Remembering Room 503

I watch the young woman across the street tear about the bedroom of her hotel like a bride trying to primp the house for her disapproving mother-in-law. She skirts frantically in her silky chemise, doing multiple sit-ups and looking at the bed. She is obviously in wait for her lover. He may be a married man or an office love affair; one thing that resonates is her intense need for this to go just right. I can pretend to hear her practice each love murmur, each little nothing to be whispered; the offer of a drink, the first gentle kiss. Sit-ups follow to tighten her belly and thighs that ache with tension. First it is a flop on the couch. A pose with legs crossed seems far too formal.

With the wooden matchsticks I took from my hotel room in Montreal, I light my Cuban cigar and think of what our first night together must have looked like. I know that smoking it will make me ill, but somehow that is what I want anyway.

I never thought we would share a hotel room. It was not in a moment I really ever believed would happen; a memory best left for my deepest fantasy. However, there she sat on the couch making subtle, unconscious movements to entice me. I had never really looked at her body before. It was only in this unreal situation that such a guilty act could seem permitted. The thin tautness of her hip bones pushed against the top of her jeans while the nervous laughter poured out from her lips in a soft way. It was almost like a dare for me to decide to be surrender. The gifts she had brought, and that I had nervously dismissed carrying into the cab, opened me up further as a testament that she listened to what I said in a fashion that not even I understood. With the story of bargaining for a goatskin drum, I felt moved to kiss her cheek. It was that single push, along my feeble attempts to cup the small of her back as we walked along streets I knew all to well from my own days and nights in this city, that served as my consent for something more to happen.

Were it not for the wine, I am not certain we would have let ourselves get closer. I don’t remember our first kiss other than being lost in it. The warmness, the sudden safety of it seems to have worn away my ability to place its exact premise, despite my undeniable memory of the pleasures in the action:  the pressing of skin, the whimperings of excitement that hoped to signal a want to continue, the sharpness of her bones against my hands. There was the permissive way she raised her right leg to outstretch above her head as she lay on the couch. Running my greedy hand down to the crotch of her jeans did not even cause any thought. It seemed such an obvious thing to do. Where we went and the dance we began blurs as she coerced me to dance in front of the window. Though I felt awkward, I could not deny her such a simple act. It was fun, and often fun comes from letting go of what one does not normally do.

Unhooking her bra with my left hand while we danced in front of the bedroom mirror brought about an immense sense of success on my part as you pushed into me, and then little comes to mind for a while. What happens over the course of the next few hours is fogged by two bottles of wine and the darkened bedroom, far from the window. In some way, her pants were peeled from her body in what could only have been the throes of passion, and it was there in the dimly lit room that I found my hand touching her, kissing her mouth while I found the wetness of her sex. In even those darkest places I had not been able to render how exactly it would feel to touch her, to work towards leading her to reach orgasm in my arms. Her weeping and exclamation that I wasn’t broken connected me to her perceptions of the moment, as I wanted to keep her safe and feel good about what we were sharing. She eagerly wriggled beneath the linen sheets until the force of pleasure exploded on her body; she arched her back and tightened her grip on my moving arm until the waves crested and fell.

The next words from my drunken mouth were a simple plea to have her hands touch me, to make me come in those hands, because I was indeed desperate for the touch of her palms across me. Ashamed of my request, I did retreat a bit into apologies, but as I felt her lubricated fingers pass across my cock I could do nothing but give in to what I felt must be a sacrifice. I was so unused to being touched, and though these hands felt strange, I was willing to let them push and pull me as the dancing had. It was that act of submission that let me whimper and moan my way to an extraordinary orgasm with its simple honestly and desire. As I rode out the blinding warmth pushing out of me, it was the lack of guilt, the lack of concern about whether I was causing a mess that liberated a piece of me in that hotel room bed. It would have been something quite extraordinary to see had the doors and curtains not been shut an hour earlier.

The woman across the street finally realizes her curtains are open. She resembles Jesus as she outstretches her arms to pull them closed. Shadows dance now like puppets in the warm spring night.