Hotel Room
You knock; I open the door to let you in. You apologize, tell me it has started to rain, try to explain your lateness, but I tell you I don’t mind. I offer you a can of beer, and you say thanks, and then you hesitate, look at me, and I think about looking away, but I don’t.
I want to say that the thought of you has been filling up my lungs. Instead, I tell you, it’s good to see you. You nod and say the same.
The walls of this hotel room are pale pink, the wallpaper thick like it’s been woven out of cotton. You sit on one bed and I sit on the other. Your hair is longer than I remember it being, and I smile at you, but I don’t say anything.
I don’t say anything because what is there to say. We should not be here.
We should not be here, but here we are. Our longing at last, something I might admit.
I’ve been drinking the same beer for a while now, so it’s gotten warm. I’m not drunk, nor do I want to be. To be drunk is not to remember each moment, and for months I have wondered at this meeting, its possibility.
I lean my head against the wall and bite the inside of my cheek, expose my throat to you if you’re looking.
The curtains are pulled back. The windows reveal the darkness of the middle of the night. There’s no lightning but the rain makes us feel enclosed and you say, I like that it’s raining. And I like it, too, but I don’t say it.
The moon peers in, obvious and holy. The pink walls heave and sigh.
You move to the edge of the bed so you’re across from me, our knees not quite touching.
How long has it been since we last saw each other you? you ask.
A while, I say, five years at least. Since I moved away.
I can tell you think about moving closer but you don’t. You play with the tab of your beer. Your hand encircling the can. My open suitcase on the bed beside you.
You know I’m married now, I say, and you say, okay, because you already knew this. Have known of my relationship all the time we’ve known each other. You were just 19 when we met, nearly a decade between us in age, a gulf, though more I was the one responsible for you, your work, whatever it was you’d learn under my care. Any flirtation between us always unspoken, impossible, wrong.
But here we are, I say and blush, and so I ask you to tell me a story.
A story about what? you ask. I hold my hands apart, mimicking the distance between us.
The space between bodies like ours, I say. All right, you say, then it’s only the sound of the rain till you start speaking.
The story you tell is about your present life, a woman you met at a bar a few months back. How she approached you hazy with drink, said you reminded her of James Dean, asked how old you were and you lied.
You tell me about this woman, a woman older than you, like me, and how you went home with her without knowing who she was, anything about her, but that she reminded you of me because of how she made you laugh, how she pulled you onto the dance floor, drunk, and pressed herself against you and apologized, and you knew that you believed yourself in control, the power of your youth and looks, but it was her doing. It was all her doing. And so you slept together first one day and then the next. And you felt like you were in a whirlpool, sinking somewhere you couldn’t see, not a bad place, but a place unknown so you grabbed for the edge to catch yourself, and now tonight, you’re here with me, instead.
I don’t feel jealous even if this is what you intend. I try to imagine her, her hips, the color of her hair, but she’s not a person to me. Everything about your life a mirage, a shadowy mix I do not penetrate. Our lives lived in other places, other states. The person I love absented to the edges of my mind and instead just possibility, precarity. Just the sound of your voice, the smell of your leather jacket drying from the rain, the feel of your body as I hugged you hello.
See, I told you once, tipsy, an accidental run-in at a bar, our shoulders brushing as we spoke, my partner away at his office, you with your fake ID, trespassing.
See, I whispered. How with our bodies we might wield hurt.
You take a swallow of your beer and then you lean toward me, ask me if I’ve changed my mind? From up close I see that you’re not beautiful as I remember you, but beautiful still. Your eyebrows thick and overgrown, your skin pockmarked from your teenage years. We’re inches apart, our mouths. I stay in the liminal space of your being until my body can’t stand it anymore. I lean back.
You move closer to me and I can feel the heat from your body like a wave.
I’m not being fair to you, I say, and you disagree. You say, it’s good to talk with you. To see you. I don’t need anything else but this.
The rain continues and I ask for another story. I want to hear you talk so I can extend this feeling inside of me, a vibration prehistoric.
A feeling, tender and infinite in its passing.
You move from the bed to the floor and lean your back against where I’m lying so we’re close again. My face above yours, resting on my palms.
You describe a summer camp you attended as a teenager. The sweet smell of skunk lingering in the cold morning air. Everyone gathered outside the breakfast hall, seeing each other half-asleep and exposed. An intimacy you’d not before known. You remember the softness inside the pockets of your hooded sweatshirt as you leaned against a tree’s rough bark waiting for the doors to open, and all the while you could sense the body of the girl you liked standing nearby. Her hair still wet from the shower and you wondered if she felt cold. But you didn’t say anything, you didn’t ask. You were too shy, afraid.
She was the first girl you kissed, you tell me, lovely, dark-haired, careful with her words. You lean away to reach for your beer, and I can no longer feel you against me, and come back, I think.
How I wish I were that girl, that I was longed for by you in this way, and then you lean back against me, and now you stroke my leg with your hand, and I am alive again, made neon by desire.
Of course we mourn for what once was, for what we lose in aging, in settling for a single love—but to risk it all again for longing, for the unknown?
You’re quiet. Your second story finished. The rain hums. You wait for me to tell you what’s next, what’s possible. I think about rolling away from you, but I don’t. I’m still.
To you, this night is one of many of its kind. You will not think of it tomorrow, but I will hold its pieces in my mind until they’re raw and worn. You’ll uncover new bodies, and I’ll sift through my memories, and it’s not unfair but the truth of where we are. My days committed to the difficulties of maintaining love, and your days seeking out this love for yourself, and each of us lonely in our own way, I tell myself. Each of us lonely, though my want now is the loss of another.
I tell you we should get ready for sleep, that sleep is harmless, and I slip off my bra beneath my shirt, and you smile knowingly at me, but I do it anyways.
Outside our window, summer insects throb. The moon floats, cold and untethered.
I ask if you want to hear a story of mine, and you say okay, even though I know you’d rather stop talking altogether. And I say we’ve done nothing wrong, right? We’re only friends? And you agree. Whether or not this is true.
You stare at my chest. I push my shoulders back, my collarbone rises, something delicate, something sharp.
I tell you about a time in high school. I was sixteen and in my box of cereal I found a small stuffed horse. It came wrapped in plastic and when I unwrapped it, I felt its presence in my hand like a being. I decided this was God I ‘d unearthed and I kept it safe in my pocket, there to hold when I needed it and otherwise forgotten. I tell you this is something I told my high school boyfriend, what made him love me, or so I thought.
You don’t respond but you come to lie beside me on the bed. You gaze at me, my face. I wonder if you see the ways I’ve begun to age. The softness in my neck. The lines at the edges of my eyes. Whether or not it matters what I look like now because of who I was. Who I am.
I turn away from you, try to make my body a clean line.
You ask if you can hold me. Then I feel your arm move slowly to circle my waist. It rests across my stomach just below my breasts and I try not to breathe so that I can stay as far away as possible, but I breath and this moves my flesh toward you.
You press up against me and I feel the electric hum between our bodies. Each node of our skins’ connection a note pinged and lingering in the space between us.
Here is the taste of three am. The raw sweat of the day exhausted on our bodies and the night winking through the window, hungry.
You move your hand up and down my side. The intention of your touch something I want to quantify. To measure and repeat and hold in my pocket. One inch of the air in this room to be bottled in its state of longing and dispersed at random into the everyday I will soon return to.
And that I need this, this dream of desire, caught like a lightning bug in the jar of my chest, and will you need this someday as well, does everyone, or is it only me? I press against you, the thinness of our clothes all we have left, and couldn’t I turn toward you?
Let our breath mingle in the space between our bodies and just the smallest move forward brings your mouth against mine and the taste of you is nothing unexpected but necessary. Quickly we lose ourselves, the readiest I’ve ever been with this endless delay, and you hold me, worry my sides with your hands because you’ve also always wanted this, because it was not what we were meant to have and is that all that makes it what we want, the risk, the wrongness? But we don’t care. I consume you as best I can, your sweet skin, the softness of your hair, and you hold me down roughly, eager in your haste, readying yourself, forgetting me, entering me, finishing, and just like that it’s done it’s over, there’s nothing more. Nothing.
And this is why I don’t turn toward you. I can’t turn toward you, don’t you see? Because it will end and what is the worth of an act consummated, an orgasm won and forgotten, when the memory, the mason jar of longing lasts longer never uncapped, never opened, saved for always later even if that later is never, it never comes.
We will do nothing. I know it, and now, so do you. The pain I wreak will not trespass the skin. But this—our bodies together, the just before—it feels right. To be only in your arms. To pretend it isn’t wrong, to linger on the precipice and believe for now, it’s right.
A few hours later, fallen asleep in each other’s arms still clothed, I wake. You’re beside me and I roll on my back, careful that our bodies might no longer touch.
I gaze at your sleeping face, a face just now touched by the broken eye of the early morning’s light. So lovely to see you this way, unadorned. A gift, I know. I have not forgotten the innocence of a sleeping body, the intimacy of a stranger’s trust.
I hesitate, but then I touch your shoulder, waking you. I’m sorry, I say, and you look at me. You look at me, and you shake your head, okay.
What else is there for you to say. Okay.
I don’t tell you that the pain of the one I love has blossomed in the rooms of my mind, turning everything red and soft and blurry, and myself and my guilt shrinking and blinding me, despite the desire that still runs through me. I don’t say this, and I don’t know it’s anything you could imagine, but maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe you know we will never see each other again and this is why. Maybe you know what you’ve given me, an electric salve to inject into my everyday life, and what have I given you but the intimacy of what never was, the feeling of edge? Or is it darker, that I have used your youth and lust, taken them assuming their abundance. What I might never know because I will never ask.
I stand, and so you stand, too, and we hold each other.
My body presses against yours, and I rest my face against your neck, touch your hair with my fingers holding onto, your smell, a citizen of my being, but only for so long. Already, you pull away from me. You’ll pull away, and then you’ll be gone, you’re gone.
A thing undone, and yet the same, it’s done.
Rebecca Bernard’s debut collection of stories, Our Sister Who Will Not Die won the Non/Fiction Prize held by The Journal and was published by Mad Creek Books in August 2022. Recent fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, and Wigleaf among other venues. She is an Assistant Professor at Angelo State University and serves as a Fiction Editor for The Boiler.
