Upstairs, Hauck unbuttoned his shirt, sat on the couch in the large room, and turned on the flat-screen TV. He flicked to ESPN. There was a college basketball game on, and Hauck went over to the minibar and took out one last bourbon and some water and sat down to watch the game.
His blood coursed.
His mind drifted to Karen, to the gulf that lay between them now. He needed to put that all behind him. Whatever was happening was happening. He flashed to Josie again, pausing over the glimpse of her breasts underneath her halter and the thought that something between them might have been fun. Your call… Maybe she was still at the bar. Maybe he should go back down there. He brought his feet up on the table and rested his head on his knees.
There was a knock at the door. Housekeeping, maybe, to turn down the bed. Hauck got up and cracked it open. “Yeah?”
It was Josie.
Staring up at him, with a steady, not-at-all innocent look that communicated something she knew they both felt, which needed no words. She pushed the bangs on her face out of her eyes.
“I was just making sure there was nothing you might have forgotten down there.”
“Like what?”
Josie shrugged. “Like second thoughts, maybe.”
He looked in her smoky eyes. “Are you really just working here while you’re going to school?”
She stared back at him. “Are you really up here just looking into false shuffles?”
Hauck didn’t reply, just felt this undeniable urge rise up in him and the hair on his arms rise as she brushed by him into the room.
“This is bad, you know,” Hauck said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Just bad.”
“You know what they say about ‘bad,’ don’t you…” She came up to him, so close they were almost touching, and curled a smile. “Only matters in wine and cheese.”
Hauck looked at her, drew in the scent he found so intoxicating at the bar. He felt her arm go around his waist, the loose, breasts that she had been so willing to let him see pressed electrically against his bare chest. Everything he told to be quiet in himself sprang alive.
Josie’s other hand draped across his cheek; she looked up at him and he kissed her. Her lips parted and her tongue gradually overcame the hesitancy of his indecision; his blood rose like a wave, surging against the feeling that he was doing something wrong to the person he loved…
Until he found his own hand sliding down the smooth curve of her back, inside the waist of her jeans. His breathing picking up and his foot shifting and the door to Room 3209 of the Pequot Woods Resort and Casino clicking shut.