Chapter 39

“Hear that?” I asked him.

He cocked his head and listened. “What?”

“Can’t you hear my bed?? It’s callin’ my name.”

My standard Gee-I’m-tired crack, mildly amusing at most, he nevertheless threw back his head and roared with laughter. If I ever launch a stand-up comedy career, I noted, I gotta remember to put this guy front and center at my debut.

We finally got our room keys and exchanged room numbers. My room was on the nineteenth floor, his on the twenty-second. We agreed to meet in the lobby at two o’clock, and I told him to think of what he wanted to go see, and what he thought he might want to eat. We rode up in the elevator together, and when I got off, he gave me another of those huge, manly handshakes, and I imagined I could still smell him on my hand as I drifted off to sleep twenty minutes later, spent, a sticky washcloth in a ball on the floor by the bed.

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