Winter Wonderland

twenty-two: the windy city

*

Nothing screams luxury like waking up on the twenty-first floor of a five star hotel in Chicago, so far away from the hustle and bustle below that I can't even hear the street noise. This bed is so big that Storie and I are each completely spread out and we're not touching – though there was plenty of touching last night, after we showered together to wash off the plane and city grime. It's pretty impossible to share a shower with my girlfriend and for it to not turn into something more. Especially when the shower has a massage head.

Let's just say that we made the most out of this bed last night, and we ended up back in the shower.

"I want to take this bed home with me," Storie says when she wakes up and spreads out like a starfish in the middle of the bed. "Wanna go halves?"

"I feel like this bed would probably set us back a month's salary each."

"Maybe next year," she says, rolling into her front and sighing into her pillow before getting up with a yawn and a stretch. "What's the breakfast scenario?"

"Included in the room and it ends at eleven." I glance at the gold clock on the wall. "I think we can just about make it."

It's a quarter past eight. Even on vacation, if this counts as a vacation, it's hard to switch off our natural alarms. Storie's always out of the apartment by eight thirty and I give myself ten minutes to get to the office for nine. So there's no sleeping in today, but that gives us even more time to explore the city at our leisure. I've already checked the forecast and looked out the window and as cold as it is – barely twenty-five degrees – the sky is clear.

"I think it's a perfect day for a bit of sightseeing." I pull on my pants and unroll a t-shirt to wear under my sweater. Years of frigid Ohio winters have taught me the importance of layers – at my old apartment, I spent a solid three months wearing at least two layers to bed just to get to sleep without freezing to death. "I was thinking we could grab breakfast and check out the Willis Tower?"

"Is that the one with the glass platform or the tilting wall?"

"The platform. The tilting wall is at the John Hancock Center." I'm halfway into my sweater before I realize it's inside out. "We can do that one if you'd rather?"

"No, no. I think I'd shit myself," she says with a laugh. "Kris did the one that tilts and he said they play some kind of soundtrack of malfunctioning machinery while you're leaning over the city a thousand feet in the air. I would actually die."

"Well, we can't have that. How on earth would I explain that to your mom?"

She laughs and throws a balled up pair of socks at me. "You wouldn't You'd have to run." There's a note of sincerity, of something hitting too close to home, when she says, "You don't want to mess with a grieving Dzsenifer Sovany."

*

The restaurant is crazy fucking fancy even just for breakfast. I mean, this place serves lobster and caviar for breakfast. This is a whole other league of wealth and even though whatever we have is included in the deal Kris got us, I feel bad knowing that they charge nearly twenty bucks for a bowl of fruit. I may have been raised in a wealthy family but I was not raised to be extravagant – it feels kind of wrong.

But Storie is lapping it up, buzzing with glee as she orders an English muffin with poached eggs, smoked bacon and hollandaise sauce, and I think fuck it, we're here for a good time. So I order their full signature breakfast and an assorted bakery basket to share (and yeah, I do plan to wrap any spare croissants in a napkin for later), and a Belgian berry waffle. We're not paying. Might as well go all out.