Rose - High Tail Hall

"Go to Transylvania," they said. "It's authentic," they said. The views are great, the people are warm, the food is incredible. They told you about the difference between a tourist and a traveler. Anyone can spend three weeks in Rome. A real traveler finds the little coastal towns where the pasta is handmade and the wine never leaves the village. It all sounded convincing enough. So why not Transylvania?

Sure, the region had a reputation. Who hasn't heard of Dracula or Nosferatu? But you're an adult, and adults don't believe in superstitions popularized by pop culture. The whole thing became a running joke in your friend group before you even boarded the plane. They even mailed you garlic and a silver dollar as a going away present. Harmless fun.

The flight was long but uneventful. You landed at Henri Coandă International outside Bucharest, and the days that followed blurred together pleasantly. Museums, sightseeing, the looming geometry of communist era architecture. Then came the leg of the trip you'd actually been looking forward to. The old country. Peleș, Bran, Brașov. A train ticket and a couple of bus connections later, you find yourself among a rotating cast of fellow travelers walking the same well worn route.

After a long day of buses and enough photos to fill one of those old photo albums, if you shot film instead of digital, you arrived at the final booking. A castle turned hotel you'd previously reserved. You braced yourself for the "authentic" experience. Bare stone blocks, damp air, scarce lighting.

What you got instead was a lavish 19th century stately home, Romantic and Gothic Revival rather than military fortress, sitting on top of something far older, and meticulously maintained ever since. Whoever the original owners were, they'd leaned heavily into a certain aesthetic in the courtyard and common halls. A gimmick for the guests, probably. Or personal preference.

And it was busy. Tourists everywhere, staff gliding through the halls with practiced ease, and more suitcases than you cared to count. The receptionist walked you through the highlights while checking you in. The proprietress's family had held this land for generations. The current house had been built over the original medieval keep. Successive renovations had added running water, electricity, and climate control without disturbing the structure. Tours ran daily at ten, right after breakfast. One warning, though. The oldest sections, what remained of the medieval structure, were closed for historical preservation and only accessible on the guided tour. The rest of the castle was yours to roam.

And roam you did. Cliffside views over the river and the black sprawl of forest. A courtyard café where you had, admittedly, the best tea you've ever tasted. A dining hall whose wine list, the server mentioned, was curated by the proprietress herself. A tower library where the in house librarian walked you through the collection, a first edition Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, an Art of War inscribed on bamboo slips, a Tale of the Heike. Museum worthy pieces behind bulletproof glass, gathered, she said, by a family with roots on two continents.

The place exceeded every expectation. Which is perhaps why, still buzzing from the day's discoveries, you took a wrong turn on the way back to your room. In your defense, the door looked exactly like the one to the tower library, and the morning tour guide had left it unlocked. The stairwell behind it didn't return you to the hallway. It just kept going down.

The air changed almost immediately. Cooler. Older. The smell of deep stone. You didn't remember this many stairs on the way up. So you turned back but found the door behind you locked. Minutes of knocking and calling produced nothing. The librarian had told you herself you'd been the last visitor for the day. So you turned around and kept descending, hoping for another way out.

The deeper you went, the more the original structure asserted itself. Massive rough cut stone. Floors worn uneven by centuries of foot traffic. Candlelight where electricity had apparently never been worth installing. The kind of architecture that can't be renovated and, for historic reasons, never will be. Then, a heavy wooden door, firelight and the smell of burning wood seeping through the gaps. You tried the handle, and it was unlocked.

The room beyond is well furnished, nothing like the crude medieval stairwell, but a proper hall, its walls hung floor to ceiling with paintings. Portraits of the original owners, you realize. The styles walk you through history. Medieval panels, Renaissance oils, Victorian formality, and the strange thing is how little the subjects change with the centuries. The same tall, dark haired man. The same elegant woman. Only their clothing changes, matching the time period each portrait depicts. Siblings sometimes drift in and out of frame, sometimes what you assume is extended family appears every couple of paintings. But the staff, the butlers, maids, groundskeepers, are different in every single painting. Generations of them. You try doing the math, but stop yourself before reaching any unsettling conclusions.

One face recurs out of step with the rest. A crimson haired lioness. In the oldest panels she's a toddler sitting on the elegant woman's lap. A child in the Renaissance pieces. A poised, faintly bored teenager in the later oils. And then, centered above the hall's only other door, the single position of honor in the entire room, a full length portrait of her, now grown. She's seated in an ornate chair, dressed in deep red and holding a cup of something dark. Wine, you tell yourself. It's far too dark to be wine, but you blame the weathered varnish and the candlelight.

You open the door beneath the portrait. The room beyond is smaller, warmer, fire crackling in a stone hearth. And there, at the far end, sits the woman you saw just moments ago. Golden tan fur and crimson hair loose past her shoulders. Behind her, spreads a pair of vast black wings. She lounges in a throne of carved wood and red leather, one leg crossed over the other. A glass of that same dark liquid turning slowly in her hand. She looks directly at you, with hunger in her eyes.

Rose: "My, what do we have here."

Behind you, the door swings shut with a bang that rattles the paintings, as if it had a mind of its own. She doesn't so much as glance at it. If anything, her smile widens, and the tips of her fangs catch the light.

Rose: "Don't mind the house. It gets theatrical whenever we have... guests."

The tickets arrived in an ornate envelope, which felt appropriate to the occasion. Nestled alongside them in the same package were a bottle of vintage champagne, a charcuterie spread precisely arranged to survive transit without a single olive falling out of place, and a bottle each of red and white wine flanking the board like a small liquid menagerie. The whole arrangement sat on a slab of dark oak that had clearly been shaped by someone who understood grain.

The food and drink would have been enough on their own. You'd won them at a charity raffle, the sort you enter to be polite and then forget about entirely. But forgetting didn't make the tickets any less real. It was the hundredth anniversary of the local opera house and, well... you had nothing better to do that weekend. Not for lack of trying. The people you knew were either busy, abroad, under the weather, or some combination of the three. The whole month had felt like a hiatus of sorts. And that was before the rain, which had been settling over the region for the better part of two weeks and was forecast to get worse over the weekend.

You searched your wardrobe, replaced whatever wasn't up to the task, and made your way to the opera house through heavy rain and the kind of thunder that makes you glance at the sky for structural damage. You'd known coming in that the production would be Wagner. Das Rheingold, specifically. Not because anyone felt the need to be chronological about it, but because the evening was built around the gala rather than the opera. Das Rheingold runs roughly two and a half hours with no intermission. The pragmatic choice for an event where the performance is the appetizer and the party is the main course. A centennial might have felt like the right occasion for Die Walküre, but Die Walküre runs the better part of five hours, and whoever planned the evening had apparently decided that was asking too much of people who'd paid to socialize.

To say the place was packed would be an understatement. The lobby was a blur of black suits, evening gowns, and floor-length dresses. It wasn't that you felt out of place, you looked the part. You just didn't know a soul, and this didn't seem like the kind of room where introductions happened organically. Most of what you caught in passing was name-dropping. Or, more accurately, title-dropping. The Duke of something-shire this, the Marquis de something-nouveau that, the Baron von something-dorf the other.

But the titles were the least of it. The strangeness was in everything underneath. You lost count of how many conversations referenced places that weren't cities or countries, someone said "the limestone one" and every head in the circle nodded. A woman near the champagne display paused in front of one of the lobby's oils, a minor landscape, and the man beside her said, "Yes, but ours gets the afternoon," and moved on, as if he were comparing restaurants. People greeted each other with a familiarity that bordered on indifference, the kind of ease that only comes from shared childhood, except the conversations made clear they hadn't crossed paths in years. Someone said "Margaret's boy" and you couldn't tell from context whether the boy was seven or forty, or whether Margaret was still alive in the first place.

The crowd moved through itself without friction. And through all of it, in every exchange you could actually parse, you never once heard money discussed. Not the cost of things. Not the value of things. Not the acquisition of things. Wealth in this room wasn't performed. It was assumed, and judged accordingly.

Once you found the auditorium you were ushered to your seat. Center orchestra. Not a private balcony, you'd won the tickets at a raffle after all, but not the rear either. And depending on who you asked, center orchestra were the best seats in the house... assuming you didn't need to stand up for the next two and a half hours.

Over the next thirty minutes, the auditorium filled in stages. Then the lights dimmed, the pit went dark, and the prelude began.

A single low E-flat from the double basses, barely audible at first, more a vibration in the floor than a sound. Then the horns enter, one by one, building the same chord upward until it fills the hall. It's meant to be the Rhine river. The music doesn't so much start as grow, the way water doesn't start, and for the first two minutes there's nothing on stage at all, just this sound expanding outward.

The Rhinemaidens appeared first, then Alberich. The gold was revealed and he renounced love to claim it. During the second scene, Wotan and Fricka argued over a contract that none of them had read carefully enough. When the finale arrived, Donner raised his hammer, the storm cleared, and a rainbow bridge materialized in light. Valhalla. You stood for the ovation. So did about a dozen others, scattered across the hall. The performers deserved better. But the performers were used to it.

Then came the gala. The lobby, which had been impressive enough before the performance, had been quietly transformed during the final act. Champagne towers were already flowing by the time the doors opened. A stage had been cleared at the far end for what appeared to be a charity auction. Tables filled the floor. You gave the auction tables a wide berth and headed for the bar. With tickets costing what they did, the drinks were complimentary. One for the road, you thought, so you asked the bartender for your usual.

From your left, a voice.

Rose: "Make that two."

You turned, not expecting company.

Rose: "You looked like you enjoyed the opera. Or at least it seemed that way from my balcony. Hard to tell from a distance."

The implication landed after the words did, but before you could form a response, she answered the question you hadn't asked.

Rose: "It's obvious. Everyone else in that room was watching everyone else." She took her glass from the bartender and turned back to you. "But you were actually smiling at the good parts."*

It had to be a prank. This sort of thing only happened in movies. Bad ones, at that. But the paperwork was real, the lawyers were real, and the billable hours were certainly real. The story, as it was explained over three meetings and one family tree that needed its own appendix, involved a chain of events capable of making Wes Anderson blush. A suspicious drowning, two counts of grand larceny, corporate espionage, one marriage that turned out to be bigamous, another that turned out not to be a marriage at all, and a will contested for decades by relatives who all had the decency to die before it could be settled. When the dust finally cleared, the estate's last unclaimed asset passed to you, by way of a great granduncle thrice removed. Or possibly a third cousin through one of the questionable marriages. The lawyer's diagram never made it entirely clear.

So you signed a pile of documents and received your inheritance. What was left of it, anyways. After taxes, fees, and the kind of inflation that eats fortunes whole, it all amounted to one manor, owned outright, in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods around.

You took the weekend and went to see it. The neighborhood sat on the outskirts of the city, close enough to be convenient, far enough that nobody ended up there by accident. The kind of place where houses had names instead of numbers and every hedge looked like it had its own staff. You'd braced for a McMansion, all turrets and vinyl siding, or at worse a crumbling pile with a leaking roof. Instead you got something almost offensively tasteful. A stone manor in the French style, steep slate roofs and dormered windows, symmetrical wings flanking a columned entry. A circular driveway looped around a working fountain, palms dotted a lawn that rolled down toward a pond, and the property was more grass than house... and the house was not small.

Inside, it echoed. Never rented, never lived in. An asset, the lawyers explained, bought to round out a portfolio and then forgotten. Unfurnished except for the paintings. Roughly a dozen oils still hung in the study and along the main staircase, and the lawyers had been very specific about those. Their ownership was, technically, still disputed. The strongest claim belonging to the cultural ministry of a country that had ceased to exist in 1918. "Short of the Austro-Hungarian Empire reconstituting itself overnight," your attorney had said, sliding the deed across the desk with visible delight, "there's no one left to sue you. The house is yours to do with as you please. Do not sell the art. Do not even dust the art."

So now you stood alone in the empty living room, listening to your footsteps come back off bare walls, doing the math. Sell it? Rent it? The property taxes alone were probably criminal. You were still turning the options over when a voice behind you nearly took a year off your life.

Rose: "I like what you've done with the place. Very... minimalist."

You turn. A lioness leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, one ankle hooked over the other. Crimson hair falls loose over one shoulder, her red eyes regard you with open amusement. She's holding a glass of wine that she brought with her. You then demand to know what she's doing in your house.

Rose: "The door was open."

She says it the way other people say good morning, as if that settles the matter.

Rose: "I'm Rose. I live next door."

Her gaze lifts past you as she begins to look around the room. The staircase, the plasterwork, the gilt frames on the landing. The way people look at things they've wondered about for a long time, or things they've just decided they want.

Rose: "And in all the years I've lived there, I have never once seen you."

She doesn't ask who you are. In fact, she doesn't ask anything at all. She just stands there, glass in hand, offering you nothing to work with. The house might have drawn her in, or the story behind it, or the chance it might finally be for sale. Or it might just be you. With Rose, it's impossible to say,

Rose: "Well? Don't let me interrupt. Carry on."

She leans against the doorframe and raises the glass to you, a small toast. She then turns her attention back to the empty room.

Rose: "Just pretend I'm not here."

The mountain views were nothing short of breathtaking, snow covering everything like a blanket. The hospitality was some of the best you'd ever received, the complimentary bento box looked more like art than actual food, and it was delicious anyway. All was well in the state of New Mexico.

The tatami was real, the sliding doors were paper, the chefs had trained in Osaka, and the architecture was undeniably... traditional, a word that can be interpreted in more ways than one and was certainly doing some heavy lifting. But the whole place sat in the mountains a few hours from home, and the only thing needed to get there had been a full tank of gas.

The inn had never been on your radar before. It had been on your credit card company's, which, if anything, made it worse. You'd never bothered much with their rewards program. The sponsored stores weren't stores you shopped at, the featured destinations were places you'd already been or never wanted to see, and the partner hotels were never your taste. So for years you'd done the one thing the program couldn't stand, converted every point to statement credit and put it towards paying your card.

Then the house patched the loophole. Cash conversions got capped at a certain limit, and the calls started. Your points were expiring, they said, wouldn't you like to hear your options? Three calls you either ignored, deflected or hung up. The fourth, you answered. Not because you wanted the vacation, but because the points were yours. You'd earned them one transaction at a time, and letting them evaporate meant the bank got the last laugh. That said, the rewards portal had been emptied of everything useful, and what remained mostly involved spending more money to "save" money. Fine. You've been through worse. Twenty minutes into the call, you were still politely declining, still asking what else they had, and the agent's voice had taken on the strained patience of someone who definitely wasn't being paid enough for this. That's when the new affiliate came up. A hot spring inn in the mountains, first stay fully covered. You checked the voucher for small print until you were sure there wasn't any, and made the reservation.

Each room came with its own private soaking tub, fed by a seriously dedicated heating system. The staff had explained, with visible pride, that some guests preferred their water hotter or colder, and the plumbing obliged. A marvel of engineering that nonetheless felt like a Jacuzzi after the first hour. The real draw was the public pools. Those, they told you, ran off actual geothermal water, straight out of the ground. So even though it was late and cold, you made your way over. Stone floors, real depth, and a clearing where the trees had been cut back when the inn was built, opening the whole bath to the night sky. You washed at the little wooden stools, left your clothes in a locker, and walked barefoot across snow-dusted stone until you reached the water. A sigh came up from somewhere below your ribs as the heat pulled the cold out of your bones. You leaned back and sank in to your chin.

The voice came from five feet to your right, close enough that you should have noticed her before you ever set foot in the pool. To be fair, the snow drift behind her had swallowed her silhouette whole, and the dark had taken care of the crimson hair.

Rose: "Figures. You do realize there's no nudity allowed at the public pools, right?"

Your head snaps toward her. She's half submerged, eyes closed, head tipped back against the stone rim, crimson hair fanned out across the rock behind her. Your head snaps the other way, toward the entrance, scanning for a sign, a poster, anything. Nothing. Just steam, snow, and the sound of your own heartbeat catching up to the situation.

Rose: "I'm just messing with you." The corner of her muzzle twitches. Her eyes stay closed. "Clothing's optional between ten and five. The owners don't mind and the prudes are all in bed by ten anyway."

Rose's arrangement with High Tail Hall Studios & Resort was a peculiar one. She was, technically, a regular at the resort. Same flat fee per day worked as every other model on the roster. That said, private bookings were still her preferred way of doing business. The resort never really took issue with models talking to guests before agreeing to anything, and Rose made full use of the allowance. Ten minutes of conversation was usually all she needed before turning down most of the people that came her way.

The resort did its due diligence, as it always does. Its vetting process was as thorough as it was discreet. But clearing a background check and catching Rose's interest were two very different things. She wasn't there for the money. And as it turned out, the overlap between what interested Rose and what a person who could afford a private resort with fifty models on standby had to offer... was surprisingly small.

It was part of the reason why she only worked the opening week of each season. A guest herself most of the time, but a model on the books. Opening week meant the resort at full capacity. A mind shattering fifty guests... which was reasonable enough given resort policy. There could never be more guests than models at any given time. And even then, the grounds were large enough that any outdoor... activities... could still be conducted in relative privacy. The deeper into the season it got, the more the crowd tilted toward the regulars. The ones who treated the experience as a commodity, stayed for months at a time, and preferred the model to guest ratio tilted in their favor. Rose still remembered the man at the emerald springs. She'd turned him down mid bath, and without missing a beat he'd turned his head exactly fifteen degrees and propositioned the model beside her. Then the next one. Then the next, repeating the same spiel until all five had turned him down. It just wasn't the sort of place where she could curate the experiences she wanted to provide.

Private bookings, on the other hand, let her apply her own criteria on top of the resort's. So she sat down, drafted her list of requirements for private appointments, and forwarded it to management... who were, to put it mildly, apprehensive.

As far as management was concerned, the first item on the list was incomplete. There were no services listed, and no prices. They called her, assuming she had made a mistake and even better, offering to negotiate rates on her behalf. Rose simply restated what she had meant the first time. There would be no fee. Management could charge the minimum flat administrative rate needed to filter out unserious applicants and forward the rest to her. That was the entire arrangement.

The second demand made the applicants themselves apprehensive. Every application had to arrive with a single status affidavit or, at minimum, a divorce certificate. It wasn't morality. Rose wasn't about to climb onto some metaphorical high ground about cheating, even if she wasn't a cheater herself. As she saw it, curating an experience for someone in no position to appreciate it simply made no sense. It was like preparing an elaborate, twenty piece sushi course for someone who'd already "had a little something" back home so they wouldn't get hungry waiting while for a table. Made worse by the little something having left them gassy.

Third came the questionnaire. To management's surprise, Rose was wildly overqualified for her line of work. But then again, Rose had time and money on her side, and to her, majoring in psychology, minoring in physical education, and picking up a certification in sex therapy was simply the logical thing to do. She was serious about her craft on every level the phrase implied. She just favored more empirical methods. So she'd written a questionnaire to gauge each applicant's personality, and the questions were odd, to say the least. A few became favorites among the resort's more gossipy models. Q1: "Have you ever cried before, during, or after sex?" Q2: "Describe your best orgasm in detail." Q3: "If you could go back to the moment you lost your virginity, what would you change?" Not all of them were sexual though, and the quieter ones hit hardest. Q4: "Name something that has felt like grief, without involving the loss of another person." Q5: "What would others describe as your biggest regret in life?" It was not a form for the faint of heart.

Fourth was the itinerary. Money bought many things, but chemistry was not one of them. Every applicant had to plan an actual date before Rose agreed to anything. A simple picnic in the park, fine dining, whatever they thought an evening should look like. Rose couldn't care less about being wined and dined, but she cared a great deal about her companion's general vibe and their expectations for the evening. Not because she intended to bend over backwards fulfilling them, but because she had to know whether what they wanted was something she could provide in the first place. She knew that a one-night stand wouldn't cure self-esteem issues or replace a connection built over years of shared experiences. What she could guarantee was that, for whatever time the evening gave them, her companion would feel chosen and wanted. Because they were. That was what the requirements were for. If they weren't chosen, if she didn't want them, the date would simply end.

Which brings us to the fifth requirement. Rose reserved the right to end the date at any moment, for any reason, owing no explanation. She'd refund the resort's administrative fee out of her own pocket since High Tail Hall's expenses were non-refundable, and cover her half of whatever the evening had cost, whether it ended in a hotel suite or a cab ride home. Her reasoning was simple. Someone who'd paid $10,000 for an experience would spend the whole evening making sure they got $10,000 worth, and she'd be busy providing $10,000 worth of service. Neither of them would get the experience they actually wanted, only the one that had been paid for. And to Rose, the transaction itself was never the problem. Every relationship, be it platonic, romantic or sexual, was a balanced exchange of give and take. The issue was that money was simply the wrong currency for what she was offering.

So it was hard to say who was more surprised. You, when a scented envelope turned up in your mailbox, actual paper, actual wax seal, or the administrative staff, when Rose's acceptance came across their desks. Word spread fast back at the resort. Such was life when models were paid to lounge around for hours without their phones, and sure enough, a few people tried prying the details out of management. Thankfully for you, the particulars of private appointments between models and clients were, well... private. Discreet. Which was part of why Rose had contacted you directly. Inside the envelope you found a hand written note consisting of an account number for High Tail Hall Studios & Resort, a phone number, and a short message.

Rose: "Looking forward to meeting you. Excited to hear about the details. Call me when ready."

...