ShapeShifter Fiction: Hotel Rooms by Susan H Gottfried

Before I get started, let me thank Johanna and the #amwriting community for letting my fictional band drop in today. Welcome to #FridayFlash, everyone!

Mitchell closed the hotel room door and flipped the safety catch like it was no big deal. He yanked his shirt over his head and, walking through the room, tossed it on the foot of the bed with his left hand while his right unbuttoned his jeans. He paused to hold onto the end of the bed while he braced his toes against the backs of the opposite Doc, the easier to slip out of them. That's when he noticed Kerri.

She sat up against the headboard, dead in the middle, her legs hugged to her chest and her chin on her knees. Not a typical Kerri position.

"Ker?"

She lifted her head and met his eyes. He didn't like what he saw: she lacked her usual, piercing look that was always assessing him, gauging if he'd make a good picture. That sucked; what had he been posing for?

In fact, she seemed sort of … down.

"You okay?"

She shrugged and slid one hand from her knee to her ankle. "I'm just… you're so much more comfortable than I am. I mean, hotels…"

He nodded and bent over to strip his socks off and drop them on the floor by his Docs.

"Even if I count going to New York with you, I think the number of hotels I've been to fits on one hand. And now you've got me here on the road with you and you're telling me that we'll be in that many hotels in a week. It's … I don't know."

He crawled up the bed and stretched out in front of her, propping himself up on one elbow, ready to keep listening, but all she said was, "I'm being stupid, I know."

"I hate it when Ma's right," he sighed. "She said you might find all this too much. That I take it for granted because it happened slowly and I had time to get used to each part of it." He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. Like most hotels, there wasn't anything interesting up there.

"How do you get used to this? Hotels are impersonal. Cold, almost, even though they try to be warm. Any idiot can tell it's all for show."

"Exactly. That's what we depend on." He smiled. "Check out Eric one day. He can walk into a hotel he's never been in before and make a beeline for the bathroom -- and it's right where he's heading. Every single time. What makes it work, Ker, is that you expect it to be the same, and there's comfort in that. So much goes wrong out here, so much gets screwed up, that when you get to a hotel and it's all exactly the same, it feels good." He rolled back onto his side.

Kerri was staring through him, like she was making sense of what he'd said.

"Give it a week," Mitchell said, pushing himself up so he was sitting. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. "One week and you'll see what I mean."