WHO: Rhett and Elvera WHEN: Saturday April 14, April 18th, Friday April 27, Monday, April 30th WHERE: The Bellowes, The Auction, Seattle SUMMARY: A series of Rhett/Elvera snippets, including the 20K date. WARNINGS: None.
The chaos of the day before had stilled into a low rumble; the walls at the inn were breathing with life, but Elvera found it a little hard to catch her breath at all.
The ham sandwich she knew she had to find the time to eat despite the fact that the anxiety that wore on her insides was filling enough.
The bell to the front door chimed, and Elvera looked up from the paperwork that she was trying not to drown in only to find THE Rhett Wyatt walking towards her, and THE Rhett Wyatt… definitely still walking towards her and--
She reflexively looked around for another staff member who might be less starstruck in his presence but came up empty.
And so with a professional, warm smile, “Good afternoon! Are you ready to check in…?”
When a beautiful and pleasant woman smiles at you, you smile back. Rhett’s smile was bright. He remembered Elvera from when he’d met the hospitable staff the day before. “I am,” he said. His assistant would be getting some of the bags while Rhett made sure everything was in order. “Thank you for your patience, it was nice to spend some time with my nephew. How has your staff been holding up? No more room troubles I hope.”
“Oh! Your nephew?” Her interest was earnest, as it might have been with anyone else whose family she enjoyed checking up on. “That’s lovely-- I-- Sorry! Here, um…” There was some shuffling behind the counter. Some fumbling. Eventually, a key was produced, as well as a new wave of nausea.
“If you’d like me to show you to your room, or…?” Her smile wavered for a moment as she felt a sudden pang of uncertainty. There might have been a handy guide somewhere on what the proper way to host celebrities, but it hadn’t made it to Fall City.
“Emmett Hayes,” Rhett said, his voice boomed with pride and he smiled. “Perhaps you’ve run into him?” It was a small town. “That would be lovely. I’d hate to get turned around.” He took the key from her with a sly wink. She seemed a little shy, but Rhett didn’t mind. She had a homey sort of warmth to her and shy women were generally great thinkers. He took a step back and made a sweeping gesture. “Please,” Rhett said, picking up one of his bags. “Do lead on.”
Watching wilderness documentaries was doing nothing to cure Rhett’s insomnia, so the actor had decided to take the opposite approach. He headed downstairs to fetch a cup of the inn’s coffee. If Rhett Wyatt wasn’t going to sleep, he was going to do it with intent.
On his way to the machine, he noticed Elvera. “You’re here late,” Rhett commented.
The anxiety of being in the same room as heartthrob Rhett Wyatt had ebbed to the point where she no longer startled at his presence. Heavy eyes looked up from her aged kindle and to the clock that was perched on the wall.
3 AM. Fair. That was late.
“Oh, well. Someone has to be here.” Her tone did not imply complaint, however, and rather suggested that she would much rather it be her than one of the younger hires, or even Julian, who she knew was much, much more tired than he let on. After a small pause, “Can I help you with anything?”
“I suppose,” Rhett said. “You don’t have a night staff?” Now that he’d thought about it, he couldn’t think of a time when Elvera hadn’t been around. Her work ethic was starting to remind him of his. “Just getting some coffee,” he said.
She stared at him for a moment, puzzled, her expression offering what words could not. They were all the night staff. They were all the day staff. Having a house full of people was not easy, particularly when Moira MacTeer alone took no consideration for the time in which she rang the front desk or knocked on the staff door.
Elvera had learned by day three that no sleep was better than interrupted sleep.
Any response she could have given him felt rude and condescending, so instead she opted to focus on his latter point. Her chair scraped against the tile as she stood.“Come on. You don’t want the machine coffee. We have a Keurig in the staff office and I just bought the most delightful flavor.”
The confusion on her face answered Rhett’s question in a way that concerned him, but she hadn’t left the matter open in any way that encouraged conversation. “Thank you,” he said. A moment later, Rhett smiled. “What flavor is that?”
“Vanilla Creme Puff.” And a beat later, Elvera smiled, too.
“Look this way!”
“$20,000 is the most money that has ever been put forward in a Fall City Date Auction-- do you care to comment on that?”
“Put your arm around her, Rhett! Smile, look this way!”
“Where do you plan on taking her?”
Rhett put an arm around her and smiled for the successive flashes that followed. “I’d say that an evening with a beautiful and kind woman is worth every penny I paid.” He flashed his most charming smile, The Rhett Wyatt Classic, before he signalled for his assistant. “Now, if you please, the night isn’t over and I am looking forward to the rest of the event.”
With a gentle hand, he helped guide Elvera through the reporters and back toward the chairs. Elvera had a tighter grip on him than he might have liked, the ghosts of the flash of the camera ghosting across her eyes.
“Sorry about that,” he told her.
“I-- must admit, I feel completely out of my depth, here.” It was the kind of honesty that came when Elvera was feeling too anxious overthink. Were the cameras still flashing? Jesus Christ.
The smile on Rhett’s face softened toward her. A moment later, he reassured. “It will die down soon. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to make sure you have the appropriate scuba gear.” He winked. That part was a joke. But from his experience, it really would die down. Rhett had too many women and too many other grand romantic gestures in his history for one charity auction date to withstand the test of time.
“I planned to drop at least twenty on someone here. Thank you for being such an excellent sport.”
Elvera knew this. It was obvious. It even made sense; she and Wynnie were the only two women on the docket who were close to his age who weren’t Moira. Still, the twist in her gut and the heaviness of her heart did not lend itself to good sportsmanship.
And yet she could recollect a conversation from not two weeks ago now, and the small mentioned-in-passing was enough to slacken the tension across her shoulders.
“I’m sure your nephew and the others with the police will be very thankful. And, well, um… Not to sound rude, not at all, but I’d understand, too, if you’d rather skip the date.”
“What?” It was like the woman had just switched to another language. Rhett blinked in confusion. “I’m looking forward to it. I already have the whole thing planned. You're going to love it.”
“I just wouldn’t want to hold you to your time, that’s all.” Elvera felt the need to clarify, her sensibilities returning to her as her vision did, the residual flashes now gone. When she found the nerve to smile, it was soft, but not shy. “I look forward to it, too.”
“Nonsense,” Rhett said. “It will be one of the best things I do with my time all week.”
Elvera offered him her profile, too charmed by his words to face him with a pink face full on. Her eyes dropped to her lap, lips tense as she tried to keep from smiling too wide as she said, “You haven’t tried any of the faire’s pies yet. That will be the best thing you do with your time all week.”
“I will eat one of those pies,” Rhett said. “But you’ll eat your words. I’ll pick you up on Monday at 3. See that you have the day off.” His sly wink and grin served as a goodbye before he turned to the next person he heard calling his name.
Coming up with the perfect date was always a challenge that Rhett met with enthusiasm, but this excursion was especially thrilling because of how quickly the eureka moment had come. All he’d had to do was read the info on her page in the dating auction pamphlet and then he’d had it. The perfect idea.
Rhett had summoned every amount of willpower he possessed not to spill the location on the way into Seattle. He’d picked her up right on time and they’d driven into the big city. Rhett had made small talk on the way while he tried to contain his excitement, but now they were finally here.
The building was unremarkable. Rhett had purposefully parked in the back to conceal the location for the surprise. There was an extra bounce in his step as he lead Elvera to the door and opened it for his date. The warehouse beyond them was dark.
“You ready?” His grin flashed before he flipped the switch.
Lights came on row by row throughout the floor to reveal a Mattress Emporium. Rhett Wyatt beamed.
“I rented the whole store.”
“The whole store?” Elvera sounded less like Belle and her Library and more like Princess Jasmine’s incredulity as she eyeballed the rows and rows of mattresses. She could sleep on one a day for the rest of her life and still not have slept on them all.
“Indeed,” Rhett said. “I’ve noticed that crowds make you anxious and wanted the privacy. You can pick your favorite mattress here and they will deliver it right to your house.” Rhett had requested that the salespeople remove the price tag so that she could make her selection uninhibited. “Then once we are finished here, we can hit your favorite take-out place, and I can drive you home to an evening with your children and give you the time to relax and rest away from the inn.” He smiled at her, invigorated by the genius of its simplicity. According to her dating profile, was this not the most perfect date?
“Rhett…” But there was no polite way to tell him that crowd didn’t make her anxious: he did. That she loved her children, but she also liked working and felt bad that she needed to be away when they were the busiest she could ever remember them being. That this was too much, too soon. That she wouldn’t even accept this from a friend. Maybe she would have if she were younger; that in some ways, he reminded her of her ex-husband. He liked flashing money, too. That this realization was effectively killing her romantic hero.
So instead, she started with, “I can’t accept this. A mattress? This is too much, and I’m-- I’m not here for your money, or what it can buy…”
He’d expected her to protest the price of the mattress. The look on his face softened. “I know that you’re not,” Rhett said. “I know you would be perfectly content if the date didn’t cost a penny. You didn’t even sign up for this adventure. You put your faith in the unknown and it lead you here.”
“But if you wouldn’t mind looking at it from my perspective for a moment. I am a man who has been very careful with my finances for most of my life. I grew up poor as a child and then I hit it big. I saved as much as I could and lived below my means so that I would always have that financial stability. Now I am nearing fifty and have more money than I could reasonably spend on myself in the rest of my lifetime. Ms. MacLaver, if I can’t buy something as worthy as a new mattress for a hardworking and incredibly kind inn employee who truly deserves one, what was I saving all of that money for? Sometimes a gift is more for the person giving it”
“That said, if this does not meet your expectations or you’d rather we did something else, please tell me, what would make you happy today?”
… How was anyone supposed to respond to a real life romantic comedy monologue?
Not easily, despite the fact that she had often had flights of fancy that had led her to this exact moment-- albeit they were on a bridge in a beautiful park rather than a mattress warehouse.
The only way to counter it was with grit, maybe, or the sore rawness of real life; this was too much and even his monologue (had he been acting? Maybe.), hadn’t put her at ease.
“Rhett,” a little terse and unsure, like she was about to give parental advice for a question in life she hadn’t even found the answer to. She could monologue, too, if she tried. “I think I would just… like something a little less grand and a little more… That is, I-- maybe we could just get to know each other without...” Her face did the talking for her as her eyes scanned the mattresses.
There was a beat while Rhett processed this, but in the next moment, he nodded. “Say no more.” He had really hoped that he would be able to put her at ease, and he did still want to buy her a mattress, but Rhett was also a proponent of the audience always being right. If explaining things from his perspective hadn’t soothed Elvera’s concerns, this wasn’t.
“You pick a place,” he said.
“I can’t believe it’s still here,” Elvera practically squealed, a hand touching Rhett’s shoulder familiarly as he pulled into a rather worn looking restaurant-- one that looked like it probably paid off the health inspector. “The last time I was here was in the late 80s… It was just after I’d gone to see Prince? Gosh, I can still remember their soft tacos. You’re going to love it. I promise.”
There was a certain stigma about actors like Rhett and their ability to eat anywhere that had less than five stars. But Rhett had camped blind and filmed in the Sahara Desert. As long as the place didn’t turn out to be haunted, a very old soft taco restaurant wasn’t going to knock him out of his orbit.
That said, Rhett didn’t quite share Elvera’s certainty.
This was, however, exactly the kind of reaction Rhett had been looking for. “You’re a Prince fan?” he asked. Rhett couldn’t say he shared that interest. Prince heavily favored purple, which was a color that Rhett had been told by many shamans to avoid. He did, however, love to hear people talk about their passions.
“I do! I am, I mean. Prince, Michael, Madonna… But apart from them, I like a lot of classic rock, too?” She unbuckled her seatbelt as they parked and quickly exited from the car, moving so that she could meet him on the other side, as a date might do. “But what sort of music do you listen to?”
“Ah, the classics!” Rhett said. “I dabble in them too. Rolling Stones. Beatles. U2. Though I’ll admit that I don’t get much time for recreational listening. I study soundtracks or determine a character’s music tastes and immerse myself that way. Going to those kinds of music concerts has become a bit of a logistical nightmare. When I do, it’s usually to one of my daughter’s. She’s a musician. Very clever lyricist.”
“I love them, too! The first couple, not-- well,” she waved her hand dismissively, as they approached the door to the restaurant, and this time, she opened it for him.