You and your husband stayed in the most adorable B&B 30 years ago on your honeymoon and tonight you’re returning for your anniversary.
“I hope I find the barrette I lost that night,” you joke as you climb the porch. Your husband doesn’t laugh.
When you walk in the front door, the very same woman who was running it way back then is still there waiting to check you in.
When she sees you, you’re shocked that she recognizes the two of you just like you recognize her. She looks stunned.
“You’re back,” she says.
“We are,” you say.
“I am,” your husband says.
She seems flustered, like she’s suddenly forgotten how to run the B&B she’s devoted her entire life to.
“The place hasn’t changed a bit,” you say, trying to lighten the mood.
“It looks exactly the same, after all these years I’ve been away,” your husband says. “Thirty years.”
“To the day,” the innkeeper says.
Your husband must have told her it was your anniversary when he made the reservation.
“I suppose you can have your old room then,” the innkeeper says. She hands your husband the key. She looks furious.
Up in the room, you’re shocked to find the bed unmade, everything covered in dust. It’s like no one’s been in the room in…
“Thirty years!” the innkeeper shouts as she bursts into the room. She runs to your husband and starts pounding his chest with her fists. “Thirty years I was left wondering, waiting, hoping, and accepting that you would never return. Thirty years!”
“I couldn’t,” your husband shouts back, to your complete confusion. “I’d just been married. I’d just exchanged vows.”
“You guys, what is this?” you ask. They wave you off.
“Every year I thought, maybe this will be the year I end it,” your husband tells the innkeeper. “This will be the year I go back to the B&B. This will be the year I start my life with the lover I was meant to love. But something always came up.”
“If it was real, you would have come. But you didn’t. So it wasn’t real, was it?”
“Guys?” you ask.
“It was real,” your husband says. “The minute I saw you today, I knew it was real.”
They kiss. Right in front of you. They kiss the way your husband has never kissed you. Ever.
“Guys!” you scream.
They stop kissing, annoyed.
“Oh for God’s sake,” your husband says. “When we came here the night of our honeymoon I fell in love with the innkeeper and she fell in love with me, but we never acted on it and I spent the last thirty years with you living a lie.”
“And I spent them waiting for him to return,” ” the innkeeper says. “I even refused to clean your room after you left. The fluids he left on those sheets are all I had left of him.”
That explains the dust and—ew, those are the sheets from your honeymoon!
“Those are the sheets from our honeymoon!” you exclaim, moving away from the bed.
They kiss again. You pry them apart.
“So are you saying you’ve been cheating on me?” you shout at your husband.
He says no. He just told you they never acted on it, remember?
“Then how did you know you were in love all these years?” you ask.
The innkeeper rolls her eyes. “We knew. We looked each other in the eye, and we both knew. One look. That was enough to keep our love alive over great time and distance.”
You’ve never felt that with your husband. When you look him in the eye he always seems to be looking off elsewhere and—Oh Christ they’re kissing again. You try prying them apart.
“Stop fucking up our first kiss!” your husband shouts. “Look, sorry, but it’s over.”
Your husband asks the innkeeper if there’s another room the two of them can go to. She starts to drag him to the master suite.
“What about me?” you ask.
“You can have this room,” the innkeeper says, then the door slams behind her.
As you listen to your husband have loud sex with the love of his life, you notice something shiny on the floor. It’s the barrette you lost. You reach down to pick it up but a rabid raccoon that’s been living under the bed bites you. You leave your husband behind and rush to the hospital where the handsome doctor who treats you looks in your eyes and you look in his and you both just know, so that worked out.
Bed & Breakfast Day!
