Suite

by Luc Reid

The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. On the other side was a vast, cold expanse of stars. “God damn it!” the bellhop said. “They were supposed to fix that!”

“What?” said Claire. She was exhausted beyond belief, having flown to Los Angeles from Paris via Newfoundland, after a marathon 9-hour sales presentation, following three hours of sleep. Why is the … ?” she waved her hand vaguely at the door.

“Dimensional disjunction,” sighed the bellhop, slumping to the floor. “It’s this hallway. It’s been broken since the ’96 Curse War. They said they fixed it!”

The bellhop looked to be about 17, with kinky blonde hair and wide blue eyes that somehow gave him a rabbity look. He was skinny and short, with long, elegant fingers that looked out of place on a person so young. Claire herself was thirty-eight, compact and dark-skinned, curvy, expensively dressed, rumpled from the flight. She thought they probably looked ridiculous together.

“How long?” she said.

“About three years. But don’t worry–they say you don’t remember anything afterward. I never do. I’ve had four of these so far, but it was like blinking when I was done.”

Dimensional disjunctions canceled hunger, thirst, aging, and all biological needs except two. One was sleep.

After the first few awkward hours, they talked–and talked, and kept talking. They played charades. They made up stories, sang camp songs, made up elaborate skits and played them out together. They had lots and lots and lots of sex–increasingly creative, revealing, vulnerable, and acrobatic sex, over time. Whatever Claire’s reservations about Lawrence were, there were advantages, she soon saw, in his being 17. And eventually her reservations about him went away completely, because he wasn’t there for her to accept or reject: he was just there. He was just Lawrence.

They grew to love each other more than either one of them could possibly express. They talked about it for hours, days, weeks on end. They talked about how they would recognize their kinship even when the disjunction was over, how they would be together, what their life would be like.

Claire woke up one “morning” (“morning” was what they called the time when they woke up) with a sudden, cold fear that the three years were over. She put her hand on Lawrence’s shoulder. “Sweetheart?” she said, “Do you think–”

#

The bellhop swung open the door to suite with a grand gesture. Beautiful furniture, Claire remembered thinking, and then she walked inside and fell face-down on the bed, exhausted. She didn’t even remember to tip.