“Thank you—for everything—Andri,” I whisper, willing the tears away.
His eyes soften, and he reaches for my cheek right before the man in the lobby loudly clears his throat. His hand retracts, and he grabs the other bags on the counter.
“I’m glad you like it.” He turns back and motions for the man to follow him. He leaves me in the lobby on the verge of happy tears, and I have to turn and squint at the ceiling for a moment before I check in the guest who arrives right after Andri leaves.
“Sorry, these allergies are awful,” I tell them as my eyes leak onto the keyboard.
“Sure, winter allergies, got it.” The vacationing minotaur one hundred percent doesn’t believe me.
Even though I don’t see Andri for the rest of the afternoon, time flies. The ski resort functions with check-in and check-out blocks, so you can stay for as many weeks in a row as you’d like, but never less than a week. It’s a strange, very old-school, way to run a resort, but I’ve really come to like it. Each week brings in a new crop of faces and takes away some of our more annoying guests. It makes it easier to keep your customer service smile on when you know there’s an end date to dealing with the rudest of them.
But it also makes it easy for our very non-techy booking systems to keep up. The only downside is that Fridays are my busiest. Everyone who’s checking out meets up with everyone checking in, and I’m scrambling to make sure that Lerana has enough time to get all the rooms cleaned. I don’t know how the faun does it, one day a week to flip all the rooms and cabins on top of her job at the diner—she’s superwoman.
Sure, it helps that this place isn’t very big. Our thirteen rooms and three cabins are more than enough to handle.
According to the green and black computer screen, I’ve got everyone booked in for the next block of visitors, and I can breathe easy for a few minutes. So as the lobby clears out, I can grab a cup of tea from the coffee stand.
I pour the boiling water onto the apple cinnamon tea bag and stare out the window at the perfect white mountain landscape that unfolds in front of me. The sky is blue and clear, and even though it’s assuredly freezing out, it radiates warmth.
The snowstorm we got last week was supposed to be the start of some super high-accumulation cold front, but it seems to have fizzled out into perfect skiing weather.
“Perfect if you actually want to ski,” I say aloud and snort to myself at my own joke.
“We get it, you hate skiing.” I hear a jovial laugh behind me and swivel. I feel weird, because technically my boss just caught me not only daydreaming on the clock, but also belittling the thing that makes us both money.
“I was totally just working,” I tell him as I scramble back to my post.
“Daphne, there’s no one in the lobby. I don’t care if you take a break, you’re not a machine.” Andri follows me to the desk and peeps my sleek new silver laptop closed on the desk. “But speaking of machines, are you sure that’ll work for you? If not, we can go get—”
“It’s literally perfect, thank you.” I smile at the yeti, who obviously needs my approval of the gift for whatever reason.
“I’m glad. I was also wondering if maybe, well you know, there’s this thing tonight…” He squinches up his brow.
“A thing?” I’m not sure where this convo is heading.
“There’s a party, it’s pretty casual, but I was wondering maybe…” He’s not making eye contact now.
“Maybe?” I egg him on, wondering where this is headed.
“Will you go with me?” His eyes flit up under hooded lids, and I can almost feel the anxiety in his gaze.
“Yeah, I’m always down to hang out with my new friend.” I slap his arm.
Andri stills and doesn’t act very excited at the thought of me joining him.
“No. I mean, will you go with me, Daphne. A date, I would like to take you to this party as my date.” He takes a deep breath after he gets his words out.
A date? There’s lots of logical pathways that would be able to lead my thought process here… but for some reason, I assumed that we would just stay friends. That my weird feelings were just my broken heart searching for the path of least resistance.
But it’s not a big leap for my mind to wonder what being with Andri romantically might be like. My imagination veers a hard left into panic though, when I realize that I have no idea what kind of equipment snowmen are working with.
“Daphne?” Andri looks crestfallen as he waits for my response.
“Oh god, sorry!” I blurt out as he pulls me from my inner monologue. “I’d love to. Go on a date with you, that is.”
His face beams, and his spins straightens.
“Really?”
