The Love Hotel

Chapter 2

Rochelle got to the hotel. She had still been wearing her coat when she had gotten home as she had been too excited about seeing Seth to take it off. Hence, she had been wearing it while leaving as well. She had not cared much about the cold at first, but soon it had started to hurt quite a lot. She was numb when she got to the hotel.

She looked around, desperate to find some sign of her boss. She saw Alice talking to a customer, smiling as she spoke. She needed to talk to her now but she didn’t want to make it so that Alice would have to stop talking to a customer. She didn’t want to get in the way of Alice doing her job. She was going to ask her boss to do a lot anyway, she didn’t want to start being a nuisance from the get go.

Alice spotted her, however, and quickly excused herself. She walked up to Rochelle, hurrying as she noticed how bedraggled her employee was. “Rochelle!” said Alice, looking at her up and down as she came close. “What happened? You left for home so long ago… what… why are you here? Why are you soaked? What’s going on?”

Rochelle started crying. She couldn’t speak. She had gone through the whole thing in her head right now but she still couldn’t help but feel like she could not talk right now. The pain of what had happened was far too great to allow her to simply get past it and feel what she was feeling right now. She needed a moment. A long moment. She needed to sit down and breathe.

Luckily, Alice was an extremely perceptive person. She was the kind of person that was always able to figure out what was happening, she would always know just what to do in order to diffuse a situation. In this situation, much like every other situation, she was going to know just what to do, and that made Rochelle feel really good about her decision to come to her place of work. She knew now that this had been the right thing to do. She knew that in coming here she had done herself a favor, because her boss was more than just her boss, she was her friend, and she was going to help Rochelle out of this. She was going to help Rochelle in any way she could, and that was what Rochelle needed right now more than anything else. She needed help from someone that could handle such situations with ease and expertise, because she was far too depressed in this moment to help herself.

She needed to think about something else for a while, and Alice, being the perceptive person that she was, took Rochelle to the employee break room. She asked everyone else to leave and everyone did so. Everyone respected Alice here. Everyone did exactly as she said, because they knew Alice always had everything handled.

Rochelle sat down and cried her eyes out. Alice held her as she cried, and when Rochelle was done she looked up and said. “I’m so sorry I’ve come here like this. I’m such a mess.”

“You’re not,” said Alice. “Okay, you are a mess but it’s not a problem. Just tell me what happened. What’s going on, Rochelle?”

Rochelle took a deep breath. She was going to tell Alice something that she had not thought she was going to tell anyone anytime soon, and she didn’t just want to start bawling in the middle of the telling her. No, she was going to tell Alice like a mature adult. She was not going to let her feelings cloud the telling of her story.

Rochelle exhaled and started to tell Alice everything that had happened so far. She told Alice about the fact that her boyfriend had been cheating on her with other men, that he had hid the fact that he was bisexual from her for so long, and that he had been doing it fairly regularly over the past two years. She told Alice every single thing there was to tell, and by the end of it, her boss was sitting wide eyed and utterly shocked in front of her.

She was silent for a moment. Rochelle was scared that perhaps her situation had shocked her so much that she would not know what to say. She did not want this to be the case. Alice was the only person that had a chance of helping Rochelle in this moment. She was the only person Rochelle might be able to get some help from, and she did not want to alienate her in any way. She did not want to make it so that the only person that might be able to help her right now would end up avoiding her in some way.

After thinking about it for a while, Alice looked at her and said, “Weren’t you staying with your boyfriend?”

“I was,” said Rochelle. “I was staying in an apartment with him. The apartment is in his name. This is part of the problem. I honestly don’t know what to do right now because he’s the person that I depended on, you know? He’s the person that I lived with, he was in a lot of ways my… my reason for living. What can I do now? I’m sorry I came here like this it’s just that I honestly have no idea where else I can go. I have no idea where else I can possibly feel safe right now. You’re the only one that can help me, Alice.”

“I’m going to help you,” said Alice. “Don’t you worry about that Rochelle. I am going to do whatever it takes to get you out of this. The first thing we need to do is get you a place to stay. I can get you the cheapest room at the hotel at a highly discounted price. I can get you about eighty percent off. That’s the most that I can give you right now, would that be enough?”

“You really think you’d be able to do that?” asked Rochelle. “You really think you’d be able to let me stay at a room in the hotel? That would be so amazing, Alice, that would be just perfect. I’d be so grateful, you have no idea. Thank you so much…”

“You don’t have to thank me,” said Alice. “I’m just doing the best I can to get you out of this terrible situation. I wish I could do more but this just isn’t the case, I’m afraid. I hope that what little I am doing will help you to get past this insane tragedy you are going through right now.”

“It’s a start,” said Rochelle. “And it’ll give me a place to breathe for a little while. But won’t you get in trouble with your boss?”

“The owner of the hotel, you mean?” asked Alice. “I’ll handle him for as long as I can. I think he would understand, he is generally the kind of person that allows people to do things as long as they have a good reason for doing them. I don’t think he is going to stop me from helping you right now. No, I think this is going to be fine for a while. Now, what do you say we take you up to your room so that you can relax for a bit? You must be tired out of your mind, and cold to boot. I can’t believe you have had to go through all of this on your own, you must be going crazy with the stress that would come with a situation like this. Come, I’ll take you up and you can take a hot shower and try to relax a little.”

Rochelle followed Alice up to the first floor of the hotel where the cheapest rooms were. She was so grateful Alice was here and that she was the kind of wonderful person that would not be afraid to put herself out there in order to help a person in need. She needed people like this in her life. She needed people like Alice, because Rochelle did not really know how to do these things herself. She didn’t really know how to take care of herself because all her life she had been depending on other people to do this for her, and it was high time she started taking care of the things she normally depended on other people for. For now, however, she was going to need this one final bit of help. She was going to need Alice right now, because without this help she would have been left high and dry and that would have made it even more difficult for her to deal with a situation that was already impossible to deal with for her.