Stay by Nicola Griffith Page A

would follow me onto the elevator, I shook my head. The bellman, unlike the usual cheerful kind, merely ducked in assent.
    When the next elevator came, he again waited for me to get in first, and pushed the button for the twenty-second floor with a powerful finger. His nails were ragged and chewed, but there were no tattoos on his hands. Curious. His body language—his excessive, almost cringing politeness, his careful button pressing, lack of swagger—was something I associated with time spent in prison, where assertiveness is beaten out of you in a matter of weeks and replaced by a nervous need to please. But there were no jailhouse tattoos.
    He knew I was watching him. He didn’t know what it meant. It made him anxious. “Good flight, I hope. Well, my name’s Bob, and I’ll be happy to help you with anything you might need during your stay. I’ll just get these bags, this bag, to your room and get you settled. The ice machine is just a few doors down from your room—which faces north, so you should have a view of Central—”
    He shut up abruptly. I wondered if my lips were skinning back again. I smiled and forced the bland expression back into place, but he still tried unobtrusively to put the trolley between us. Bad haircut, cheap watch, new shoes, nervous eyes. He hadn’t been doing this long, and it was probably his first steady paying job for a while. What kind of family waited for him when he got home after his shift? Probably divorced, maybe with two kids he was allowed to see every other weekend. The hotel might not even know he had been in trouble with the law. The lack of tattoos meant he’d done his time somewhere soft, and not for too long, so whatever he’d done was probably crime against property rather than person; forged checks, boosting truckloads of cigarettes, something like that. I could do or say almost anything in this elevator and he wouldn’t retaliate: he needed this job, and it would be his word against a guest’s. I tracked the way the muscles in his shoulders moved as he kept his balance in the elevator: not easy, not supple.
    The door opened, I stepped off first, he followed cautiously. My room was halfway down a long corridor. I opened it myself, lifted the bag from the trolley, and gave him a ten because it occurred to me that even timid guests probably sensed they could undertip him, and because I felt soiled, having imagined the things I could do to him if I wanted. I knew he had sensed my understanding of his vulnerability, might have bad dreams tonight in his fifth-floor walkup with the bath in the middle of the kitchen. “Thank you,” I said, and shut the door. I opened it again when he was gone, put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, then locked and chained it.
    It took less than a minute to unpack: I had forgotten almost everything. No toiletries, no underwear, not even a comb. Just the clothes I had worn for most of the drive, the clothes I stood up in, three pairs of socks, two books, my phone, and a can of half-frozen concentrated orange juice. How strange.
    It was an anonymous room, done in the artificial pinks and grays popular for public spaces five years ago, with two beds. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a hotel room with two beds. The furniture was all fake-mahogany-veneered particleboard, and the window would only open three inches, barely enough to let in the greasy, hydrocarbon air. Room service was open until midnight: another ten minutes. The desk phone felt large and unnatural in my hand. I told the woman who answered that I wanted tomato soup, chicken teriyaki, a bottle of Samuel Adams, and three bottles of Evian. I had to repeat myself because even up on the twenty-second floor and even at night the ululation of sirens and honking of angry drivers on Sixth drowned me out. That done, I stripped off the Eileen Fisher and hung it up.
    The only space big enough to lie on the carpet was in front of the dresser. I sat and stretched my tendons one