Public Fantasy Gone Wrong

Sally had been working up to it all weekend. She was twenty-three, she worked as a software developer back in Columbus, and she had come to the Chicago convention with a plan she had not yet told anyone, including the man she'd been dating for eight months.

Denny was twenty-four and did freelance graphic design, which meant he could work from a hotel room, which meant he had said yes when she asked him to come along. He was sitting on the end of the bed in their room on the second evening, eating chips out of the bag and scrolling his phone, when she finally brought it up.

"So I have an idea," she said. "For tonight."

He looked up. "What kind of idea?"

"Kind of a wild one." She sat down next to him and took the chip bag out of his hands, which made him frown at her. "You know how I said I feel like I'm boring in bed?"

"I never said you were boring."

"You didn't have to. I said it. Because I am." She set the bag on the nightstand. "My one hookup before you, that guy Chad from work, it was bad and I think it was bad because of me. And I've been thinking about it a lot and I want to try something that scares me a little. Something we do together."

Denny put his phone down. "Okay. Like what?"

"Here. At the convention." She took a breath. "Somewhere semi-public. Like a hallway, or a corner of the garage level. Where we could get caught."

He stared at her for a good five seconds. "Sally."

"I know."

"That's how people end up on a registry."

"That's how people end up on a registry if they get caught doing it in a public park. This is a hotel full of adults, and it would be somewhere nobody goes." She had rehearsed this part. "I looked it up. There's a service corridor behind the expo hall, behind the loading doors. Staff only. On the last night the cleaning crew is on the other side of the building."

"You looked up where the cleaning crew is going to be so we can..." He rubbed his face with both hands. "God."

"Say it. Say what we'd be doing."

"Having sex in a hallway, Sally."

"A handjob, first. Maybe just that. I want to touch you somewhere we shouldn't be touching each other and feel that in my stomach." Her face was hot. She pushed on anyway. "I want to feel like someone who does things, instead of a person who thinks about things and then orders the same pad thai."

Denny was quiet for a while. He picked up the chip bag, looked at it, and put it back down.

"Is this because of Chad?" he asked. "Because that guy sounds like he was bad at it, and you keep acting like his review of you was fair."

"That's not the point."

"It's kind of the point." He turned so he was facing her. "Look. I like having sex with you. I'm not just saying that. But if you need this, I'd rather try it than have you feel stuck. So. Okay. Handjob in a hallway. What could go wrong."

"That's not enthusiastic."

"It's one hundred percent more enthusiasm than I expected to have tonight." He shrugged. "We try it. If either of us hates it, we leave. Deal?"

"Deal." She leaned over and kissed him. He tasted like salt and ranch powder. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me until I'm not arrested."

---

They spent the next day in panels like normal people. There was a talk about procedural generation that put Denny to sleep on her shoulder, and a merch hall where Sally bought a pin she did not need, and a long line for coffee that they stood in while arguing about whether a certain remake was good or just pretty. It was a regular day. Sally kept checking the time like the corridor had an opening hour.

By seven the expo hall was shutting down. Attendees drifted toward the bars and the after-parties, badges swinging, everyone loud and done. Sally and Denny ate a late dinner at a sandwich place two blocks over, and at nine she looked at him across the table and he nodded once, and the entire conversation they needed was that.

The service corridor was off the south end of the expo hall, past a set of gray double doors with a keypad that someone had propped open with a folded cardboard sign, because in a hotel that size some rule is always propped open somewhere. The lights in there were dim yellow strips set far apart, and the floor was bare concrete, and the air smelled like cardboard and floor cleaner. It ran straight back along the wall of the expo hall, deep enough that from the doors they had come through, a person would only see them if they walked all the way in.

"Okay," Denny whispered, like the corridor required whispering. "This is creepy. This is a horror movie hallway."

"It's perfect." Sally's heart was going fast. She pulled him by the hand past a stack of empty crates and stopped where the light from the next strip didn't quite reach. "Here. Nobody comes back here. I checked, remember."

"I remember. You checked where the cleaning crew is. I still think about that."

"Shut up." She put her hands flat on his chest. He was wearing the lanyard with his exhibitor badge still on it, which she decided she liked. "We can still go back. Say the word and we go back and get dessert and this never happened."

"Do you want to go back?"

"No."

"Then I don't either." He kissed her, slow, and she felt the exact thing she had been chasing, that drop in her stomach, that edge of oh no, someone could walk in here. When he pulled back she was breathing harder than the kiss accounted for.

"Can I?" she asked, with her hand already at his belt.

"Yeah. Yeah, go ahead."

She got his belt open and his zipper down and reached into his boxers, and he was already halfway there, which pleased her more than she wanted to admit. He leaned back against the concrete wall with his hands braced on the edge of a crate, and she worked him with her fist, slow at first, the way she had learned he liked, thumb over the head on every third stroke.

"Okay," he said after a minute, voice low. "Okay, I take back everything I said. This was a good idea."

"Told you." She sped up a little. In the dim light she could see enough of him and not much else, and somehow that made it better, made it feel like a thing happening in a place it wasn't supposed to happen.

He got hard all the way and his breathing went uneven. She loved that. She had spent eight months learning that sound and she still considered it a win every time.

"You're actually into this," he said. "You're smiling."

"I'm very into this."

Sally was about to say something else, something about how she wanted to go further someday, maybe right here, when a light swung at the far end of the corridor.

She stopped moving. Denny heard it too. They both turned their heads.

A hotel security guard had come through the doors at the other end, a big man in a dark jacket with a flashlight in one hand, walking along the corridor at a slow patrol pace. Fifty yards away, maybe more. He was pointing the flashlight at the floor ahead of him, checking doors.

Sally pulled her hand out of Denny's pants so fast she nearly fell over. Denny fumbled with his zipper, and for one horrible second the sound of the zipper seemed loud enough to echo off every wall in the building. They stood there pressed against the crates, Denny holding his jacket closed in front of him with both hands, Sally with her back flat to the concrete and her hand still warm from him.

The guard's flashlight swept the corridor ahead, hit the stack of crates, passed over the dark stretch where they stood. For a second the beam seemed to slow. Sally did not breathe. Then it moved on, and the guard turned at the end of the hall, walked through a door marked STAFF, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Silence. The hum of the ventilation. Denny exhaling like he had been underwater.

"Okay," he whispered. "Okay. That was..."

"Yeah."

"That was the scariest thirty seconds of my life and I once rode with you through Cleveland rush hour."

Sally started laughing, silent, shoulders shaking, and had to press her face into his shoulder to keep it down. When she came up for air her whole body was buzzing. Her hands were actually trembling.

"Denny. I'm so turned on right now it's stupid."

He looked down at her, and then at himself, still half out of his pants. "Yeah, I noticed. You stopped mid..."

"Sorry. Survival instinct."

"Fair." He was grinning now too, she could see it even in the bad light. "So do you want to finish what you started, or is the moment ruined?"

She reached for him again. "The moment is extremely not ruined. That was the best part."

"You're a menace."

"I know." She took him back in her hand. "Now be quiet and let me work!"

He leaned his head back against the wall and did as he was told.

"I have to tell you something," she said, pausing with her hand around him. "This is my first time doing anything like this. Ever. Public, risky, any of it. In case that wasn't obvious by the part where I almost knocked over a crate when the guard showed up."

"Wait, really? You seem like you've done this before."

"Nope. Chad and I did it in his car one time, in a parking lot, at night, and it was so boring I mostly thought about my grocery list." She kept moving her hand while she talked, which made it hard for him to answer. "So this is new for me. All of it."

"For what it's worth, me too. I never did anything like this. Nan and I were very much a bed people. A closed-door, lights-off-ish, bed people couple."

"A bed people couple."

"Very boring. You would have hated us."

"Do you hate this, though?"

"No," he said, and his voice caught a little when she ran her thumb over the