He woke up again and he felt like he wanted to sleep for another 200 years. And he was almost scared. He felt a hole inside of him, a concrete absence of something he didn’t have a name for. It almost paralyzed him. That was new, the feeling of helplessness, but the hole wasn’t. He knew the hole must have been there for awhile. That he couldn’t tell how long it had been there was what scared him. It was loneliness. He was aware of the fact that, for whatever reason, up until this moment he had lacked the necessary sensory receptors to know it was there. Now it was like a kind of sight that felt worse than being blind. He wished he could tell when it had started to control him.

He was on the bed, lying on top of the sheets naked, something he never did. Then he remembered finding his way back to the hotel. Going up to the desk clerk and making it known that he needed laundry service, and then stumbling up the stairs to his room where he stripped off his clothes and dumped them in the middle of the hallway outside his door. He hoped the porter had known what to do. Maybe they were still there. He was still exhausted, bone-tired, as if suffering from a hangover caused by an alcohol he had never drank before.

From the solid dimness in the room he took a guess that it was late afternoon. He stared at the shadows falling across his bare skin. Somehow in the silence and the dull burnt orange light he could imagine he was looking at someone else, and the thought suddenly excited him. He saw himself get instantly hard, and then a hand coming into view. He started panting, went rigid and rocked back and forth on is spine as he jacked off. He started moaning, “Grant, Grant, oh fuck,” and he didn’t know where it was coming from or what it meant, but it was so hot, he was watching Grant getting him off, and imagining his own face, Grant lying right there barely not-touching him, and then he came. And he shot so hard that he literally hit the wall behind his head. It was completely confusing. And then he was rudely jerked out of the moment, and he was lying there sticky and cold and alone on the bed. He dragged his fingers through the stickiness and then put them in his mouth to try and stop the crying, but it didn’t.