The Wrong Room

If my brother had not been so stubborn, none of this would have happened.

We’re opposites, me and him. I’m easygoing and not altogether much concerned about particulars. His steadfast sense of fairness is matched only by his asinine obstinance.

I should have known he’d make a scene about the room.

Weddings are enough to make the most even-keeled people froth at the mouth. Alex is not even-keeled even when there are no weddings in sight. But fact that this happened to be his own wedding made him more unreasonable than was strictly necessary.

Of course he booked the honeymoon suite for himself, but insisted on booking my room as well. Barbados is a nice place for nuptials by anyone’s standards, and I found his gripe about my placement in an oceanfront versus a mountain-view suite frankly ridiculous.

To make a long story short, a quarter hour of tense negotiation escalated to a full-on tirade directed at the wan, panicky, clearly inexperienced receptionist behind the counter, and my brother got his (read: my) mountain suite. Alex could not understand how such an expensive hotel had managed to mishandle the simple request of honouring his original room selection.

The wedding itself was lovely. There were no hiccups there. Nothing noteworthy anyway. Nothing besides me, by my own volition, becoming extraordinarily drunk.

I stumbled back to my hard-won room around 2:30am. Early for a tropical wedding, and early for me in general, but I was in no condition to stay.

The windows to the mountains were thrown wide open, gossamer curtains fluttering and snapping in the warm, heavy air. The smell of rich, wet soil and water-fat foliage filled the room, and the night was bright with the trill and hum of insects playing their artless music.

I began to undress myself, shrugging out of the stifling constraint of my coat and throwing it over the back of a chair. The crisp shoulder pads and lapels creased in a way that would have made my brother spit blood. I whipped off my tie and threw it on top.

After popping off the first two shirt buttons in my clumsy, intoxicated frustration I gave up on undressing. I flung myself onto the bed, landing on my back with my feet dangling off the edge. Not bothering to undo my belt, I put a toe behind the heel of one shoe and swiftly kicked it off. Taking sock-encased toes of my right foot, I hooked them above the protrusion of the sole of my left shoe and sent it flying into the wall.

I expected the hollow thump of rubber bouncing off dry wall. Instead I was met with the —slightly sad— modulated beeps of an electronic keypad. I looked up.

In my careless haste, my shoe had bounced into the open closet door and hit the safe, smashing the keypad as it went...