After Paula left my office, I tried to regain my composure. The unexpected sexual liaison was enough to occupy my thoughts, but Paula’s last comment kept pushing to the front of my brain. “You know Geneen and I are close, but I don’t think you know HOW close. Tonight you are going to find out!” My fantasies started to take shape.
All day long I kept getting caught up in situations that took a long time to handle. I had to skip lunch, and was facing a late night at the office. Geneen and Paula didn’t come by my office for small talk as they usually did, and when I would see either of them in passing they would just smile and wink and hurry off, instead of engaging in our usual banter. The way they were acting let me know that they had something big planned for tonight, and didn’t want to give it away. My fantasies went into overdrive.
Somehow I made it through the rest of the day and I probably accomplished something – but I was not really paying attention to work. About 6:45 pm I managed to get away from the office, and I headed over to Gators for the Happy Hour. We usually stopped in there for a drink after work, just to blow off some steam and relax a little before heading home. Paula and Geneen had left work without so much as saying goodbye, and I was hoping to find one or both of them there. I didn’t see either of their cars in the parking lot, but that wasn’t too strange – Gators is in a Holiday Inn and sometimes parking is not available right at the entrance.
The Help Desk gang was there in our usual spot, and I waved to Tina, the waitress, as I took a seat. As I greeted my co-workers, Tina brought me my usual beer, and I scanned the room for Geneen or Paula. They were nowhere to be seen, and I commented on this to David.
“I thought Paula and Geneen were coming over tonight,” I yelled over the ‘background’ music. Even though Gators was supposed to be a place to socialize, they keep the music loud enough that casual conversation was almost impossible.
“I saw Paula earlier today,” David loudly replied. “She said something about having plans for tonight. I assumed you were in on it – you two are always hanging out together anyway.”
“Well I had a rough day and was barely able to come out of my office, let alone make plans for tonight.” I drank down most of my beer and waved to Tina again. “I guess that Paula and Geneen were swamped as well, cause I hardly talked to them at all.”
I was in the process of deciding to go home and get to sleep when Tina arrived with my beer. She placed it on the table in front of me as usual, and then she reached for my hand. She pressed something into my palm – a hard object wrapped in paper.
“This was left for you, Mark.” Tina looked at me with a smirk on her face. “I hope everything comes out all right!”
With that she left, refusing the money I offered to pay for my beer.
“It’s been taken care of, sweetie,” she called over her shoulder as she walked back to the bar.
I looked at the paper in my hand. As I opened it I saw a bright green plastic tag affixed to a key. Gold lettering on the tag proclaimed “Holiday Inn Room 1258”. The note simply said, “We’re waiting.”
I finished my beer in two swigs as all of the fantasies of the day came back to me. I made quick work of saying goodnight to my friends at the table, and strolled toward the main lobby of the hotel. Strolled? More like ran as fast as I could!
The elevator took forever to arrive at the ground floor, and twice as long to ascend to the twelfth. I walked down the hall in the direction indicated by the sign, toward room 1258. The carpeting did little to muffle the noise of my racing heart even though it muted all sound of my footsteps. I reached the room at the end of the hall and knocked lightly to see if there was any response. Hearing nothing from inside, I opened the door with my key and walked into a darkened room.
Unless you are in a suite, a hotel room offers little in the way of places to hide. The ‘closet’ is usually little more than a depression in one wall, and the bathroom is hardly big enough to change your mind. The double beds are too low to the ground for anyone to crawl under, and there isn’t much else in the room to conceal anything. So I was surprised to find that neither Paula nor Geneen was in the room. I had expected to find them there, hopefully in a state of sexual desire. But I was alone.
