Parallel

He woke up in a dark room, the heater or air conditioner or whatever it was throbbing in the background; there was another noise, something that set his teeth together. He woke fully up when he realized it was an aircraft engine, and rolled out of bed onto the floor, ready to get going.

When he looked around, coming back, he was in a hotel room.

"Oh yeah," he said.

"Yeah."

He'd slept in his clothes. Walking to one wall, a wall covered in some truly ugly fabric, he found a part in the middle and separated what he figured were curtains. The light hit him hard, but he squinted into it until his eyes adjusted. Outside was a landscape of tall buildings and concrete, with a background of large airplanes roaming the air, climbing and descending, bulbous things, plodding around in the sky like a wandering herd of cows. He was at an airport hotel, waiting.

The day was actually very gray and slightly misty; the light had hit him from the darkness, but it wasn't very bright out at all. Turning around and looking over the room, he saw a hideous coverlet on the bed, brownish carpet, a large TV, and that was about it. He walked to a short, pasteboard-ey nightstand and opened the top drawer. He was amused and somehow comforted to find a Gideon Bible. Glancing up, he saw the time on the cheap digital clock: it was late afternoon.

"Holy shit!"

He had a flash of panic when he realized he'd slept damn near around the clock. He sat down on the bed, aware of his clothes, and debated what to do. His phone was in his single bag, but he didn't want to check it. Feeling the pockets of his newly-purchased jeans he found his wallet, and after a few minutes of fuzzy thinking he decided to head down to the lobby and move on from there. He dug out the key card and walked out the door.

There was an atrium type thing through the center of the hotel, with glass elevators. On the way down he noticed a bar area set back away from the main entrance, and in those seconds he made his decision. When the doors opened he walked out, reflexively looked around, and headed for the in-house place for a beer.

To his mild alarm he got kind of lost on the way there; a series of potted plants and bizarre, square cement blocks with carvings on them confused him, and he got turned around. He found a perimeter walkway, and ended up circling the bar area, able to see into it, but not finding a door, until he walked all the way to the opposite side of the atrium and located the far entrance. He was frustrated when he walked in.

The bar itself was lit from fixtures on the floor or maybe below, and the only other person at it was a short woman with a blondish ponytail. He noted the woman was small; really small. She looked like the kind of woman who had trouble buying age-appropriate clothes. Obviously a woman, though, and she was sitting very straight.

The bartender was an older, dyed blonde woman in a white blouse and black pants. She looked beat down.

He picked a stool, waited for the beaten barkeep to come over, and ordered his drink. She didn't look at him, and only grunted when he finished talking.

The bartender came back with his beer. He took a slug, then got nervous and set it down, clasping his hands and swiveling to look behind him into the main lobby of the hotel. There were people milling around, dragging wheeled suitcases, lugging large soft bags, and a few kids straggling around behind harried-looking adults.

When he turned back, satisfied, he glanced at the woman at the bar. She was small, damn near dinky, but had an odd broadness in her shoulders, and seemed, even sitting, to have a certain compact, muscular power.

"Strange," he thought.

He thought, "The last blonde woman I saw was in a magazine."

He huffed in frustrated disgust at himself and his newly-found inexperience. "This is going to take a while."

He looked out at the lobby again, and picked out a few blonde women to look at. Some of them were pretty enough; one couple checking in was professionally dressed, and he allowed a decent ogle at the woman. She was of course blonde, that thing he wasn't used to any more, and attractive, and he could see an expert makeup job even from a distance. He turned back to the bar, and when he looked at the small woman she was looking directly at him. He smiled, or tried to, and apparently it was good enough, because she smiled back, a little smile, but real. She turned away, resting her chin in her open palm.

The woman had her hair pulled back in a shortish ponytail; there was a natural shine in her hair, so there was no spray or anything, but no extra wisps either; it had been grown out evenly and then been cut carefully to a specific length. He noticed it because he was, even sitting, far taller than her and was looking down more or less at the top of her head.

She turned her head to her far left, away from him, and he took the opportunity to look over her body. She was very small and solid-looking, but not wide except in the shoulders; she wore a thin sweater, wool or something, that stretched some across her back and breasts; it didn't fit quite right, and it looked a little too short. She had decent breasts, but she'd clad them in what looked through the sweater like a flattening sports bra.

For pants she had on some kind of gray yoga wear, and as she turned a little more and her rear came off the bar stool he could see the back was seamed to run up like a thong. She had a round, hard, muscled ass. He glanced away as she turned back, noticing the sweater top looked black but in the light turned slightly dark green. Her face came around, and they made eye contact for a short burst; then he looked back at the mirror behind the bar.

"Why are there mirrors behind bars?" he thought.

Over the next few minutes he checked her out, looking at the woman's face in the mirror and out of the corner of his eye. She was cute. Not really conventionally pretty, exactly; her face wasn't proportioned that way, with the equal features women in magazines have. She had a sort of short, turned-up nose with a kind of roundish tip, and wide cheeks; her forehead was prominent, and with her hair pulled back it made her look a little like a doll.

Her chin stuck out and was rounded, but her face was kind of flat. She was cute. He caught himself thinking she didn't have that sense of a woman that would lose the way she looked; she'd have pretty much the same appearance until she was fifty, as long as she didn't gain a hundred pounds. He realized the thought was really stereotypically sexist and the realization made him laugh to himself.

He thought, "Yep, we're all the same shallow asshole under the skin no matter how much we claim to be different... oh well."

He shrugged and caught himself doing it in the mirror, then involuntarily glanced over to see if the woman had seen him do it; he had a sudden stab of fear of being somehow found out at, you know, being a guy. He gave up trying to be cool, turned his stool, and looked straight at her.

She wasn't facing him at all. She was watching the activity in the hotel lobby.

He waited for her to rotate back to the bar, then screwed it up and said, "Mind if I join you?"

"Come on over," she said instantly, tilting her head in a surprisingly guy-like gesture. "I'm not waiting for anybody."

He got up and pushed in his stool, moved over, and sat down next to her, sliding the new stool away slightly to give her a polite amount of room. She looked down at the floor between them, then looked at his face and smiled. She didn't introduce herself, so he didn't either.

He decided to start the conversation. "I came to the city for a job interview." He got a mouthful of beer from the bottle. "I don't think it went well."

She said, "For what job, and why not?"

He told her the job, and she made a face.

"Yeah, I know. I think I didn't really want it. But I don't have too much time to decide about work, you know? So whether I want to do some job or not is kind of... immaterial."

She smiled and said, "Well, what did you do before?"

He hesitated, then blatantly lied to her face. He didn't want to explain. He didn't feel like listening about it, or talking about it either. His explanation was lame but plausible, and she simply nodded and sipped at her bottle.

The beaten down bartender turned on the TV. She flipped around a little, found the channel listings, then turned and asked, "Anything you two want?"

The small woman watched the listings scroll for a bit, then exclaimed, "Ooh! Ooh!" and named a quiz-type game show. "Turn it up so we can hear it!"

It was a fairly hard show, with tough questions; they watched the whole thing, sometimes dead on, sometimes not. He was surprised how much she really knew, and said so, and she told him the same thing.

"This is cool," he thought. "This is relaxing and cool."

He felt a twinge of guilt for lying about the job interview, too; he was in the city for a funeral. He didn't want to talk about that, either.

The show ended, and some new thing came on. The woman didn't like it, and turned away, uninterested. She waved the bartender over, ordered another beer, and asked to turn down the TV.

Then, when the bartender was out of hearing range, she bent over and said, "I have a question for you. Do you know why guys like small women?"

He shook his head.

She turned her head down and looked up at him from under her brows. "Because our hands make your cocks look big."

He felt his mouth fall open, and she burst out laughing.

After a few seconds of genuine surprise he laughed too, and said, "Oookaay..." and rested his head on a propped hand. "I'm not sure what to say to that."

The bartender came back with another super light beer and set it down, then walked away again. The woman fingered the neck of the bottle.

"Ask me a question," she said.

He thought briefly. "Do you do yoga?"

She picked up her bottle and nodded while drinking.

"Good. Because I'm a huge fan of downward-facing doggie style."

She had a mouthful of beer, but raised her eyebrows, amused. She swallowed and said, "I guess I asked for that."

"Well, kind of."

She looked at the mirror behind the bar. "I'm a gymnast." She corrected herself: "Well, I mean I used to be. I'm not anymore. I guess." She looked over at him. "Don't ask me to do any tricks or anything, because I won't," she said, with a notable hint of threat.

He said, "No, that's okay, I imagine it's something guys ask all the time when they find out what you do. Or did."

She made a face, twisting her mouth sideways and tilting her head so the hair on her head slid mildly, gleaming in the unflattering bar light. "I hate that shit," she continued, "Put your heels behind your head, huh-huh-huh." The face appeared again. "Cocksuckers."

He took a big chance and said it: "Well, can you?"

She flared up, eyes flashing. "Can I do what?"

He retreated silently and took a drink from his bottle. "Uh... nothing." He glanced over, and she was letting it go, at least for now.

"So what can you do? In the way of stupid human tricks?" she asked in a confrontational attack.

He instantly grabbed his left pinky finger and folded it back to touch his wrist.

"EEWW!" she shouted, and burst out laughing, really loudly, so loud the bartender popped up from whatever it was she was doing behind the counter to see what was so funny. The hotel employee put on a quizzical expression, so he did it again; the bartender made a pained gagging expression and sighed, laughing quietly.

"Oh my god, how do you do that?" the gymnast demanded.

He told her: "It's been dislocated like, five times, and now it sort of floats around. It doesn't hurt."

The woman laughed again and said, "That is so gross."

She stopped and froze her body suddenly. "I can't do gymnastics anymore because I just can't take the pain. I can't do it. It's just..." She shook her head. "It's just too much."

He was curious and asked, "What kind of pain? I mean, it's gymnastics." He kind of shrugged.

"Whoops," he immediately thought, because the girl had whirled at him with angry eyes. "Well, I mean, I don't really know. You have falls, and things like that, right? It can get serious."

She stared at him for a few agonizing seconds, then said, in a very controlled voice, "It's one of the hardest sports on your body. It's right up there with pro football for injuries."

She clamped her lips together, then spoke with venomous agony. "I've had five major surgeries in seven years, and to do it right I've been slamming pain killers like fucking candy." She looked away.

He waited.

"I talked to my coaches, and doctors, and everyone, and they were all totally supportive, but I'm just walking away from most of my life. I'm walking away. I'm all fucked up, and I had to walk away. If I keep up I'll end up in a wheelchair or on crutches."

"I'm sorry," he said, then didn't know what else to say.

She said, "I want to be able to walk when I'm thirty."

She turned and looked at him. "I'm twenty-two, and I'm losing my school scholarships, and I have to change schools and lose all my friends and everything. And I'm way behind in my work because of all the injuries, and it was all for nothing."

He stared at the bar mirror, watching the reflections of travelers.

He said, "Ending a career isn't much fun, is it?"

She shook her head violently and said, "I'm here checking out schools to change to." She shook her head again. "I don't want to talk about this anymore." She turned to face the lobby, bending forward and doing what looked like an unconscious stretch.

She had a gorgeous neck with smooth skin. He ran his eyes down her back and took in the shape of her ass. "Very nice," he thought, and then she turned back and he had to pretend he wasn't checking her out.

She said, "Yes I can."

Confused, he asked her, "Do what?"

Turning her chin down and looking up at him, she answered, "Put my heels behind my head," and then laughed.

They talked for a while longer, and then a bit more, and finally she stopped cold and stared at the bar mirror. "So what about it?" she asked, and he had to ask what she was talking about; and she said, in a conspiring way, "Do you want me to make your cock look big?"

He got over his shock and suddenly felt very lucky.

Taking a deep breath, he said, "Yes."