A booking error put my key card in the wrong door at midnight, and the woman already in Room 714 had her own ideas about how to fix it.
How it works: read, then choose what you do. Only the right choices earn the happy ending.
I’m Liam, I’m thirty-eight, and I had been awake since five. A delayed train, a day of conference talks on network security, a dinner with clients who wanted to argue about invoices. By eleven at night all I wanted in the world was a hot shower and a cold pillow.
The Albion Hotel had other plans.
The girl on the front desk was flustered, the system was down, and she wrote my room number on the little card sleeve in biro. 714. I took the lift up, found the door at the end of the corridor, tapped the card and heard the lock click green.
The room was warm and dim. One bedside lamp on. The sound of a shower stopping.
Then the bathroom door opened and a woman stepped out in a cloud of steam, wrapped in a hotel towel that was doing its very best and not quite winning.
We stared at each other.
She was maybe late twenties, brown skin still beaded with water, black hair piled up on her head, a tiny gold stud in her nose. She held the towel closed with one hand and pointed at me with the other.
“You have exactly five seconds,” she said, “to explain why you’re in my room.”
I held up the key card like a white flag. “It says 714. I swear to God it says 714.”
She took it from me, looked at it, and held up an identical card from the dresser. “Brilliant,” she said. “So do I.”
Then she started to laugh.