Page 20 of Up All Night
Chapter 7
“This one okay?” Hadrian pointed to a nondescript hotel by the station. The quintessential love hotel, where couples with no privacy at home come to do their romantic deeds all over each other.About fucking time!I wanted to shout into the parking garage entrance. My body was awake again.“Oh, hey, we’re doing this? Sweet. Let me get horny as fucking hell again. Is this the guy? Damn, girl, this guy is hot! Look at that smile! You gonna get that smile all over our pussy soon?”
Shut up, body. You’re not helping!
“This one’s fine.” I tried to hide my excitement. After all, I was a shy and retiring young lady who treated this one night stand as the biggest non deal of her life. Didn’t want to scare the man off, you know.
Then again, my apparent reservations were not giving Hadrian much confidence. The results, however, were nothing short of hilarious. “You sure? We do this? You okay?”
This man was going to fish for my consent until the end of time, wasn’t he? Then again, with his basic English and my coy American attitude, who could blame him?
“Yes. Let’s go.”
He crossed his arms with a smug sensibility that almost made me lose my shit. Whatever language he thought in, the English translation was clearly,“Hell yeah, man, you are the absolute shit scoring this American chick!”
“Okay!” Hadrian uncrossed his arms and marched toward the hotel. “Let’s do it!”
He had no idea what that meant in English, did he?
Full confession: I had never been to a love hotel before. Oh, I knew all about them, thanks to common expat knowledge and tales from friends, but actually in one? Nope.
For the ignorant and confused, a love hotel is not your usual hotel. It’s a place built around romancing your partner and eventually hitting that home run that makes baseball look cute and trite. Some hotel rooms are perfectly innocuous, and you have no idea you’re in one until you find all the porn on TV and the bowls of condoms on your headboard. Usually, though, they’re themed. Some of the themes are utterly ridiculous, like “fairy tale in the woods” or “leopard print paradise.” You also don’t get assigned a random room by the check-in desk. Instead, you pick your own room, where you are presented with previews of the themes and the hourly prices. In the case of this hotel, the rooms were rented for whole nights only.
We stood in front of the LCD panel. About half of them hadReservedstamped on them, and the ones leftover were fairly average – if ostentatious is considered average. (No leopard print, though.) Hadrian looked at me and asked, “Which one you like?”
His tone and erratic mannerisms implied he still couldn’t believe this was happening. I had broken the man. So, I did what any woman getting ready to bed a hot dude would do: I put a reassuring arm on his shoulder and said, “You choose.” He was paying for it, anyway. A consummate gentleman ‘til the end!
“This one?” His smile almost blew his face off as he pointed to a white and gold themed room. “Or maybe this one?”
I don’t remember what the other room looked like. Because my finger smashed the button for the gold and white room before we could dally any longer. This man had bones in need of jumping, and I had body parts in need ofhumping.
The ticket spat out of the machine. Hadrian snatched it and turned toward the check-in desk, his eyes never leaving my determined visage. “Like that?”
“Like that.” I pretended to be completely taken in with the previews of the other rooms while he paid and received the key from the proper-looking lady behind the desk.
The elevator was a tiny, cramped thing that forced lovers into close proximity. I had another one of those moments, as we rode up in silence, where I realized I was about to settle down and have sex with a guy I had barely touched yet. It wasn’t the fact that we barely knew each other. I didn’t care about that. But so far that night we hadn’t as much as held hands. Hadrian made it clear he didn’t like unexpected touching. Would sitting on the couch with him and massaging his thigh be unexpected? Would he like that? This man clearly had the giddies for me. As flattering as that was, what were the boundaries? The limits? How were we going to sort this out? We were in a two-person elevator and not even touching!
I let him lead us to the room on the fourth floor. The place was so quiet, so well insulated that there could be swinging orgies going on in every room around us and we would have never heard. Good. I was loud in bed.
The room was exactly as promised in the preview. A decent size, with a queen-sized bed covered in gold and white-threaded blankets that were as inviting as they were awe-inspiring. The pale yellow walls had golden fleur-de-lis stenciled in particular places, while a faux-crystal chandelier glistened from the ceiling. Across from the bed was a huge flat screen TV with a…
Yes, that was a bedazzled karaoke box. It was also the first thing Hadrian pointed out after we took off our shoes and stepped into the room.
“Look! Karaoke! You can use.”
What I needed to use was the bathroom. A girl needed to make sure those condoms she went through so much trouble getting didn’t get up and run away from her bag. Because they would, the little shits.
I came out to find Hadrian sitting on the couch. The way the living area was laid out? The loveseat was pushed up into a corner, and the only way to access it was via Hadrian’s seat. He caught my eye the moment I entered, wondering if I should go ahead and take off my sweater.
Fuck it. I was going to sit next to this guy I intended to ride until the sunrise. I flashed him a coy smile as his facial muscles did a ridiculous dance to regain control of themselves.
If you’re reading this and imagining two grown adults who were both trying to act too cool in this situation for their own good, well… you would be right. Shame on us!
“Can I sit down?” I asked. Hadrian instantly slid over so I could get a spot on the couch. He sat up straight, mind wound up in rapid thought. Yeah, man, me too. I was going over how I would scoot up next to him and make his fucking night.
He was way ahead of me.
I hadn’t sat down for ten seconds before he said, “I want to kiss you.”
