With this year’s Thanksgiving almost here Carla couldn’t help thinking about her last few days in Ardmer, as well as her long, eventful road trip back to the Pittsburgh area. “Good thing nobody I know now has any idea about what I got up to that week,” she thought, attributing her uncharacteristic run of wild behavior to the stress of leaving her job and moving with no job lined up where she was headed.
Her time since moving back east had been anything but wild. Between her often long hours at her new job in the commercial lending department of Pitt 1st Bank, a small but growing bank based in Pittsburgg, her fairly long commute, and living in her childhood bedroom, she often thought her love life was about as exciting as that of a nun.
Her focus on establishing herself at work was paying off, with her supervisors giving her more and more responsibility. Included with the responsibility came fairly frequent travel, but none to anywhere particularly exciting. Even if the destinations had been appealing, her trips were usually only a day or two long and too tightly scheduled to get out and explore.
When she was tasked with training employees in the equivalent department at a bank her employer had recently bought, she was excited; not only was she being entrusted with an important assignment, but the office she would be visiting was in Miami, offering at least a hope of the trip being interesting. She was sorry to have to miss spending Thanksgiving with her family, but looked forward to a few days enjoying weather almost like summer in Pennsylvania. She packed some summer clothing along with her work outfits.
Carla was able to arrange for her departure to be set for Friday night, giving her some beach time as well as time for some sightseeing before getting down to work the following Monday. Her employer didn’t cover the expense of her hotel room for the extra couple of nights, but she didn’t mind springing for a room at the off-season rate she was charged. She managed to work in a little bit of shopping, buying some things not even slightly unique to Miami. The Steelers jersey she found in a shop was a perfect Christmas gift for her brother, so she was glad to find it. She counted getting a head start on her Christmas shopping list as a win, and was able to fit it, along with a handful of things she picked up for herself, into her carry-on.
Carla’s mini-vacation ended Sunday night as her Uber ride took her away from the restored Art-Deco hotel in South Beach she’d been staying at to a pleasant but generic Hilton Garden Inn several miles from any beach. Her new room was actually a suite, allowing her to treat part of the space as a work area, as she planned to do a few hours of her regular work after dinner most nights.
Once she had settled into her room, Carla went downstairs to the hotel restaurant for dinner. The menu was acceptable though hardly exciting, but the eerily quiet atmosphere was off-putting. With the diners at the only two other tables in use already having dessert, it seemed like she was going to make the staff work late. When her server returned to take her order, Carla asked if she could have the pasta primavera from the restaurant menu served in the bar. He said, “No problem, miss. Come with me.” In less than a minute she was seated at a small table in the bar, where at least she could do some people watching and possibly even eavesdrop a bit. The server returned with the glass of Merlot she had ordered before the move.
Carla enjoyed her dinner more than she had expected to. The food wasn’t bad, the wine was actually pretty good, and the people watching was way better than it would have been in the nearly vacant dining room. She saw a young couple clearly not happy with each other, a couple who appeared to be in their eighties or older who seemed delighted to be there, and a group of late-middle-aged men in a cluster at the bar. The group of men were laughing and talking loudly enough that she couldn’t hear any of her other fellow diners, but they weren’t being rowdy. The bits of the men’s conversation she could hear made it clear that they’d been friends a long time and enjoyed each other’s company.
Wanting to be sharp for what she knew would be a busy day Monday, Carla resisted the temptation to have a second glass of wine after she finished her dinner, heading back to her room to work for a couple of hours. By 9:30 her shoulders and neck were feeling stiff, so she changed into bike shorts, a sports bra, and a t-shirt and headed downstairs to the gym to work out her kinks. Passing by the lobby after a quick workout around 10:30, she was surprised to see the group of gray-haired men still at the bar. “Party on, old dudes,” she chuckled as she waited for the elevator. By 11:00 she had enjoyed a long, hot shower and set out her outfit for the next day. She turned off the lamp on the nightstand and was sleeping by 11:30.
Monday’s work time went more smoothly than she had expected, with the staff at the bank being acquired eager to learn how their new employer’s systems worked. Wrapping up work just after 5:30, Carla could see nothing resembling a restaurant in the office park where she’d been working, and didn’t feel like taking a long cab ride to find dinner, settling instead for another dinner in the hotel’s bar.
By 6:15 Carla was seated at a small table in the bar. She had just ordered her pan-seared salmon and was almost halfway through her glass of wine when she noticed the arrival of what looked to her like the same group of middle-aged guys in suits who had been there most of the night before. One of them apparently noticed her noticing them, because a few minutes after she looked their way one of the bartenders approached her with a glass of red wine, the same kind she was already enjoying, telling her it was “compliments of the gentlemen at the bar.” She accepted the glass with a nod to thank her benefactors.
Carla had been offered a drink at a hotel bar on work trips more times than she could remember, and often accepted, but those offers had invariably been made by a solitary male closer to her own age who she imagined was hoping for a road trip hookup. It never ceased to amaze her how much some men thought buying a woman a drink entitled them to. She’d never been tempted to take any of them up on their offers beyond the initial offer of a drink, but when one of the group she’d been observing approached her as she was finishing her dinner and asked her if she’d like to join the group for an after-dinner drink, she was curious enough to accept, joining the group once she had finished and signed for her meal.