Page 16 of The Drifter

I'd never heard which one. That's how they do it—the fewer the words, the safer everybody is. I had been in the safe part of that arrangement for years without ever once being asked whether I wanted to be.

So, I ran the roster in my head the way you'd check a hand of cards. It wouldn't be Ryker; Ryker had a wife and a house. It wouldn't be Marcus. I'd checked in enough of them by now to know the shape of the thing, and the shape of the thing was that when one of them came in nameless, off the books, no car, comped—it meant something had gone wrong.

Which might mean blood in a room. Sooner or later.

I'll pour his coffee, I thought. I'll burn his paperwork.

I straightened the pens.

The evening came on. The lobby did what it does at that hour—filled and emptied and filled, the dinner crowd going out in their good shoes, the tired ones coming in from the airport looking for a bed and a bourbon and somebody to be kind to them. I gave them all three. A woman from Ohio told me about her daughter's wedding and I heard every word. A man in a seersucker jacket told me a joke I'd heard hundreds of times and I laughed like it was new, because it was his first time telling it to me.

Otis limped past the bell stand and didn’t sit on his stool.

"Otis."

"Don't start with me, Miss Benning."

"That stool cost the house money."

"That stool," he said, with dignity, "is a insult." But he sat on it, and he sighed when he did. Neither of us said anything about the sound he made.

Around the time the light went out of the tall windows, my phone buzzed against my hip. It was Rashad Boykin.

I looked at it for a second longer than a woman ought to have to look at a name.

Rashad was the sous-chef at a place off Cannon that had gotten written up in something last year. He was built like a door and had a laugh that turned heads two tables over. He had come into my lobby eleven months ago to drop off a menu for the concierge stack and had ended up leaning on my marble for forty minutes.

He'd asked for my number. I gave it to him, because he was funny and he smelled like rosemary and he'd looked at my mouth twice while I was talking and then, had the grace to look away.

Eleven months.

We had never once been on a date.

Not because he didn't ask. He asked. He asked so many times that the asking had become a kind of joke between us. The joke had gotten softer and sadder every time, the way a joke does when it stops being funny to the person telling it.

I closed on Tuesday. I opened on Wednesday. Thursday, I was there till the last check-in cleared because we had a group in from a conference and the night man's wife was having a baby. Friday and Saturday belonged to the building the way the tide belongs to the moon. Sunday, I called my cousin and slept, and by then, he was working, because he was a chef.

We had almost done it once. We'd gotten as far as a place and a time. Then a pipe let go in the east wing and I stood in a flooded corridor at midnight in my stocking feet with a wrench in my hand and a hotel on my shoulders. I texted him from the mechanical room, and he wrote back rain check with a little smiling face. That was the last time either of us had said the word date out loud.

hey stranger, the message said. thinking about you.

I stood behind that desk and looked at those words with something moving in my throat.

He was a good man. He was a beautiful, good, patient man. If I had been any other woman in this city, I would have been in his bed months ago and probably in love with him by now. I would have burned him a dinner and let him laugh at me for it. Maybe, somewhere down that road, there'd have been a Sunday morning and a second bedroom with something in it besides a dresser.

And I could not find him one night.

Not one. Not in eleven months.

That was the thing I couldn’t make anybody understand—not Izzy, not Verlie, not the girl who quit, and not the version of myself I argued with in the car on the bridge. I did not lack a man. I lacked a night. I lacked a single square of unclaimed time to hand another human being and say here, this is mine, and I'm giving it to you. Everything I had was already spoken for. Every hour of it was promised to a building that would forget my name the week after I died. I gave it, and I kept giving it, because the giving is the only thing I have ever been extraordinary at.

I would have been a good wife, too, I thought.

I typed hey you and deleted it.

I typed I miss your face and deleted that, too, because it was true and because true costs more than a woman standing behind a marble counter at a Charleston hotel can afford at that hour.

In the end, I wrote thinking about you, too, and I put the phone face-down on the shelf under the register. I didn’t look at it again.