Chapter 4: The Floor

The heels were where she had kicked them off the night before, on their sides by the desk, one of them still holding a grain of lobby stone. Priya put them on with the thong and nothing else. The work dress went over the chair. The lanyard stayed in her bag. Dev had said thong, heels, nothing else, and she was done adding costume.

The room air found her breasts at once. Nipples tight. The cotton between her legs was the day’s map, stiff at the edges, slick at the center where the trailer check had put his fingers back. She looked at herself in the black glass of the television and did not ask if she could take a robe to the door. Asking would have been running it.

“Stairs,” Dev said. He was in the chair, boots off, belt still on. “Six. You knock. You don’t feed yourself a speech in the stairwell. If you pass a person, you smile and you keep the hands down. Ice machine is on six, by his door. That’s the likely one.”

“And if I say skip.”

“Hall dies. You already know.”

She did not say it. She opened their door and stepped into the carpet-hum of the fifth floor, and the door shut behind her on Dev’s silence. The stairwell was concrete and colder than the hall. Her heels made a cheap bright sound. Halfway up, a door above opened and shut without anyone coming through, the same almost as a threat, and the almost hit her low and wet, a fresh pulse into cotton that had already done a day’s work. She kept climbing. Hands at her sides. Smile not needed yet. The smile was for a face.

Six smelled like ice and the sweet chemical of the machine. A man in a hotel robe stood at it with a bucket, back to the stair door. He turned because heels announced her. His eyes went to her mouth, then to the rest, then to the bucket, then helplessly back. Priya smiled. The smile held. She did not cover. She walked the length of him, close enough to smell his shampoo, and knocked on Mark’s door with a bare knuckle while the stranger remembered how a bucket worked.

Mark opened. He had been waiting. The sight of her undid the site voice in one look. Behind her the ice machine rattled and the stranger did not leave.

“Dev said,” she started, and stopped, because the sentence was not for the hall. “Down.”

“Turn around,” Mark said, rough. “Walk. I follow. I don’t touch you out here.”

She turned. The stranger was gone, or hiding in the alcove. She did not check. She walked to the stairs and the concrete took her heels again and Mark’s step came behind her, not close enough to count as a hand. Fifth floor. Their door. She knocked because the key was a bite in her fist and using it felt like entering ahead of the order.

Dev opened on the picture: his wife, thong, heels, flush; his coworker one pace back, hands visible, empty.