The Boss's Room

Ezra Chalmers was thirty-two years old, and he had never once done anything interesting on a Thursday... until this one. That fact occurred to him on the shuttle bus from the airport, somewhere past the second switchback, when the driver announced they were twenty minutes from Pinecrest Lodge and half the bus cheered. The half that cheered was the sales team, mostly. The other half, the marketing people, smiled politely and looked at their phones.

Ezra was a marketing coordinator at a sporting goods company, which meant he spent his days making spreadsheets about tents and his nights reheating leftovers in the microwave of his one-bedroom apartment. He was single, had been single for a while, ever since a relationship back when he was twenty-nine that had ended the way most of his things ended, quietly and without a fight. Even the breakup had been sensible. They had agreed it was for the best. He had helped her carry boxes to her car.

The bus rounded a bend and the lodge appeared, all timber and stone, with a fire going in a fireplace you could apparently see from the parking lot. It was late autumn in Aldervale, the air crisp and smelling faintly of pine, the sun already sinking behind the ridgeline at four in the afternoon. Ezra stepped off the bus with his wheeled suitcase and felt something he couldn't name. Not dread. Not excitement either. Something closer to the feeling you get standing on a diving board, when you haven't decided yet.

"Chalmers! You made it." Matthew Petrova came across the gravel lot with a drink in each hand, which was very Matthew. He was twenty-eight, the youngest person in the department, and he had decided years ago that Ezra needed looking after. "One of these is for you. It's cider. Don't make that face, it's good cider."

"It's four o'clock," Ezra said, taking it anyway.

"That's what makes it a vacation." Matthew walked with him toward the entrance. "Okay, so, weekend agenda. Friday is team stuff, boring. Saturday there's a hike if you want it, or you can sit by the fire as a normal person would. Sunday we drive home and pretend none of this happened."

"That's usually how retreats work, yeah."

"See, this attitude is what I'm talking about." Matthew pointed at him with his own drink. "You're gonna have fun this weekend if I have to schedule it."

The lobby was warm and smelled like woodsmoke. Behind the front desk stood a broad man in his fifties with a name tag that said ZEKE and a smile that seemed like it had been installed that morning and never removed. He was checking people in with the easy patter of somebody who had worked a lodge desk for twenty years and could probably do it asleep.

"Company retreat, huh," Zeke said, pulling up the reservation list. "We get a lot of those this time of year. You folks behave and I won't have to come find you."

"No promises," Matthew said.

Ezra waited his turn, set his suitcase by his feet, and gave his name. Zeke typed for a moment, frowned at the screen, then frowned harder.

"Huh," Zeke said.

"Is something wrong?"

"Well, now, depends on how you look at it." Zeke turned the screen slightly, as if that would help Ezra understand. "Chalmers, Ezra. Suite twelve-oh-one. That's the Chalmers Suite."

"There's a suite named after me?"

Zeke laughed, a real laugh, not a desk laugh. "Named after the family that used to own half this town. It's our top room. Presidential suite. Private balcony, its own fireplace, the whole deal." He set a heavy brass key on the counter. "Reservation's under the company, and there you are on the list, plain as anything. So either your company really likes you, or somebody upstairs made a switch."

"I'm a coordinator," Ezra said. "Nobody likes coordinators that much."

"Then it's a switch, and it ain't mine." Zeke slid the key across. "Twelfth floor. Elevator's past the bar, which you'll find is convenient or dangerous, depending on your evening. Enjoy it, Mr. Chalmers."

Ezra took the key because it was in his hand and it seemed rude to argue with a man that friendly. He told himself he would sort it out with the front office in the morning. He found his room, which turned out to be less a room and more a small apartment with a stone fireplace already lit and a balcony looking out over a dark valley full of pine. The bed was enormous. He sat on the edge of it with his shoes off and thought, this is exactly the kind of thing that happens to other people.

He decided not to think about it further until after a drink, which was its own kind of progress.

* * *

The bar at Pinecrest hummed the way Zeke had promised, low conversation and a fire and a bartender who remembered your order from the night before even if there had been no night before. Ezra found a stool at the quiet end and ordered a whiskey, because he was in the mountains and it felt obligatory.

He was halfway through it when someone took the stool beside him and said, "Please tell me the sales team didn't rope you into the trivia signup."

Ezra turned and there was Connor Dyer, his boss, the VP of marketing, in a gray sweater and looking tired in a way Ezra had never seen at the office. Connor was forty-four, silver at the temples, and generally carried himself as someone who had a handle on things. Right now the handle looked loose.

"No trivia," Ezra said. "Matthew tried, though. I escaped."

"There's hope for you yet." Connor signaled the bartender. "Two of the same, please!" He glanced over. "Is that all right? Me sitting here? You looked like a man enjoying his own company."

"I don't really get to enjoy my own company at these things. Somebody always finds me."

"Well, I'm your boss, so technically I outrank whoever finds you." Connor took his drink and turned on the stool, facing the fire instead of Ezra, which somehow made talking easier. "How's the room?"

Ezra hesitated. "Actually, there's been a mix-up, I think. They put me in the Chalmers Suite. Twelfth floor. I was going to sort it out tomorrow."

Connor went still for a second. Then he laughed, and it was a real laugh, tired at the edges. "No, that's mine. Or it was supposed to be. Zeke must have gotten the list crossed when they changed my booking." He shook his head. "Keep it."

"Keep it?"

"Keep it. I stayed in that suite with someone, before. Six months ago now. Eight years, actually, and then six months ago it ended." He said it plainly, like reading off a form. "I booked it again out of some kind of stupid stubbornness and I've been staring at the ceiling up there all evening. You'd be doing me a favor, honestly. Stay there. I'll take whatever's next to it."

"Connor, I can't take your..."

"You can, and you're on a first name basis tonight because it's after five and we're four hundred miles from the office." He drank. "Besides, it's just a room."

Ezra looked at his whiskey. "Was it a bad ending? The eight years?"

"Not bad. Just slow. Like a tide going out. One day you look up and there's no water." Connor shrugged. "We don't hate each other. That's almost worse, some days."

"Yeah," Ezra said, and surprised himself by meaning it. "Mine was like that too. Four years shorter, but same tide."

Connor looked at him then, really looked. "You ever do anything reckless, Chalmers? Anything at all?"

"I color inside the lines. Professionally."

"Hm. I used to be reckless. I'm trying to remember how." He finished his drink and set the glass down. "Go enjoy the big fireplace, Ezra. God knows somebody should."

He got up, paid for both drinks, and walked out toward the elevators. Ezra sat there a while, warm from the whiskey and from something else he couldn't name, the diving-board feeling again, stronger now.

He went up to the twelfth floor eventually and stood on the balcony in the cold, looking at the dark valley, and for the first time in years he didn't make a plan for tomorrow.

The knock came at nine. Ezra opened the door and Connor stood there in the gray sweater, holding a bottle of scotch and two glasses, looking like a man with an excuse he'd rehearsed on the elevator.

"I can't sleep up there," he said. "The room next to this one has a view of a parking structure. I figured I'd drink the good bottle in the good room one last time."

"You want a nightcap. In my borrowed suite."

"In your borrowed suite. I'll even pour."

Ezra stepped back and let him in, and something in his chest did the diving-board thing again, that lean over empty air. He knew what a smart person would say. He was thirty-two years old and had never once followed the smart impulse anywhere interesting, so he decided, quietly, to try the other thing for once.

Connor lit nothing, turned nothing on, just set the glasses on the low table by the