Centaurs and Lovers.

*** Seven: The Trouble Rooms

She heard about the trouble rooms from a housekeeper named Sylvia during her rotation through housekeeping - three weeks with a cart and a master key.

"See this one?" Sylvia said, stopping in front of 714. "Off-limits."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Television's broken, the desk chair's missing, and the window latch sticks. Nothing dangerous. Just not right."

"So it sits empty?"

"It sits ready," Sylvia corrected. "Manager can put someone in it if we're full and nothing else is available. Usually comped. Guests are always grateful because the alternative is nothing."

They moved down the hall.

"Honestly though, I hate these rooms," Sylvia said. "It's not right, putting someone somewhere substandard and calling it a favor. My manager did it to a woman last month. Elderly lady, traveling alone. Told her it was a special quiet room. She thanked him."

Angela said nothing. They went into the next room and stripped the bed in silence.

She pushed away what the rooms suggested about herself, and she pushed it away the next day, and she pushed it away for a long time after that.

***

There was a work trip - corporate event planning, a sideline she'd picked up, good money for long weekends. The hotel comped single rooms until it didn't, and she ended up sharing with a colleague, a woman named Dana who was friendly and competent and had never, as far as Angela could tell, indicated being anything other than entirely straight.

The first night they ordered room service and ate on the beds with the boxes open between them, too tired to sit up straight. They complained about the client, a man who'd changed the seating chart four times. Dana told a story about a wedding she'd worked where the groom fainted during his own vows, and laughed so hard at her own telling that she snorted, then apologized for the snort, then laughed again. Angela was surprised by how much she liked her. Nothing about the evening suggested anything else was coming.

Between sessions, Dana mentioned an ex-boyfriend she'd dated for three years, then immediately clarified that they'd never lived together because she'd "always needed her own space." No one had asked. The conversation had been about rental cars.

Dana had a habit of introducing herself before anyone asked.

Later, walking back from the afternoon session, Dana said, "I've always wondered -" and stopped. Didn't finish it. Asked instead if Angela wanted coffee before the evening thing.

Angela said she did. But she felt it, small and specific: something's coming.

Dana seemed to like getting there first.

The second night Dana spilled water on her bed. Angela was fairly sure this was not completely an accident. She said nothing and moved over.

Dana curled against her back, warm and immediate. After a while, she took Angela's hand and placed it on her breast and said, with the air of someone genuinely surprised: oh, that's nice.

Angela said nothing.

The third night, Dana didn't bother with the ruse. She got into Angela's bed and turned toward her with an air of expectation and said she'd never kissed a woman before, said it in a shy, hesitating way that was somehow also completely certain. She was lonely. She kissed her anyway.

Dana was tense at first, almost mechanical, and then when Angela pulled back she came forward and wanted more.

At dinner the following evening - Dana had pleaded, Angela had relented - two cocktails and two glasses of wine in, Dana said she was curious about being with a woman and really wanted to. It pissed her off. The clarity of the transaction, the tidiness of it. Later in the elevator Dana looked alluring and they kissed and it was genuinely good and that pissed her off too, the way desire ignored what she knew.

In the room she understood within the first few minutes what was being offered and what wasn't. She'd been here before. She knew what she was looking at. She stayed anyway.

They kissed again, and this time Dana's hands were less hesitant, finding the hem of Angela's shirt, sliding beneath it like she'd been thinking about exactly this. Angela reached for the zipper of Dana's dress and drew it down slowly, felt the small shiver that ran through Dana's spine at the drag of it. The dress pooled at her waist. The clasp of her bra took a moment - Dana laughed, a little breathless, said sorry, sorry - and then it gave, and Dana's skin was warm and close and she pressed into Angela's hands like she'd been waiting all week to be touched.

She kissed Angela's neck with the same grateful concentration she brought to everything, as though following instructions she'd memorized without quite understanding, learning them by feel. It was clumsy in places and good in others, and Angela let herself want it anyway, let her hands do what they knew how to do, even while some other part of her watched from a slight distance, already certain how it would go, the sequence of it.

This was not new to Angela. She knew, already, how the rest of the night would go.