashed
after the Towers came down, he found himself out of a job. We’re lucky he wasn’t
at work that day. He was, by some miraculous fluke, taking me to have my wisdom
teeth removed.” It was the easiest thing to sit here and talk to her about some
of his deepest, darkest memories. Like they had known each other decades
instead of days.
“Wow.” He could see the shared memories
in her eyes of that tragedy. “I can’t believe you could have lost your dad like
that. How awful.”
“We were lucky. My dad called me his
little miracle from that day forward. He actually asked the doc if he could
keep the teeth as a souvenir. Gross, I know, but even later, when he lost his
job, and mom left, and we were living on the streets for those months or
bouncing around shelters, he never lost those teeth.” He drank some water to help
his parched throat, and then cleared I, before asking, “You said you’ve lived
in New York your whole life, were you in the city at that point?”
“I actually grew up in a small town in
Upstate. Well, you would call it Upstate, since anything that isn’t Manhattan
is Upstate New York to you people, but it’s really in the Hudson Valley. I was in
elementary school, and even though I was young, that morning is one of my
earliest memories. I remember exactly what we were learning: counting money,
dimes and pennies. Mrs. Morton was going through the lesson when the classroom
phone rang. Watching her try so hard not to show us how scared she was will be
forever etched in my mind. She had a daughter who worked right down the street
on West Broadway who she wasn’t able to get in touch with until days later. She
was a wreck that morning, obviously. But she soldiered on, gave us lots of hugs
and sang lots of songs that day.” She smiled sadly at the memory.
“I think that was the time I realized I
loved the city I’d never seen. I remember sneaking peeks at the news coverage
of the aftermath, hiding from my mom because she didn’t want me watching that
kind of crap, and just thinking, God,
look at these people helping each other. Look at them risking their lives for
their neighbors. I grew up in the small town that always treated the city
like it was this big dangerous place, but that day, and in the days following,
I saw a very different New York than the one I’d been taught. And from that day
forward, I knew I’d live there one day.” Her gaze had been far-away in memory,
and she blinked, refocusing on him. “Wow, sorry. That was a bit more of an
overshare than I needed to have.”
“That’s okay. For me too, ya know? I
wasn’t exactly planning on pouring out my darkest secrets to you, though it’s
kind of nice to be able to talk about real stuff with a woman. You’d be shocked
at how many people look at me differently after I tell them about being
homeless when I was younger. Like I’m somehow less of a man.” But she didn’t.
Now that her gaze was on his once more, it was the same comfortable no-bullshit
expression she’d been giving him all along. It was like he could feel the lines
of connection growing stronger between them. The sex had been amazing from go,
but the more time he spent with her talking, really talking, about things that
mattered, not just work or banter, the more he felt the link between them
growing. Could she feel it, too?
A Love Affair in Las Vegas is only 99 cents if you want to get your copy here: https://www.books2read.com/u/3kre78
