The idea of taking a vacation did not start as a real plan.

At first it was just something Mandy threw out one evening while she was stretched across the couch with the laptop open on her knees, refreshing the clothing store dashboard for what had to be the fifth time in half an hour. The apartment was quiet except for the low hum of traffic outside and the faint clink of Lip setting a mug down on the kitchen counter. Another order notification slid into the corner of the screen.

Mandy looked at the total, then let her head fall back against the cushion.

“One twenty-three.”

Lip was still at the table with his own laptop open, half looking through supplier messages and half pretending he was not also keeping track of the numbers in his head.

“Clothing store?”

“Yeah.”

She closed the laptop and dropped it beside her. Then she stared up at the ceiling for a second before saying, “This is stupid.”

That made him finally look over.

“What is.”

She pushed herself upright and tucked one leg under her. “This.”

He waited.

Mandy gestured vaguely toward the laptops, the notebooks, the entire room. “We’ve spent the last year working almost every day. You know that, right?”

Lip leaned back in his chair. “I’m aware.”

“No, I mean actually working. Not sitting around talking about plans. Real working.”

He smiled a little. “Yeah.”

Mandy folded her arms. “And now we’re making enough money to make everybody we know lose their minds.”

“That’s true.”

Lip did not bother arguing because it was true.

The stores had grown past the point of being some weird little project they ran from a tiny apartment with bad lighting and too many soda cans on the table. They still worked from the same room. Still used the same beat-up notebooks. Still wore old hoodies while looking at numbers that would have sounded insane to them not that long ago. But the money itself had stopped being hypothetical months ago.

Mandy looked at him across the room.

“We should go somewhere.”

Lip raised an eyebrow. “Where.”

“I don’t know. Somewhere that doesn’t look like this.”

He glanced around the apartment on purpose. “You insulting our home now?”

“I’m saying if I have to stare at one more gray Chicago street for the rest of my life, I’ll lose it.”

That made him laugh quietly.

Mandy watched him, waiting.

Then she said, more plainly this time, “I’m serious.”

He could tell.

That was the thing with Mandy. When she was joking, it sat differently in her face. When she actually meant something, the edges got quieter.

“You want a vacation,” he said.

“Yes.”

He leaned back farther in the chair. “We’ve had breaks.”

Mandy stared at him. “You bought me coffee last week and we went home early one night.”

“That counts.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

He was still smiling when he looked back at the laptop. “You bought new shoes.”

Mandy threw one of the couch pillows at him.

“That is not a vacation.”

He caught it against his chest, laughed, and said nothing else.

But two weeks later, they were on a plane.

Mandy still did not know where they were going.

That had annoyed her from the second he booked it, but only in the way things annoyed her when she was secretly enjoying them too. She kept asking and he kept refusing to answer, which only made her more suspicious. By the time they were in their seats and the plane had leveled out, she had already threatened to go through his emails twice.

Now she sat by the window with her arms crossed, looking over at him with the expression she always wore when she thought he was being smug on purpose.

“You still haven’t told me.”

Lip adjusted slightly in the seat. “You’ll know soon enough.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It kind of is.”

Mandy narrowed her eyes. “You know I hate surprises.”

“You hate bad surprises.”

“I hate all of them until I know what they are.”

That was fair.

He looked over at her and smiled a little. “Too late now.”

She turned back toward the window like she was done with him, but he could still see the corner of her mouth trying not to move. She was annoyed, but not enough to stop watching the clouds like they might give her the answer early.

About forty minutes later, the plane started descending.

Mandy looked out the window again, absentmindedly at first. Then she leaned closer.

The ocean came into view, wide and bright under the afternoon sun.

Palm trees.

Long pale strips of beach.

Buildings that looked nothing like Chicago.

She went still for half a second before turning toward him.

“Wait.”

Lip said nothing.

Her eyes searched his face, then flicked back toward the window.

“Miami?”

He gave one shoulder a small shrug. “Felt warmer than home.”

Mandy stared at him for another second, then laughed under her breath and shook her head.

“Okay, that’s actually good.”

“That okay sounds suspicious.”

“It means I’m deciding whether I’m impressed or mad.”

“And.”

Mandy looked back at him, smiling now without bothering to hide it. “A little impressed.”

That was good enough.

The hotel room overlooked the beach.

That was the first thing Mandy saw and the only thing that mattered for the first full minute after they got inside. Lip barely had time to drop their bags near the bed before she was already heading straight for the balcony doors.

The room itself was better than he had let her expect. Clean lines. Big bed. Light walls. The kind of place that tried very hard to make even ordinary furniture look expensive. But none of it stood a chance against the view.

Mandy stepped out onto the balcony and stopped.

“Ocean,” she said, like she was confirming it was real.

Lip came up behind her with his hands in his pockets.

The air was warm in a way that felt strange after Chicago. Not sticky, not yet. Just soft. The breeze came off the water carrying salt and the low sound of the beach below. Farther down, music drifted up from somewhere near the bar by the pool.

Mandy turned in a slow circle and looked back at him.

“This is insane.”

He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Not bad.”

She laughed once. “You’re underselling it.”

He looked out at the water for a second. “Thought you’d like it.”

That landed more naturally between them, easy and quiet.

Mandy looked at him for a second, then back toward the horizon. “Yeah. I do.”

They did almost nothing the first day, which turned out to be exactly what both of them needed.

They walked along the beach without talking much at first, just letting the heat and the sound of the water do most of the work. Mandy took her shoes off and carried them in one hand until she got annoyed by the sand and made Lip carry them instead. They got drinks at a bar near the water where nobody knew their names, and that alone felt like half the vacation. They swam. They sat in the sun until both of them got too warm and had to go back inside.

For once, the day did not belong to numbers.

No dashboards. No product photos. No supplier pages. No ads. No calculations running behind everything. Just heat, salt, and the strange feeling of time not being measured by notifications for a little while.

That part lasted until nighttime.

Back in the hotel room, Mandy sat cross-legged on the bed with the laptop open while Lip leaned back against the headboard beside her, one arm behind his head and the other resting across his stomach.

The dashboard refreshed.

“Phone cases are lower today,” she said.

“Weekend,” he answered.

She clicked over to the other store. “Clothing still did one eighteen.”

Lip looked at the numbers. “That’s fine.”

She checked messages, scanned supplier updates, and then shut the laptop with a clean little snap.

“Okay.”

He glanced over. “What.”

She put the laptop on the nightstand. “Work’s done.”

“That was quick.”

Mandy turned toward him and shifted closer across the bed. “That’s because we’re not here to stare at graphs.”

He smiled faintly. “Fair point.”

She settled one knee between his legs and looked at him in that direct way she had when she already knew what she wanted and didn’t feel like waiting around for him to catch up.

“You know what the best part of being here is?”

Lip looked at her. “What.”

“No one’s gonna knock on the door asking for something.”

He laughed quietly. “That is a strong perk.”

“No Gallagher drama.”

“Very strong perk.”

“No Carl deciding to light something on fire for fun.”

“That one’s up there.”

“No Frank.”

That made him laugh harder.

Mandy smiled and slid a hand up under his shirt. “Exactly.”

He looked down at her hand, then back at her face. “And what else.”

She leaned in close enough that he could feel the warmth of her skin before she kissed him.

After that, the room got a lot less useful for talking.

Later, much later, Mandy lay on her back beside him with the balcony door still cracked open. The sound of the ocean drifted in low and steady, mixing with the air conditioning and the city noise far below.

Neither of them had reached for the laptop again.

Mandy turned her head toward him. “You know this means we’re going to have to do this again.”

Lip looked over. “Go on vacation?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled a little. “I can live with that.”

She rolled her eyes. “I mean real ones. More places.”

He smiled a little. “You’re planning the next trip already.”

“Obviously.”

She shifted onto her side and rested her head against his shoulder. “We worked too hard not to enjoy any of it.”

He looked out through the open balcony door toward the dark line of the ocean.

For a second, neither of them said anything.

Then he said, “Yeah.”

Mandy’s hand rested lightly against his chest. The room smelled like clean sheets, salt air, and the faint remains of sunscreen from earlier in the day.

There was no need to add anything to it.