We were in the hotel room. The Marriott. The bed was made up like a crime scene to hide the wet spot where my dignity had leaked out during the night.
She came out of the bathroom. Clean. Blonde. Looking like Kate Hudson if she had an MBA and a secret desire to ruin her credit score on a bad investment.
And me? I was hungover. I was shaking a little. I smelled like soap and shame.
But here’s the thing about shame: It’s a hell of a fuel source.
I had to prove I wasn’t just the drunk idiot who lost his car and wet the bed. I had to remind her—and myself—why she drove six hours across an international border to see me.
So I didn’t ask. I didn’t negotiate. I took her.
It wasn’t “love making.” It was belligerent. It was a physical argument. I threw her onto the dry side of the bed and I went to work like a man trying to dig his way out of a collapsed mine.
She was a banker. Controlled. Respectable. But in that room? She was starving. She matched my energy. We tore at each other. It was angry, sweaty, desperate friction. I wanted to erase the memory of the lobby apology. I wanted to replace the image of me on my knees begging with the image of her on her knees gasping.
We went for hours. The “Tantra master” routine wasn’t about spirituality; it was about endurance. It was about punishing the body until the mind shut the fuck up.
We ordered room service. We drank the expensive mini-bar vodka because I couldn’t leave the room to find a liquor store. We got drunk again, but this time, it was the good kind of drunk. The naked, sweaty, post-coital drunk where you feel like you own the goddamn world.
“You’re crazy,” she said, drinking wine out of a water glass, her hair a mess, her lipstick smeared across her face like war paint.
“I’m a project,” I said. “High risk, high reward.”
