South Beach: Hot in the City by Lacey Alexander

Chapter One
    It had been ten years since Holly Pettit stood in the lobby of the Imperial Palms Hotel. And as she wheeled her suitcase in through the oversized revolving door, the past came rushing back to her. Through the marble floors and walls, through the long registration desk. Through the glittering chandelier still hanging over the fountain circled by a collection of elegant, curved sofas. Through the art-deco-style palm fronds carved above the desk and into the arched, acoustically perfect ceiling. Even the very smell of the place caught her off guard, drew her in.
    Wow. She’d expected coming back to be easier than this. She’d expected it to be fun. Instead, she felt as if she’d just taken a slug to the gut.
    “Oh my God, isn’t this great! It’s just the same!”
    Holly looked to her best friend from high school, Lori, standing beside her, wide-eyed, as she took it all in. The Imperial Palms was one of South Beach’s largest and grandest art-deco-era hotels, then and now. And she’d expected to feel the way Lori appeared to at the moment—she’d expected to be reliving that first time they’d walked through this same door back when they were two bright-eyed farm girls from Indiana.
    She and Lori had worked here the summer between their freshman and sophomore years of college at Purdue—it had seemed so daring and adventurous to spend the summer so far away from the small town where they’d both grown up. South Beach had sounded alluring and exotic, and the hotel had been just as historically majestic as in their fantasies.
    So when Lori, now an advertising exec in Orlando, had invited Holly to meet her in Miami for a getaway to their old stomping grounds, it had sounded like a good idea. But maybe being here now, in the flesh, was just a little too real. It was funny how memories worked, how they could steal over you so intensely, how they could even sometimes pull you back in time. And for Lori right now, that was clearly a good thing, a happy thing—she didn’t even notice when Holly failed to reply. But for Holly… Lord, why hadn’t she thought more about this first? After all, she was busy making a new life for herself—she didn’t need to be drawn back into old recollections that had left her broken inside.
    Strangely, as they moved to the registration desk, she found herself scanning the large lobby and realized she was actually looking for him . As if he would actually be here. As if she would instantly recognize him ten years later, ten years older. As if maybe through some uncanny twist of fate he, too, would have shown up here on vacation this week.
    That’s the kind of irrational thinking he caused in you for a long time. He messed you up so badly inside. Don’t even waste your thoughts on him—he’s not worth it.
    And normally, she didn’t think about him—it had probably been a couple of years since he’d crossed her mind. It was just a little more difficult now that she was here, in the very place where their entire summer romance had happened. She’d lost her virginity in this hotel. She’d fallen in love walking the stretch of South Beach that spanned the property. Oh God, it was stupid to have come here. But she supposed she’d thought she was really, truly over him. Over all that had happened. Yet maybe things like that never really went away. You might think they had, but maybe they were just hiding under the surface, waiting for the right opportunity to bubble up again.
    She stayed silent, in the background, as Lori checked them into an oceanfront room they could only have dreamed of affording when they were eighteen.
    “Can you believe we’re really here again, Holl?” Lori asked as they started away from the wide marble desk toward the elevators.
    “Not really,” she said.
    And that was when Lori finally noticed. “What’s wrong? You don’t look happy. It’s eighty degrees outside, the sun is shining, and we have three glorious days of South Beach decadence