• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 280 0

successful chain of boutique business hotels located as close to major airports as the Transportation Security Administration will allow. The success of this and all the properties in the Here Hotel Group depends greatly on the failings of the airline industry. Investors are banking serious money on current travel trends indicating that the number of stranded, grounded, or otherwise waylaid passengers will only continue to escalate. When forced to spend a night in a city they never wanted to visit in the first place, and given the choice between chic cheap and chiggers cheap, most airport refugees will choose the former. Jessica has spent too many nights in too many hotels to be impressed or depressed by any hospitality industry amenities or lack thereof. As for Marcus, he has just spent a week sleeping three people to a two-person tent. As long as they don’t check out with a parasitic infestation they didn’t check in with, both have fully embraced the motto: “If you can’t get where you want to be, you might as well stay Here.”

They have barely spoken since stepping off the shuttle train. It’s not an uncomfortable silence, exactly, but rather a mutually accepted silence with an edge, a silence between two people who recognize that they have agreed to share roughly twelve hours in each other’s company (minus whatever is lost to sleep) but have no idea how that time span—one that feels simultaneously luxuriant and meager—will be spent. Jessica worries there are far too many hours to fill with amusing anecdotes and idle gossip, especially when Marcus is pushing for truth and dare. And Marcus fears that time is too short for anything but, particularly after Jessica’s professed reluctance to play along. They both try to make sense of the most perplexing aspects of their conversation thus far. (Why didn’t she want to tell me about that girl Sunny? he wonders. Why didn’t his story about the watch make any sense? she wonders.) They ask themselves if they should have said more (Why didn’t I just tell her about The Queen’s uncanny prediction? Or the true meaning of the watch? Or Greta?) or less (Why did I blurt out Lens name? Why was I so snarky about Hope? Why did I keep bringing up Sunny?).

Jessica takes a risk. She decides to say something. “It’s a nice room,” she mumbles, her face half pressed into a goose-down pillow.

“It is a nice room,” Marcus replies, standing on the opposite side of the second double bed.

“I am particularly fond of the soothing palette of earth tones,” remarks Jessica. “It’s nice.”

“I myself am quite taken with the roomy walk-in shower,” responds Marcus, “and the complimentary spa-quality toiletries.”

“Very nice.”

“A nice room at a nice price.”

“For two nice people.”

“The nicest.”

Jessica laughs uneasily, wondering how long they can keep this up. Marcus keeps going.

“This bed,” he says, placing both hands flat on the one he has chosen. He pumps up and down a few times in quick succession, as if he’s performing CPR on the mattress.

“What about this bed?” Jessica asks as if by rote, feeling like the straight woman paid to set up the star comic’s punch line.

“It’s like the gun in Act One,” he says.

Jessica stares blankly.

“When a director reveals a gun in Act One, it’s sure to return in a major way in Act Two.”

As Jessica shakes her head, her ponytail loosens and makes a soft swish-swishing sound against the bed linens. “I assure you, Marcus, that when this bed returns in a major way, as you say, it will do so for the purpose of sleeping.”

Marcus grins. “If you say so.”

“I do.”

The innuendo could end here. It should end here. And yet Jessica can’t mind her tongue as it tongues Marcus’s mind.

“By the way,” she says, releasing her hair from its elastic and shaking it over the pillows. “The bed isn’t the only place you’re not going to have sex with me.”

Marcus raises an eyebrow.

“You’re also not going to have sex with me on the floor, in that office chair over there, in the shower, or in the elevator down the hall. There is no limit to the places where you’re not going to have sex with me.