Last Round

Everyone Riya knew at the conference had called it a night. She'd decided one more drink, sitting at the hotel bar with her lanyard in her bag and her heels off, thinking over the day and not quite ready to return to the particular loneliness of a hotel room at eleven PM. The man on the stool to her left had been there when she arrived. He had the look of someone also at the tail end of a long professional day — jacket off, slight looseness about him, nursing something amber. They'd exchanged the small acknowledging nod of solo drinkers at hotel bars. "Long day?" he said, around his second drink. "Which one wasn't," she said, and he laughed. His name was Kabir. He was in marketing, she was in product, and they were at the same conference through complete coincidence of industry. They talked — easy, sharp conversation of the kind that's possible with strangers you'll never see again, without the performance required by people you'll have to manage impressions with on Monday. He was funny and frank and looked at her with undisguised interest without making it pressing. She matched the interest. She was aware of it, unsurprised by it. He was attractive and she was alone and the night had the particular permission of anonymity. "Last round?" he said. "Yes," she said, and meant both things at once. They both understood what the last round was. In the elevator he stood close to her without touching, and she looked at the number display ticking up toward his floor and thought: yes, this. His room. For tonight. She was rarely impulsive but here she was, and it felt more like clarity than impulse. Inside, he kissed her against the door — unhurried but definite, both hands in her hair, and she felt the day's accumulation of tension dissolve into something entirely different. She pulled at his shirt, he unzipped her dress, and they moved toward the bed with the unselfconsciousness of adults who knew what they wanted and had decided to simply have it. He was good — attentive and skilled and genuinely interested in her pleasure rather than performing interest, which she could always tell. He went down on her until she was gripping his hair and breathing raggedly, and she came hard against his mouth before pulling him up and over her. They were noisy in the way you could be at eleven PM in a hotel conference floor when the rooms on either side were empty. She said what she wanted, he gave it, and she came the second time with real force, wrapped around him, his name in her mouth even though she'd known it for an hour. Afterwards she lay in the white light from the city and felt pleasantly undone. "I have an eight AM panel," she said. "I have a nine," Kabir said. "I should probably go back to my room." "You should," he agreed. "In a minute." She stayed for another hour.