La Quinta -- in Spanish, it means "the fifth." To Matt, it meant a sad breakfast of pale bagels, bitter coffee, and tiny boxes of cereal he wouldn't look at twice in a grocery store. It meant light switches perpetually too far away from the bed and the cheapest shower curtains you'd ever see that weren't wrapped around a body on the lead story of the local news. Was it his fifth stay La Quinta this year? Was it the fifth La Quinta he'd booked in the Bay Area? He didn't know, he didn't care, and all he could really hold against the La Quinta at this point was that it didn't have a bar.
Matt hung his suit for tomorrow in the closet, and put his shirt on a hanger. He brought it into the bathroom and turned the shower on at full heat. If he could steam some of the travel wrinkles out of the pale cotton while he cleaned up, he might not have to wrestle with his room's dubious ironing board in the morning. Under the water, he flinched when the hot drops first lanced into his skin but endured because he knew it would loosen his plane-stiffened shoulders. Flying coach wasn't meant for people over six feet tall, and his travel budget had been too tight this month to spring for business class. He unwrapped the paper from the little block of soap. No matter where he went, East Coast, West Coast, Middle America, Deep South, one thing was constant: all hotel soap smelled the same. He scrubbed at his chest and arms, then his long thighs and calves. Turning away from the spray, he lathered his cock and balls with generous hands and stroked himself hard as water ran through his dark hair and down his back.
This was his game when his flight got in early enough. He teased his cock close to the point of release, then stopped and finished his shower, letting himself slowly drop back to soft. He loved the tension it put in him, the feeling of vibrating wire strung from hipbone to hipbone. It was that feeling he liked to take out to a bar to watch people and the tension that he liked to hold while deciding if he thought women across a dark room were attractive while twisting his wedding ring around and around on his finger. He toweled off, decided not to shave around his goatee until the morning then dressed in fresh khakis, a blue button-down, and a jacket against the San Francisco fog.
Matt always booked himself a rental car on business trips. Room service and hotel restaurants wore out their welcome with him in the first year of heavy travel. Now when he had the time, he spent his wait in the airport before boarding scrolling through online reviews to find places the locals liked that were far enough away from his hotel that he'd get to see some of the city. Then, if he was lucky, there was a decent bar nearby for some additional people watching - the same old basic cable crap and late night softcore porn got old about six months after hotel menus for him. Tonight, he had good fortune on both accounts: the fresh noodles, stretched between the fingers of an old Chinese lady with machine precision before being dropped into boiling broth, were worth the trip and down the block he spotted the red sign of the Mulberry Inn, bright in the light of the full moon.
Chinatown was for tourists, he'd been to the Bay enough to know that, but along the fringes was where you found the really interesting things, the family restaurants that had been operating for a hundred years but didn't make a big deal about it, the bodegas that were a thin veneer over all-night mah jong games in the back store room. The Mulberry Inn was exactly what he'd been looking for. The brick hotel was only six stories tall and lacked the glazed tiles and other Chinese-y architectural schtick of many of the buildings around it. It might have been built in the 1920s or 1930s, by his best guess. Matt knew hotels -- and he knew instinctively this one would have a bar.
Just off the lobby, he found exactly what he'd hoped. The Mulberry Inn had been grand and discreet at one point, the kind of place a black-and-white movie starlet may have escaped with a married lover for a weekend or reporters in the Woodward and Bernstein mold might have met a source to get confidential information on City Hall while putting back boilermakers and watching through the ferns for eavesdroppers. Now, its glory had faded but not fully departed the wood-paneled walls, brass rails, and framed botanical prints. A half dozen people nursed drinks against the foggy October night. Matt's preferred seat at any bar, the far right corner, was even open.
The bartender was young and eager-faced, Hispanic or maybe half-Chinese. It was hard to tell in the dark bar and San Francisco was such a melting pot Matt hardly thought it mattered. His jet hair was cut short on the sides, long and full across the top, a kid haircut. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow showing tattoos of thickly-outlined stars, roses, and skulls that, like this whole hotel, seemed to be a half-step out of modern. A few faded Chinese characters on the bartender's forearm, obviously put on earlier than the Sailor Jerry ink, made Matt think it was less likely the kid was Asian since he'd only seen people who didn't speak Chinese stamp themselves with it. Matt ordered a vodka martini, dirty, and did his first detailed sweep of the room.
At one table, two plump, pink blondes about thirty years apart, were drinking mai tais. Matt made them for mother and daughter, which was always an interesting interaction to watch in a bar. He was too far away to hear their conversation, but daughter seemed to be enthusiastically explaining something to Mom. Mom puzzled.
Here on vacation
, Matt thought,
Daughter's trying to get her to go to the Museum of Modern Art tomorrow.
At the bar with him was an older man drinking scotch who had hair as black as the kid behind the bar's, but a white moustache. A younger man sat between Matt and the old guy, a few seats away, draining a beer. Matt clocked him as a fellow business traveler. It was the familiarity of the guy's shoes -- when you first started traveling, you packed all these different shoes for flying, for work, for going out, for running on your hotel's wheezing treadmill. When you got more seasoned, you realized what a pain it was to pack that much and found a pair of shoes that looked nice enough for work, were comfortable enough you didn't mind wearing them out after, and slipped off for airport security. They weren't any good on the treadmill, but at that point most everyone had given up fighting against the caloric creep of room service. Matt hadn't. He ran every morning to keep trim and burn off some of the sexual energy he built up overnight in an empty bed.
Three men at one of the tables were sharing a pitcher of beer, laughing and doing imitations of someone. It wasn't a celebrity, so Matt guessed it was an officious co-worker. None of them seemed too pissed off, and it had the air of a well-worn joke among them when blowing off steam at the end of the day.
In the darkest back corner of the bar, at a high table by herself, was the woman he couldn't believe he hadn't noticed first when he walked in the door. Her honey blonde hair was parted deep on the left and nearly covered her right eye. Her skin was pale, even in the low light of the bar, and her eyes were rimmed in smoky makeup. If he hadn't seen her pick up the glass of dark wine in front of her and touch it to her glossy, carmine lips, he might have taken her for a mannequin set in the corner for further retro effect. She wore a simple black satin dress with enough of a plunge in the front that he could see the generous swells of her breasts and the deep shadow between them. She was easily the most attractive woman he'd seen in a bar this year, maybe in five years.
What made Matt's mouth go dry around his martini, though, were her stockings. She wore real silk stockings -- not pantyhose, not nylon thigh-highs. He couldn't see the backs of her legs, but he knew the light brown seams would be there, running from her heels to her garters. Most people wouldn't have been able to tell the difference, especially not across a dark bar, but Matt had a particular affinity for real silk stockings. Like a diehard Led Zeppelin fan can pick out one of their songs from just the opening chord, Matt was attuned enough to silk stockings that he could instantly find them on his peripheral vision just from the way they caught the light. His cock lunged, already primed from the shower and as surprised to see her shapely silks as the more rational parts of Matt. He shifted in his seat to hide his growing erection but still take her in without staring.
After he finished his martini, Matt ordered another and put a ten dollar tip on the bar for the kid.
"You see the blonde in the corner there?" Matt asked, casually. "You know if she's waiting here for someone?" The idea that a pretty woman in rare lingerie drinking alone in a tatty hotel bar was a working girl was foremost in his mind.
"Oh, uh," the bartender looked over his shoulder casually enough not to be noticed. "No, I don't think so. She comes in here every once in a while, likes to sit alone and have a few glasses of wine. Charges it to a room, so I guess she stays upstairs sometimes. I've never seen her with anybody." The ten disappeared into his pocket. "She likes Malbec and always dresses like that."
