Page 12 of Only You

But as I stripped down to my boxer-briefs and went to sleep, I couldn’t get the image of Molly out of my head.

7

Molly

The Day He Asked Me Out

I couldn’t get the image of Donovan out of my head. Standing on the balcony, holding the pasta like my own personal Prince Charming.

I didn’t handle embarrassment well. One time when I was a teenager, I accidentally called my calculus teacher “mom” in front of the whole class. For a week after that, I pretended to have the flu so I could stay home from school. It wasn’t a big deal, and nobody else remembered it now. ButIwas mortified, and I still thought about the memory to this day.

As far as embarrassing moments went, yelling at Donovan in the lobby was probably in my Top Five. I had quickly forgotten about it because of the pandemic and the hotel locking down, but now that I knew he was my neighbor, all the embarrassment came rushing back tenfold. It was even worse now because he had been giving me food!

And then, when he found out it was me, he didn’t get upset. He did the opposite: he made mecookies!

What kind of guy did that?

He invited me out to the balcony again, but I didn’t dare accept. I couldn’t even respond. Just the thought of going out there and facing him made me cringe. I was too scared to even go out and retrieve my bottle of wine. All I wanted to do was crawl in bed and disappear.

It was made worse by the overwhelming urge to call my mom. She would have listened to the story, laughed with me about it, and then made me feel better.

I just want to go home, I thought.

I was bored the next day. I took another luxurious bath to kill some time in the morning, and when I got out, I had a text waiting on my phone.

Donovan: Sorry, no breakfast today. I’m running low on supplies. But I have leftover pasta from last night if you’re hungry.

I ignored the text because I was still too embarrassed to reply.

By the afternoon I was going stir-crazy, so I decided to venture out of my room. I tied a T-shirt around my face again as a makeshift mask. It made me feel like a bank robber.

The hotel tower was shaped like a square, with four hallways making up the sides. If I walked down the hall, after four left turns I would end up back where I began.

The first hallway had a few rooms, the elevator, and the vending machine.

The next hall was full of hotel rooms, all of which were empty.

The next hall had more empty hotel rooms, plus the gym with the big “CLOSED” sign taped to the door in five languages. The wall between the hallway and the gym was all glass, giving me a view of the interior for seven or eight steps.

The last hall was like the second one, filled only with empty rooms. Then I was back to the hall with my room.

I circled my floor like a power-walker at the mall. After a few minutes I started getting into a rhythm.

My hall.

Empty hall.

Gym hall.

Empty hall.

I wondered how long the loop was, so on the next lap I counted my steps. It was about fifty steps per length, or two hundred total. How many were in a mile? About two thousand? That sounded right.

With nothing else to do, I decided to walk at least two miles. Twenty laps.

I put in my earbuds and listened to a news podcast. Normally they covered a wide variety of subjects, but today they were only talking about the pandemic. So far, the United States hadn’t implemented any containment measures. There were several more cases in Washington and Oregon, and rumors of two cases down in California. The CDC said they were monitoring the situation and would present guidelines if things got worse.

In Europe, the only countries to institute travel bans were Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. International travel was still permitted everywhere else. On my twelfth lap, a brilliant idea came to me: I could travel to a neighboring country like Austria and fly home from there!

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