Room 412 —
the Gap

Jordan has been at this hotel for six months, long enough to know not to look too hard at the guests. But the curtain track in Room 412 has been broken since Tuesday and nobody's called maintenance. When he finally goes up to fix it he stops dead in the hallway, because the gap is three inches wide and inside the room there is a man—older, suited, shirt half-undone—shoving a woman onto the glass desk. Her hands slam flat on the polished surface and she takes it. Jordan should leave. He should call the front desk to cover for him. But she lifts her head and catches his eye through the slit. She is forty, maybe, with silver at her temples and a streak of mascara running from one eye into her hairline, and when she sees him watching she slows down, deliberately, rolling her hips in a rhythm she controls. Her partner doesn't notice—his face is buried in her neck. She glues Jordan to the carpet with her gaze, bites down on her own forearm to muffle the sounds she makes for him, and Jordan thinks: a woman like this would destroy him on purpose and he would thank her. He doesn't leave. When she finally comes—wracked, shivering, small—he watches her stagger to the bed, and the older man pulls out, and then one of them must see his silhouette because the room goes still. But the woman does not point at the door. She sits up slowly on the mattress, reaches back, and pats the empty space beside her like she's calling in a stray.