Chapter 2: Stepping Outside
There are no obvious security cameras out on the walkway. I'd seen the security monitors during check-in, over the clerk's shoulder, and they showed the parking lot entrance and exit, and nothing else. But still, I look a little longer before I turn and look directly into our window, just to be sure. Even peeping on your own wife in your own hotel room feels like a risk, these days. People aren't as understanding as they used to be. But there are no little black lenses in the corners of the overhang, no little red dots or security bulbs that look like overwatch, so I turn and I take a good look.
She's arranged herself. Propped on her elbows, the blue light of her phone glazes her indifferent face. But her body is an exhibit. She's laying on her stomach, but she kicks the comforter to the floor, limbs sprawled. The curve of her lower back is a deep valley, descending into the shocking, pale swell of her rotund ass, her cheeks parted enough by her position to reveal everything to the open air and the empty walkway behind me. The lamplight from the room renders every detail in bright definition: the dark pink furl of her asshole, the gleam of her vulva nestled below, angled to anyone who might pass.
My throat tightens.
It's hard to know how to feel about what she was doing.
We'd been fighting all day. The cliffside, the wrong turns, my silent fuming over the cheap hotel and the ill-fitted tux—it's all still coiled tight in my shoulders. Now she's stretched out like an offering, and I am exiled to this concrete ledge, a spectator. Normally she needs a nudge, a specific mood, not this cold, deliberate exhibitionism aimed at everyone else but me.
I raise my fist and tap the glass. It's a soft, polite rap. I know she hears it.
She doesn't. She doesn't even glance up from her phone. Her only response is a slight, almost imperceptible shift of her hips. She closes her legs. The move is subtle, but definitive. Where before there had been an explicit, open display, now there is only the smooth convergence of her thighs. She still looks beautiful. Like an oil painting. A horny oil painting. Naked Woman With Phone. But her pussy is closed.
The parking lot below is a basin of gray pavement, quiet and still. No headlights cut the gathering dusk, no doors slam in the distance. The only movement is the slow, molten descent of the sun behind the far-off hills, bleeding orange into the bruising sky. I can see the freeway from here, beyond a tall and droopy palm tree.
I stand there for what feels like a long time, but probably isn't. When I look back, my reflection, a pale ghost superimposed on her naked form, stares back at me from the glass. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t cover up. But she has turned on the TV. I know she can zone out when the TV is on. I remember one time when two drunks knocked on the glass, while she was naked with the blinds open--Cathy swore she never heard either one of them, hooting and whistling through the window, pointing and shouting. Maybe she was telling the truth after all. I never really know with Cathy, what's the truth and what's pretend. Right now she seems pretty zoned out, with her eyes glued to the TV and her bare ass pointed at the window.
Watching her now, the whole stupid day seems a little less stupid. She looks good.
The arousal is a dull pressure in my gut, raising my pulse in the warm as I stand out on the walkway, although I can still see her in my mind's eyes, standing earlier in the day by the canyon vista, her silhouette a sharp accusation against the sky. She knew I thought about running her over, even if it was only for a heated moment, in the middle of a stupid argument about which back road to take. She's still splayed out naked for me in the open window.
Being locked out is new.
I look around, down at the parking lot. No one is watching me. I look around again, one last time, for any sign of security cameras. They might be out there, somewhere, but I can't spot them. I leave the window with its glorious view of her glorious ass and head down the walkway, to the stairs at the far end.