The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online

hundred or two hundred each to help cover the cost, and most of the men had agreed.) But for a price, the rest of the guests could have a little private time with either of the girls. Or both. Boris Badenov had made that clear. So had the dancers. But private time wasn’t an issue for Philip. The groom was so drunk by then that he hadn’t even bothered to adjourn to one of his older brother’s bedrooms upstairs: he’d taken the blonde on the living room floor while everyone around him had egged him on. Richard had listened as he had led the other girl upstairs to the guest room. (He sure as hell wasn’t about to bring her to his and Kristin’s bedroom or Melissa’s bedroom or even the room with the home theater and their records and two very comfortable couches.) He’d started talking to her on the stairs, if only to drown out the sounds of the men as they raucously cheered his brother, and the woman as she cried out like a porn star.
    “Where are you from?” he’d asked her, and she had leaned her head on his shoulder as if they were lovers on a date, and talked about Armenia and Russia, and how in another life she could show him the most beautiful sculptures and parks in Yerevan and Moscow.
    “There is a Botero cat at the base of the Cascades in Yerevan,” she had said.
    “A Botero,” he’d asked, “is that a kind of cat? A breed like a Siamese or an Abyssinian?”
    She looked up and smiled. “No, silly. Botero is a sculptor. He’s from Colombia. It’s a plump—plump like big pillow—black cat. A very big sculpture. But the cat has a king’s face. Royal.”
    “Regal?”
    “I guess.”
    “And the Cascades are a waterfall in the city?”
    “Cascades are steps in the city. Levels. And there are sculptures on every level,” she explained, as she started to unbutton his shirt. He let her. He stretched out his arms to allow her to pull off the sleeves. “I like a man’s chest,” she said. She kissed his sternum.
    “How many levels?”
    She looked up at him. “The Cascades?”
    He nodded.
    “It’s been so long. I wish I knew. I wish I could remember. Seven? Maybe eight?”
    “You grew up near them?” He thought she sounded wistful.
    “Close, yes. Parts of the city are so beautiful. The opera house? Nothing like it. At least for me.” She undid his belt and pulled down his zipper. He let her do this, too. He had never been with a woman this hypnotically sexy; he knew he never would be again. He tried to memorize every detail of her smile and her breasts and even her fingers, as his underwear and his pants slid down to his ankles and he stepped out of them. She started to kneel to pull off his socks, but he stopped her and stepped out of them, too, so—like her—he was naked.
    “How long have you lived here?” he asked. “In America?”
    “Shhhhhh,” she whispered, and her dark eyes seemed to sparkle. “Shhhhhh.” She stepped backward toward the bed, pulling him with her by holding both of his hands.
    …
    In the end, they hadn’t had sex in the guest room. For a long moment he had stood above her as she sat on the bed, her feet—so small, the arches petite and erotically incurvate, he remembered, the nail polish on her toes an unexpectedly childlike pink—dangling a few inches off the floor. He’d gazed down when he felt her hand reach out to him. He saw the nail polish on her fingers matched the color on her toes.
    But instead he ran his own hands along the skin of her thighs and felt the goose bumps. Her skin was smooth and tight, but all he could sense was the reality that the poor thing was cold. And instantly he had taken a step back.
    As drunk as he was, there was still some small part of his temporal lobe that recalled he was married. That recalled he was a father.
    As drunk as he was, he realized that this had all gone too far. Too ridiculously far. What in the name of God was he doing about to fuck a stripper—no, she wasn’t a stripper; she was a prostitute, a call