5. Thea
THEA
Sneaking out of a hotel room is a project, and projects have phases.
Phase two is extraction, and the complication there is that my legs don’t work. I discover this on my first attempt to leave the bed, when I slide out from under a heavy arm and stand, and my knees offer the structural integrity of warm frosting.
I grip the nightstand and wait out the wobble. My whole body is one long ache with a satisfied expression, and my wrists hold a faint silk-burn that flares hot in my face when I look at it.
I have some memories to process.
And I’ll be processing them for a business quarter.
Behind me, Max sleeps on his back, one arm now flung across the space I vacated, breathing evenly. Asleep, with his pale eyes closed and the watchfulness switched off, he looks less like a threat and more like a man.
Silver stubble. One old scar shining faint at his ribs where the city light touches it. The thing stands out among the black ink around it, a small oasis. Something in my chest wobbles worse than my knees do, and I stand there in the dark, holding my shoes, waiting for that to pass, too.
This is why I leave. Right there. That wobble is exactly why.
Klaus never noticed that I hate sleeping next to people. Not the activity before the sleeping. The sleeping. Every cough, every turn, every blanket negotiation snaps me awake, and by morning I’m a wrung-out rag in a more-desperate-than-usual-for-caffeine kind of way.
I like my own bed, my own pillow with the dent in the correct place, my cat annexing his quarter of the mattress despite composing one percent of its population.
Waking up next to another human is a level of intimacy I didn’t prepare for tonight, and it takes me some preparation to do it comfortably. Or comfortable-adjacent.
Tonight was the other thing, and the other thing was perfect, and the way to keep it perfect is to be gone before it can turn into a morning.
The wobble passes. Phase two complete.
Phase three is getting dressed, and the dress fights back.
I get it up over my hips and shoulders, and then the zipper hums to the middle of my back and stops, because the last four inches of that zipper have required an assistant every time I’ve worn this thing, and my assistant options at present are a wall and a sleeping stranger.
Definitely not waking him.
I perform a full minute of silent contortions against my own spine. The zipper wins. Fine. My coat covers the gap, October covers the coat, and I’ve survived worse wardrobe failures at better-lit events.
I ease the door open. Hallway light falls in a thin bar across the carpet, just touching the foot of the bed. He hasn’t moved. His arm’s still lying across the empty half of the bed, holding the shape of where I was.
Bye, Max. Thanks for everything, and I do mean everything.
The door clicks shut behind me, and the corridor is all hush, carpet and dim sconces and a hundred strangers breathing behind numbered doors.
My heels stay in my hand, because heels at four in the morning are optional until I’m outside.
I aim for the elevators, half-zipped, hair beyond the help of professionals, moving in the special silent walk of a woman who would like no one to know what she’s been up to.
Just a few doors down, the neighboring suite opens, and a man steps out directly into my path, and I stop so fast my shoulder brushes the wallpaper.
He’s big. Not gym big. Occupational big, like a bricklayer, filling the doorframe in a black sweater and black pants.
He’s bald, and his scalp is a mess of old scars, ridged lines crossing each other in a pattern that no accident would draw.
More scarring pulls at one cheek, tugging the corner of his mouth toward his ear in a way that suggests a smile even at rest. He has a phone in one hand and a toothpick in the other corner of his mouth, and it appears he’s fully dressed and going somewhere, same as me.
Our eyes meet, and the corridor narrows. I do not want to share an elevator with this man. Or a hallway. Or a city.
Two seconds. That’s all it is. Two seconds of eye contact with a stranger in a hallway, and in those two seconds his gaze does a slow, unhurried inventory of me, and arrives at my face with the toothpick rolling, leisurely, from one corner of his mouth to the other.
Then his eyes slide past me, to the door I just came out of, and hold there.
And he breathes in slow, through the nose. His head tips a degree to one side, and the resting smile deepens by a fraction, without any warmth whatsoever. A sound comes out of him. Quiet. Two notes, hummed, almost merry. A little tune for a private occasion.
Every hair on my arms stands up at once. He must smell sex on me.
He steps back and to the side, making room for me to pass, and executes a small, courteous sweep of the phone hand. After you.
The courtesy is the worst part. The courtesy is a costume, fake, and we both know it. But I walk past him because the only other option is to stand still, and I do not want to be near him any longer than I have to be.
Ten steps of hallway. I feel his attention on the bare gap in my zipper the entire way, even though I know he can’t see through my jacket. The doors open. I step in, turn around, and he hasn’t moved.
Not one fraction of an inch.
He stands in the middle of the corridor watching me with the phone now raised loosely at his side, not quite pointed at me, not quite not, and as the doors begin to close, he lifts two fingers off it in a small salute, and the last thing I see through the narrowing gap is the toothpick rolling.
The doors seal. My breath comes out all at once and fogs the brushed steel.
“Okay,” I tell my reflection, which has gone a fun shade of gray. “That was creepy as fuck.”
By the lobby, I’ve constructed a reasonable explanation, because constructing reasonable explanations is my profession.
Hotels are full of frightening men this early in the morning.
That’s what hotels are for. He’s probably somebody’s driver, somebody’s bodyguard, or somebody’s very committed personal trainer—and he was creepy at me for two seconds.
But I’ll never see him again in my life.
Shake it off, girl.
The valet brings my Honda around to the valet zone, where it sits, looking deeply embarrassed among the luxury cars, and I tip him too much for both of us, then drive home.
My hands stop shaking somewhere on the bridge.
I can take a full breath by the time I wedge my key into my apartment’s lock.
My place is a third-floor walkup in Queens with radiators that clank in a pattern I’ve decided to hear as affection.
I get the door open, flip the light on, and find Potato on the kitchen counter, illegally seated beside the cookie jar, which is on its side and now mostly empty.
Potato is a Scottish Fold I did not select. He picked me two years ago by sitting outside this building every day, looking fat and tragic until I cracked. The Cat Distribution System hard at work.
He’s brown, built along the lines of a fuzzy football with ambitions, and his left ear performs the fold while the right one never got the memo.
His tail has a bend at the end from a past he declines to discuss.
He observes me observing the crime scene, and his golden-yellow eyes hold no remorse, only the serene confidence of a creature who has never once feared a consequence.
“You have food,” I remind him. “There’s food in your bowl. I can see it from here.”
Potato says nothing, because bowl food is for emergencies and the jar was right there.
He drops off the counter with a thud that shakes the floorboards and escorts me to his dish, herding my ankles, yelling the whole way.
I feed him because one of us should get what he wants without complications, and he punches into the wet food while I lean against the counter in my coat and let the night finally catch up.
So… That happened, I think as I pull the pins out of my hair over the sink, one by one, small metallic pings on the ceramic in the quiet. The adrenaline drains. There’s a pleasant ache everywhere. When I reach for my facial cloth, I see the silk-burns on my wrists.
And smile.
The ghost of a low voice against the back of my neck, informing me that a birthmark I’ve had for twenty-seven years is under new management. So delightfully cocky of him.
Klaus never noticed that birthmark. Eight months, and he never once found it. A stranger located it inside an hour and claimed it.
He claimed me.
It was a calculated risk to go bareback with Max, but I didn’t see anything worrisome on his skin, and I’ve been on the pill since I was fifteen, so I’m not too concerned. I should schedule a blood test just in case, though.
It’s odd—I never go bare with a guy on the first night.
But I had a… gut feeling about Max. Like he wouldn’t hurt me like that.
Na?ve in the extreme, I know. But still. He called himself dangerous, and I believe that, but there was something about him that made me drop my guard.
Maybe that’s the real dangerous part.
That’s tomorrow’s problem. Correction—today. Today is going to be a problem, and it’s already today.
In all fairness to me, Klaus told me to handle the stranger, and the stranger has been handled. Distracted, comprehensively, for hours, kept far away from Klaus the entire time.
If anything, I over-delivered, which is what my performance reviews always say.
But I vanished from an event I was running.
I never cleared the ballroom, never supervised the breakdown, never signed the final vendor sheet.
The hotel staff can do all of it without me, and none of it is technically fatal, and every bit of it is unlike me, because I’m the one who handles everything, always.
For once, I was unreliable, and it was everything I dreamed it could be.
I check my phone. Forty-one notifications. Vendors, the banquet manager, a rental company confirming a pickup window I already confirmed twice, one from Mandy at 1:14 a.m. that says only “girl.”
Nothing from Klaus. Not one message.
I was his to send across a ballroom at nine, not around for the rest of the night, and there it is, eight months summarized on one screen. He truly never gave a shit about me.
Potato finishes eating and begins his post-meal project of pushing a pen toward the counter’s edge, one patient paw at a time, watching me while he does it.
I don’t regret what I did tonight. Not long ago, I sat in a dentist’s parking lot with half my face numb, reading a breakup text. Then I got up the next morning and worked on my ex’s party because I handle my shit. That’s who I am.
But tonight, for a few hours, I wasn’t the woman who handles things. Somebody looked at all of me, every soft inch I’ve spent years apologizing for in fitting-room mirrors and called it magnificent in a voice that closed the discussion, then spent hours proving he meant it.
I deserve a treat. One without guilt. So, screw it. I needed some fun, and I had some. Case closed.
The pen goes over the edge. Potato peers down after it, satisfied with gravity’s performance, tail tip flicking.
I shower off the evening, wincing in a way I don’t mind, and climb into my own bed with the dent in the correct place.
Potato lands beside me and starts up his purr, a small brown motor settling in for his shift.
Out the window, Queens is going from charcoal to slate, and I wonder whether my morally gray hookup had a good time.
He sure seemed to. I dare say I wore him out.
I smirk as I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.