You had sex! With that man!
Her leg hurt. Rosemary shifted to sit on her bottom, dragged the sheet over her breasts, rubbed her hands over her screaming foot and remembered the crunch that could only have been her mobile.
Bugger.
She crawled to the plug in the wall. Followed it underneath the billowing mass of sheets until the mobile dangled from the other end, the screen black, hopelessly cracked.
She pushed the button, but it didn’t come to life.
Bugger, bugger, bugger.
Keys jingled, and a door opened. “Hang on!” she shouted, but no one responded, and then the voices in the hallway fell silent with a thump.
Doctor Doom opened the door to her room, walked out into the hallway wearing only blue jeans, disappeared, reappeared. “It was across the way.”
“Pardon?”
“The knocking. It wasn’t your door. It was across the way.”
“Oh.”
Rosemary tried to think what to say next, but her social training fell down in the department of morning-after pleasantries, and her head supplied a parade of inanity.
You’re sitting naked on the floor.
You’ve buggered your mobile.
You had sex with that man.
Dozens of people are dead.
The dumplings were delicious.
She covered her ears with her hands, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, Doctor Doom was sitting on the edge of the mattress, just in front of her and to the side, jeans unbuttoned, feet bare.
His short black hair lay flat against one side of his head and stood straight up over one ear. His face had a sleep crease, his neck a scarlet love bite. His lips were chapped. His black eyes were on her in a way that made her brain supply a memory of exactly what his flesh had felt like against her teeth as he made that first rough thrust into her body.
It had been superlative sex.
You don’t know his name.
Rosemary looked away, clearing her throat. “Well. That’s a bit of relief, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I didn’t exactly relish finding out who was going to be on the other side of the door.”
“I thought perhaps housekeeping.”
“Could’ve been, I guess.”
“How long were we sleeping?” She directed the question to a square inch of bedcover. Her neck was too hot to keep looking at him. Her body hurt in a number of places, many of them for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, but a few of them for scarlet reasons having to do with soft bodily tissues not used to that sort of abuse.
“I don’t know. Last night the clock said twelve, and the sun’s up.”
They both looked at the digital display: 05:07. They’d slept…“Five hours?”
He shook his head. “I’m guessing more like seventeen.”
“That’s a rather substantial amount of time.”