She would be waiting for him in the room, thinking that he was only a few blocks away. She would have called by now if she had gone out to look for him. It was unthinkable that she had gone out to the airport, that they would have crossed paths on the way in separate taxis and not known it. It was not possible.
He made it back to the hotel somehow, finally. The girl at the check-in desk gave him a strange look that didn’t last more than an eye-blink, replaced almost immediately with a smooth smile.
‘Hello,’ she said blithely. Blithe as all get-out. Not asking, not even thinking, what the hell are you doing back here already?
For a moment Ryan almost told the girl that his wife was still in their room and he just needed to go get her. No, that would sound awfully funny.
So what was he supposed to tell her? ‘Excuse me, Miss. I appear to have somehow lost the woman of my dreams in a hotel in an alternate universe, so I need to get to the corresponding room in this universe because I’m sure that simple act of faith will somehow cause the universes to re-collide and deliver her back into my eager arms.’
Oh yeah, Carson. You smooth bastard. That’s much better.
‘I need a room,’ he said, managing to smile but breathing heavily. He’d run in from the street. He struggled to remember which room. ‘414.’
‘414,’ she said, running her fingers over her keyboard. ‘Let me just see if that’s available …’
‘It has to be 414,’ he said, trying desperately to sound reasonable. She had to be used to snotty corporate types making outlandish demands, wanting a room on the north side or west side, or a room with a view of the park, quite willing to bawl like infants if they weren’t instantly accommodated. Surely this girl wouldn’t bat an eye at him begging for a specific room.
But what if someone else had taken it? Was Irene, even now, poutingly telling some fat salesman from Bloomington, Indiana that his clumsy princess had forgotten to pick up her niece an I HEART NY T-shirt as a souvenir?
‘Oh, yes … here we are. For just the one night?’
Ryan had to stop himself from snatching the key-card from her hand. No, he didn’t need help with his bags. Oh, he was sure, all right.
He ran for the elevator.
The room, when he reached it, was empty. Even emptier than last time. Housecleaning had been at it. It had a sweet, empty smell of chemicals. There was no sign of Irene. Her absence tore at him.
Ryan fell down, exhausted, onto the bed. The faith that had been in him like steel only moments ago was gone now, or turned to porridge.
He was losing his mind. No excuses this time. He was not only seeing dream-women, he was hearing their voices talking to him on his cell phone. He should consider checking himself into Bellevue while he was still in New York, assuming they’d have him.
Self-pity and fear for his sanity gradually gave way to a feeling of emptiness. It was a strangely gentle feeling. Everyone in the world felt like this eventually, didn’t they? Sure they did. They wanted something or someone more than anything, and they couldn’t get it/them, no matter how hard they tried.
Ryan lay watching bars of sunlight track slowly across the ceiling. He didn’t want to ever move again. The stress of the past few hours began catching up with him, demanding he relax his muscles, showing him how good it would be to shut his eyes, just for a minute. Sleep stole up on him eventually. He didn’t fight it.
He woke up like diving through a bank of cottony clouds into sweetness. The room smelled sweet, like her perfume, like her laundry and the syrup-filled chocolates she liked to snack on in bed. He felt weight on his legs. Irene was there, lying on top of him, barefoot in a sundress. Her nails were freshly done, a maroon that went beautifully with her skin tone.
She had unzipped him, taken his cock out and was holding it, lapping at it like an ice-cream cone.
‘Where the hell were you?’ she whispered, her lips moving over his pink head as if she were speaking into a microphone. Her eyes were fixed on his, unreadable. ‘I looked and looked. We missed our plane. This is your punishment.’
She licked his cockhead again and he shuddered at the intensity of the feeling. No more emptiness. Joy was back instead, so strong he didn’t have the strength to cry out or grab her. He lay back with his eyes shut, smiling idiotically. I’m crazy, but I don’t care. I don’t.
‘I’m not going away again,’ he told her. ‘I promise. If I go anywhere, you’re coming with me.’ For the rest of our lives. I’m never losing you again.
‘You’re right about that, Mr Man. And look …’ She gave his cock a last kiss, climbed up so they were cheek to cheek. She took his hand and slipped something over the fourth finger. ‘There,’ she said smiling.
‘What?’ he asked, but he knew what it was. He held his hand up. Late-afternoon sunlight caught the metal and gleamed. It looked strangely familiar now.
Irene bit his earlobe. ‘I found your ring,’ she told him.
‘This is what you chose?’ Caroline said, setting her bags down on the snow-covered floor.
The place was beautiful, without a doubt, but it was definitely not what Caroline had expected her husband to pick for their getaway. She had been expecting Vegas, California, New York … not Canada. Not that Canada was not nice, again. And even less expected than Canada was the ice hotel she was now standing in, shivering. She glanced down at her brown luggage set, furrowing her brow as she wondered if it was cold enough for her bags to freeze to the floor. Then she brought her eyes back up to the room her husband Victor had rented for a couple of nights’ time. It was definitely a suite. It had just about everything you could expect from just a standard room, the little table with two club chairs, a bed, a chest of drawers – except … it was all carved out of snow and friggin’ ice.
‘You didn’t really think they’d make people sleep on a block of ice? That could kill you,’ he said, picking up her discarded bags and moving them to an out-of-the-way corner of the room.
Caroline did not even crack a smile. ‘I didn’t know what to expect.’
Victor crossed his arms over his broad chest – honestly, the first thing Caroline had noticed on him, next to his brilliant green eyes, those five years ago when they had met at a mutual friend’s wedding.
‘You said that we couldn’t mock the other one’s choices, and that I got to pick the hotel,’ he reminded her.
Caroline nodded. It was very true. Those had been her terms. They would be married five years, exactly, come three days from now, but that marriage was … well, on ice. They had tried for children a couple of years back, and somewhere along the way, with all the ovulation sticks, pregnancy tests