"I don’t mind this feeling. In fact, I actually quite like it” you mumbled, swirling the quartered lime around your Gin.
“I mean, most people despise loneliness. It’s as undesirable to them as a paper-cut, or perhaps stubbing their toe. They come to places like this to meet new people, to get away from it. Not me. I thrive in the ‘dreaded’ feeling of loneliness. And just as Einstein theorized in the Theory of Relativity, without the perspective of other’s being un-lonely, you can never quite know how truly lonely you are…”, you take another sip.
“The feeling of living ‘without’ shatters the ego and forces one to look ‘within’. It is there, and only there, within arms of reach of hundreds of partygoers all laughing, and singing, and clutching one another around the shoulders with their glasses extended, that I may know how lonely I truly am. That’s where true introspection is-“
A hand rests on your thigh, “But there are just some things you just can’t enjoy all by yourself”.
A wave of realizations, each more humiliating than the last, overwhelm your limbic system.
Firstly, your acceptance speech for “The World’s Loneliest Man Award” you were preparing was not done so internally, as you presumed.
Secondly, and there is a connection here you’ll draw later in one of your “introspection” sessions, you have nearly finished your fourth Gin. The rest of it is on your shirt. Perhaps you were sloshing that lime about a bit too harshly.
And thirdly, and this is most important, a woman, very much beautiful and very much real, is flirting with you.
These realizations of course all culminate into a look of astonishment that one might describe as being between “man who has just discovered the Theory of Everything” and “that same man now discovering he is standing completely nude in the middle of Six Flags”.
“I, uhhh. I-well” you stammer, hopelessly.
“Shush. Why don’t you tell me more about being alone, alone” she smiled.
“I think I’m in love” you thought “PLEASE don’t let that have been out loud”, you thought again, a bit frantically.
If it had been out loud, it did not seem to stop her. Her soft hand guided yours away from the bar, across the casino floor, and towards the bay of elevators. You quell your kiddish excitement only long enough to try and reconcile what had just happened. How exactly did you get here?
From one perspective, you had shown you are a deeply sad man with little control over his motor-skills and absolutely no situational awareness to realize it. But from the other, you must be quite the intellectual. I mean, you had invoked the Theory of Relativity and all, albeit incorrectly… but that’s enough to make any woman pounce nonetheless.
And for her to not only recognize this, but to take hold of the opportunity!
A beautiful woman that knows what she wants and won’t go a moment more without it?
My, this is the type of love they write about in Hollywood films!
I’ll tell our children about this.
Perhaps I’ll have a large bookshelf installed in our home, one with a ladder that slides from end-to-end. If I am an intellectual I better look the part!
And surely she’d do the decorations! Her dress is proof enough she knows what looks good!
“Are you going to tell me what floor you’re on or are we going to stand here all day?”
She hovered her hand around the buttons as if she is expected to cast a spell on the elevator to get us to the right room.”
“OH! Oh! My room, of course! I’m on 16, but I-I can get that for you!”
You press 14.
Then 17.
You start to panic.
“Can you?” she quips, pressing the correct floor number.
You’ve surrendered any attempt at talking at this point.
If you can just not look like a complete fool, you’ll get laid.
But you must do, something.
You smile, surely you can’t fuck up a smile.
“You’re quite the gentleman, you know that?” she whispers in a seductive tone and leans in to kiss you. You nailed the smile.
Time stood completely still. Her lips pressed against yours, only breaking for a giggle here and there, then reintroduced each time more passionately than before.
You swell with affection as she pulls you in tighter. Your body now pressed against hers, her body pressed against the wall, her hand guiding yours along her breasts and down her waist - it was all just so FANTASTIC.
So fantastic, in fact, that at some point in the excitement you hadn’t realized you’d; climbed 14 floors, briefly introduced your impassioned expressions to an elderly couple on said floor, climbed another two floors, walked down the hallway, and wound up outside your hotel room door.
She rocks back and forth on the tips of her toes in excited anticipation.
You grab the keycard and confidently present it to the reader.
No fumbling this time, might you add.
Not like those elevator door buttons, or remembering to press the elevator door buttons, or speaking.
No.
You are as cool as a cucumber. The kind of cool that picks up women just by sitting alone at the bar and talking to himself.
But no matter cool you are now, and you are behaving very cool, nothing will stop the inevitable pre-sex awkwardness. It’s written in to the very act itself.
No matter how enthusiastically a couple may agree upon a shared sexual experience, it is always awkward the first time. How would it not be, if neither of you had specified which parts of it you’d like to enjoy (there’s a lot to do down there) or even where to start! Sure, In the movies it’s always:
But in real life, there should be a form you can fill out together beforehand that covers all these things, you know? From removing one’s clothes, to favorite positions outlined in their respective order, and even which towel to clean up with!
That way, there are absolutely no surprises.
The door closes behind you.
“Sooo,” she exclaims, a bit loudly.
“it will be $400 for the evening if you’d like to do everything.”
“What?” You say, surprised.
“I said it would be $400 for the entire evening. That includes everything. Or it’ll be $125 for the hour, which I’ll consider having started in the elevator” she continues, with all the sexiness of a flight attendant reciting the pre-flight manual for the thousandth time.
Another round of realizations flood you.
“Did you not know I was working?”
Your expression is the same “deer in headlights” as it were the first time she surprised you, but your mind is running amok. Perhaps humiliation is more easily received when it isn’t accompanied by the prospect of sex.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t. I wouldn’t have, well we wouldn’t be here had I known…”
“Oh”, her tone drops to one of disappointment.
“Well you are going to have to pay me something. I won’t charge you for what happened in the elevator because I believe you didn’t know, but I have to have something for the time I’ve spent. That has to be worth something.”
Of all the times you had played out being robbed in your head, practicing how you’d end up on top with sheer wit and sheer wit alone, there was at least one scenario you hadn’t played out.
A shy, “How much would you like?” perks up followed by a more cautioned “I didn’t bring all that much, you know. I didn’t plan for something like this…”
She intentionally did not look up while redoing the straps on her high-heels.
“Just give me $10 or something” she tinged in embarassment.
Oooooh, It’s not about the money, you idiot.
She’s humiliated. After experiencing a full-on intense expression of it only moments before, you rejected her intimacy as soon as you had to assign a dollar value to it. I mean, even when intimacy is your profession, it can’t feel good to be test-driven and then turned down like your body is a used-car.
“Of course! Let me see what I have!”
You open your wallet to find two one-hundred bills and nothing more.
The other three one-hundred bills were spent on Gin and, unsuccessfully so, gambling.
“Just, take this” you murmur, as if she would pick up on your reservations and not take the $100 bill extending towards her.
She takes it.
She walks out, still unmistakably not looking at you.
She leaves.
No grandiose, pseudo-intellectual tangent fills the void. No miserable self-hatred veiled as some thoughtful “taking pleasure in displeasure”, or whatever stupid nonsense you came up with earlier.
You are all alone, spare the lone $100 bill in left in your wallet.
Just what you had wanted.
“Fuck it” you uttered, out loud this time for certain.
Down the elevator you went, leaving your self-pity 15 floors above you.
You stepped out with all the confidence a man could ever wish for.
Your eyes locked on a beautiful young woman, seemingly single, who you absolutely intended on buying a drink. Your eyes even locked for a brief moment.
“I am not going to be alone anymore”.
Along the way you got distracted by the BlackJack table and gambled your last $100, promptly left, and drove home.