Her hands find mine, and this time, I don’t pull away.
“I’m so sorry, Doc.”
“Don’t be. I’m where I am today because of the choices I made, and even though a lot of them were questionable, I like my life.”
“I like my life too.”
The moment suddenly turns intimate.
I stand because I’m seconds away from taking Lily in my arms and kissing her. But instead, I turn away, “I’ll check on Odin.”
In full escape mode, I walk out of the kitchen.
Not because I’m afraid of giving in to my urges.
But because my heart is starting to see her as something so much more.
DOC
“Doc, Doc… wake up.”
Lily shakes me awake, and I jerk upright. “Is everything okay?” Rubbing my eyes, I look around the room, slightly disorientated. Sometime after coming back to check on Odin, I must have fallen asleep.
“Yes, everything’s fine.” She smiles, and it’s beautiful. “I just wanted to show you something.”
Yawning, I stretch and attempt to rub out yet another kink in my neck. “Show me what?”
She straightens and crosses the room to the door. “Come on… you won’t believe what I’ve found.”
“Where are we going,” I ask, following her.
She leads me down the hallway toward the room with the locked door.
“I tried this door yesterday. It’s locked.”
She holds up a key. “There’s a bunch of keys. I found them in a box in the kitchen.”
She unlocks the door, and I follow her into the weirdest-looking hotel room I’ve ever seen. It’s almost empty, except for a messy bed and a busted lamp on the floor. Above us, a starlit sky twinkles through a massive domed ceiling made entirely of glass.
I stare in awe as a billion stars twinkle down on us in the darkness.
“What is this place?” I ask, mesmerized by the glass ceiling.
She hands me a crumpled pamphlet from her pocket. “The UFO Hotel. Apparently, back in the sixties, this area was known for its extraterrestrial light shows at night. UFO chasers used to flock to these parts in drones. This hotel was one of many that popped up to cash in on the excitement.” She walks to the center of the room, where the starry sky twinkles through the glass. “They called this the Sky Dome room. For eight dollars…” she waves her hands around, “… all of this could be yours for the night.”
She twirls, and I can’t help but think how beautiful she is.
I need a distraction, so I look at the pamphlet in the dim light. “It says we’re in Little Town, Virginia.”
At least now I know where we are. We’re deep into the mountains about two hours out of Tennessee. Last summer, we passed through here on our way to one of our cannabis crops in Redbud. There’s not a lot around, just a general store and a gas station.
“Look what else I found,” she says.
I glance up from reading the pamphlet, and Lily is on the other side of the room, holding up an old transistor radio plugged into the wall. She switches it on, and “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star fills the room.
I tuck the pamphlet into my back pocket and watch as she walks toward me, a playful smile on her beautiful lips. She takes my hand.
“What are you doing?” I ask as she pulls me toward her.
Bright moonlight streams through the glass dome and casts an ethereal light through her eyes. Her beauty is otherworldly and breathtaking, and the urge to kiss her is almost too much to resist.
“Dance with me,” she says, tangling her fingers with mine. She draws me to her and wraps her arms around my body, her warmth melting into me, making my heart pound and my pulse race.
My first instinct is to pull away from her touch, but I don’t because the feel of her skin and the weight of her body pressed against mine feels too good.
She rests her cheek against my chest, and I tremble.
Nothing about this is right, but everything about this is perfect.
We move slowly to the music, our bodies crushed together, our steps woven in perfect synchronicity. Her warmth is like silk floating on a breeze around my body, and it’s doing strange things to me.
God, I want her so much.
Every cell in my body screams at me to kiss her. To touch her. To do all the things it’s aching to do.
But I don’t.
Instead, I look up at the galaxy of stars shining through the dome roof and tighten my arms around her waist. Pelvis to pelvis, I feel a rush of fire sweep through me, and I don’t know how to process the feeling.
I haven’t held a woman in my arms like this in…
… forever.
For a while, we say nothing. We simply dance, our bodies swaying and our heartbeats entwined. She sighs, and I feel her warm breath brush against my chest. I close my eyes because the unfamiliar sensation makes me feel things I thought were long gone.