Depends On Who's Asking (SWAT Generation 2.0 12)

“I sure hope that opaques or something, or we’re going to be getting real familiar with each other rather quickly,” Carolina said as she looked the same direction I did.

I swallowed hard and walked to the wall, only to realize that there wasn’t a wall there at all.

“They’re not finished with it yet,” I found myself saying. “I’m sure that there’s supposed to be glass here.” I waved my hand through the empty space between the toilet and the non-wall.

“Great,” she grumbled. “Maybe they have extra sheets that we can hang up and put there so you’re not watching my ass while I pee.”

I would’ve laughed had she not looked so forlorn.

I walked to the closet near the front entrance where I assumed they’d keep the linens, and stopped when I saw the full kitchenette.

“No oven,” I said. “But we have a full-size fridge, microwave, minibar, coffee maker, and a few other things.”

She walked with me and peeked around the corner, humming with pleasure. “At least there’s that. What’s in here?”

She pointed at the closed door that I assumed was the closet.

Only, when I opened it up, I stared in surprise at a full-size weight room.

“Umm,” I paused. “At least we can work out.”

She turned up her nose. “You can have that. I’m good.”

I turned to look at her and not the equipment. “You don’t work out?”

I looked her up and down, taking in her shapely body.

“Not if I’m not being chased or held at gunpoint,” she teased.

“You’ve been chased and held at gunpoint before?” I wondered.

She shook her head. “No, not technically I haven’t.”

My lips kicked up at the corner in a smirk before I backed out of the room that might very well save my life the next three weeks in search of the closet with the linens.

I found it in the pseudo bathroom.

There were quite a few linens, too.

“Nice,” I said as I pulled a sheet down and looked around the room for something to hang it on.

Spying a coat rack and a tall lamp, I grabbed both and strung up the wall of linen that would protect our privacy—at least a little bit.

“They didn’t finish with the couch or the chairs, either,” Carolina said as she helped me.

Once we had it in place, we looked at the rest of the room.

“There’s a balcony,” she pointed out. “And it looks out over a lake I’ve never seen before.”

“With some comfortable looking chairs,” I agreed. “At least there’s that.”

And that was it.

We had what amounted to two thousand square feet of room with one bed, two comfortable Adirondack chairs, and that was it.

We’d be using the bed.

A lot.

Wonderful.

Just fucking wonderful.

“There’re enough pillows to build a barrier.” She must’ve read the direction of my thoughts. “I promise that I won’t accost you in your sleep.”

I turned to her and didn’t bother to hide what I was feeling.

“That wasn’t what was worrying me,” I informed her. “It was me worrying that I would accost you.”

Her eyes widened and she snapped her mouth shut, looking for all she was worth like a scared, innocent woman.

I looked away and searched for the remote, finding it in the bedside table with a pad of paper, a Bible, and some menus from local restaurants and the grill on the first floor.

Snatching up the television remote, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and then started dialing while simultaneously switching on the television.

I stopped on the Die Hard Christmas movie when the line connected.

“Hello?”

I breathed a sigh of relief when my father’s security detail answered and not my father himself. Thank God that I didn’t have to actually talk to my father.

“Brad,” I said into the phone in relief. “Listen, I have a situation.”

Brad instantly became alert.

“I fucking told you that you needed a security detail. When will you ever fuckin’…” He trailed off as I interrupted him.

“I’m being quarantined for three weeks due to being exposed, possibly, to Ebola.” I interrupted him.

Brad paused for such a long time that I wondered if he’d even heard me.

“Are you listening?” I asked shortly.

Brad started to laugh.

“Yes, I’m fuckin’ listening.” He sounded like he was fighting the laughter and losing. Kind of like a donkey braying. “I’m just trying to figure out how in the hell you always seem to find yourself in these kinds of situations.”

He had a point there.

When I was fourteen, during one of my father’s election races, I’d fallen down a flight of stairs with nobody’s help but my own bad luck. When I was fifteen, during a visit to a Montana school where my dad was doing a debate, I’d contracted fucking chickenpox. Who got chickenpox anymore?

Then, when I was seventeen, I got in a car wreck with a man who was getting a blow job by a prostitute with two more prostitutes in the back of his car fucking each other.