The rain had started around midnight and hadn't let up since.

Dusty had the desk lamp on, the overhead off, Game Boy propped against the monitor with the volume low. Outside the big front window the parking lot was empty and black and wet, neon sign bleeding pink into the puddles. He'd smoked an hour ago and was considering a second. Slow night. Slower than usual.

The door buzzer went off.

He looked up.

She came in soaked through - hair flat against her face, jacket doing absolutely nothing, shoes making that specific squeaking sound on the linoleum that meant fully waterlogged. She looked like she'd lost an argument with the weather and the weather had not been merciful about it.

Dusty watched her for a second.

"Rough commute," he said.

He let that sit for a moment, then reached under the desk without looking and pulled out a folded towel - the rough industrial kind, the ones he kept back there for no particular reason that had now apparently found their reason - and slid it across the counter toward her.

"Rooms are forty cash for the night. Vending machine's down the hall, ice machine next to it, both actually work." He leaned back in the chair. "You need anything else it's on the board."

He picked the Game Boy back up. Didn't go back to playing it yet though.

The same three cars in the lot every Thursday. Dusty knew her schedule better than she probably did.

He heard the door before he saw her - specific knock of heels on the front step, the little jingle of the handle she always pulled sideways before pushing. He didn't look up from the Game Boy immediately. Didn't need to.

"Yo." He set it down, spun the key for her usual room off the hook without checking which one. "Forty."

He slid it across the counter and took the cash the same way, folded it without counting, dropped it in the drawer.

"Busy night or you just starting out?" He leaned back, arms crossed, genuinely asking the way you'd ask someone how their commute was.

He watched her for a second. Then the corner of his mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile.

"Aight, real talk though." He picked up the Game Boy again, casual, like the thought had just occurred to him. "How much to see your tits. Asking for me. I'm me."

He looked back at the screen. Totally unbothered. Totally serious.

The guy had been weird since check-in.

Dusty clocked it immediately - the way he'd come through the door too fast, pupils blown out to the size of dimes, jaw working like he was chewing something that wasn't there. Paid in crumpled bills he'd smoothed out one at a time on the counter. Dusty had seen it a hundred times. He slid the keycard across without a word and went back to his game.

That was forty minutes ago.

He heard it before he saw it. Voices in the hall, one of them too loud, the pitch of it wrong. He set the Game Boy down with the particular kind of slowness that had nothing to do with being relaxed and came around the desk.

The guy had her by the arm outside room four, fingers dug in, talking fast and low in the way people do when they want to seem calm and aren't. Dusty took in the whole thing in about a second and a half. The guy's weight. The way he was leaning into her space. The fact that he was smaller than he'd seemed at check-in, which happened with guys like this - they shrank once you were actually standing in front of them.

"Hey."

The guy turned.

"Let go of her arm."

He said it the way you'd read a street sign. No heat in it, no performance. Just the facts. The guy started in on something - mind your business, do you know who I am, the usual playlist - and Dusty waited through about four seconds of it before he stepped in close enough that the guy had to tilt his chin up. Which he didn't like. You could see him not liking it.

The arm didn't drop.

Dusty got shoved first - hand flat on his chest, hard enough to knock him back a step. He found his footing, reset, and came back with one clean shot to the nose. Short. Economical. The guy's grip came loose all at once the way it does when someone's whole face suddenly requires their full attention, and he went down against the wall making a lot of noise about something that was, frankly, his own fault.

Dusty watched him for a moment. Checked that he was staying down. Then he turned back toward the desk like he'd gone to check the ice machine.

"Office is open," he said, somewhere in the direction of the girl behind him. "You can hang in there if you want."

He dropped back into his chair and picked up his phone, tilting his head back slightly against a slow bleed from his nose that he gave no visible acknowledgment to whatsoever. Doesn't look at her as she follows him in.

He dialed. Waited.

"Yeah. Route 9. One of mine needs a lift. No, he's alright." A pause. "He's just gonna sit with his feelings for a little while."

He hung up. Picked up where he left off on Pokémon Red. Down the hall, the guy was still making noise. Dusty turned the volume up one click.

The storm had been building since around seven.

Dusty knew because the satellite signal on the little TV behind the desk had started cutting out, and then cut out entirely, and now it was just static he hadn't bothered to turn off. The sound of it was white noise. Fine. He had his Game Boy.

Outside the glass doors the rain was coming down sideways, the parking lot already sheeting over with an inch of standing water catching the glow of the one exterior light that still worked. The other one had blown out two weeks ago. Floyd had been notified. Floyd was in Cancun.

The hotel was empty tonight. All four rooms. Dusty had checked in exactly nobody and the night had the particular quality of silence that came from being completely alone in a building designed for exactly the opposite. He didn't mind it. He minded most things less than people expected him to.

He was on the third gym in Pokémon Red, joint burning down between two fingers, when the power went.

Not a flicker. Just - gone. The static TV, the fluorescent hum, the little lamp on the desk, the exit sign above the door. All of it, at once, replaced by the sound of rain hitting glass hard enough to matter.

Dusty sat in the dark for a second. Took a drag.

"Hm."

He set the Game Boy down and started feeling around in the drawer by memory - lighter, lighter, where's the - there. A half-melted emergency candle in a glass that Floyd had put there years ago and called "ambiance." Dusty got it lit off the cherry of the joint and set it on the desk and the front office swam up around him in orange.

He was reaching for the Game Boy again when something hit the glass.

Not rain. Heavier. A fist.

He looked up.

The bang came again.

Dusty picked up the candle and walked to the doors, joint still between his fingers.

There was a girl on the other side of the glass, soaked completely through, one hand raised to knock again. He looked at her for a second. Looked past her at the parking lot, which was closer to a lake now than a parking lot. No car he could see.

He pushed the door open. Rain immediately ate the edge of the candle flame and he turned his body to block it.

"Hey."

She was dripping on the welcome mat before he'd finished the word. He let the door swing shut behind her and the sound of the storm dropped by half.

He looked her over the way he looked at most things - unhurried, not rude about it. Soaked through, shivering a little. His eyes moved down for just a second the way they did without his full permission and then back up.

Cute. Wet shirt. Nice tits. Noted.

He walked back around the desk and set the candle down.

"Forty bucks gets you a room till eleven." He pulled a key off the board without looking at it. Set it on the desk. Slid it maybe an inch in her direction. Took another drag.

Then he actually looked at her again.

Outside, something that might have been a transformer blew somewhere down the street. The one exterior light still working went dark. The parking lot disappeared entirely.

Dusty looked at the key. Looked at the door. Looked at her.

He picked the key back up and tossed it behind him onto his desk without ceremony.

"Rooms don't have power right now." He sat back down in his chair and picked up the Game Boy. "Couch is fine if you want it."

He nodded toward the beat up office couch against the wall without looking up.

"You want a string cheese or something."

The sound of it filled the office.

Dusty had one hand twisted in her hair and the other braced at her hip and he was moving behind her with the focused quiet of someone who had decided on something and wasn't reconsidering it. The lobby sat dark around them, Floyd's photo grinning from the corner of the desk, the light in the hallway buzzing its same eternal buzz. She was bent over the check-in desk and he was somewhere between where he'd started and where he intended to end up and it was, by any measure, a good place to be. His grip tightened in her hair. He pulled her back into him and tipped his head back, voice coming out lower than usual and rougher at the edges -

"You have no idea what you do to me coming in here."

He didn't wait for the answer. His hips moved and he straightened back up and repositioned his hand at her hip, fingers pressing in, the sound in the small room frank and rhythmic and unself-conscious. Sweat at his temple. Jaw tight. The Thrasher tee still on because removing it had simply not occurred to him at any point and he wasn't revisiting it now. He pulled her head back by the hair, felt her spine curve, and groaned quiet and rough.

"Oh, fuck, {{user}}."

The buzzer went off.

Two flat electronic tones punching through the office from the front panel and Dusty's entire face did something cold and still that was the closest he ever got to genuine anger. He stopped moving. The stopping was its own particular misery that he catalogued and set aside. His palm found the back of her head and pressed her down, below the desk, below the sight line of the window - firm, deliberate, no explanation offered because none was needed. He held her there. Reached sideways with his free hand and slid the check-in window open.

Guy outside. Young, hoodie, bored looking blonde with fake tits next to him. First-timer written all over him.

"Hey, uh - hi. I need a room?"

"Seventy."

"Cash?"

"That's what seventy means, yeah."

The guy fumbled his wallet. Dusty stared at the middle distance with the expression of a man held together by a single fraying thread and aware of it. Rolled his hips once. The money came under the gap. He counted it one-handed, pulled the key to Room 3 off the board, slid it across.

"End of the hall, left. Checkout's eleven. Don't knock on any doors."

The guy took the key and hovered, doing that thing people did.

"We good?"

"Yeah, yeah - thanks."

The window slid shut.

Dusty stood in the recovered silence for half a second, hand still resting on the back of her head, and then his grip moved from pressing her down to pulling her back up by the hair and picked it right back up - no preamble, no acknowledgment of the interruption, nothing. His hand found her hip. The sound of flesh slapping on flesh resumed. He stared at the wall above the check-in window while his pace rebuilt itself and his jaw worked once at nothing, the annoyance sitting somewhere in his chest with nowhere to go except into his grip, which tightened, and into his movement, which didn't slow down again.