You can hear the door’s mechanism scratch ever so
lightly, but you are the only one. The room only has a single bed with a single occupant, a stranger
lying face-up on the bed with his eyes closed, just as you expected. You knew how the hotel was laid
out, which rooms were singles, from a few evenings of easy research.
Your hands in front, careful not to touch anything, your feet carefully planning each step, you
grab a stray pillow and inch closer to the stranger. You step over a still damp crumpled t-shirt. A
cartoon pirate on it scowls as he appears to yell something. You walk up to the edge of the bed,
minutely aware of each movement of you toes and heels, making everything silent. A CD sits on his
night table along with a book. A crack in the hard plastic runs through the word Buddha on the front of
the album, and the white cover of the book lies open to reveal more about Malcolm Gladwell. His face
is right below yours. His face is slightly tanned, but you can see speckles of discoloration, especially
directly beneath his eyes. He is young. The hairs on his precisely trimmed beard are still visibly thin.
You can feel traces of his warm breaths on your face. His breathing is erratic and strange. There is a
faint hoarseness to every breath that you cannot help but notice. You looked into his eyelids just for a
moment before you covered them with a pillow. He was awake immediately. You felt him struggle
beneath you but you knew he could not match your strength. You hear faint noises but whatever the
pillow doesn’t catch is only heard by you. You feel different muscles flex, pinned beneath your legs. It
is exhilarating. Each movement of his feeds your pleasure. He is powerless to stop you.
A few minutes later he lies in the same position as before, eyes closed, mouth slightly ajar, the
lips powdery white at the corners from dryness. You breathe in the air deeply, you can almost taste
sweetness in it. You had never felt so alive and real as you did in that moment. It was all fast. If you
had blinked you could have missed it. Everything can change in the instant of a blink.
You pull on the feet. They are bare, but cold now. You had been staring at the body for quite a
while. The feet are dangling, helpless, off the side of the bed. You bent and clutched his body, one
hand on the undersides of the knees, the other just below the shoulder blades. You can feel bones from
his spine sticking uncomfortably into you. He was a bony kid, probably just out of college. The Robin
Hood design on his t-shirt makes you even surer of his youth.
You reach the bathroom with the stranger in your arms. 