The Love Hotel

She got into the room. It was small and not nearly as extravagant as some of the other rooms in the hotel. It was a simple room, really. A small box with a comfy looking bed with clean sheets as well as a mini bar. Rochelle looked at that mini bar with some trepidation. She was not going to go anywhere near that place. She was not going to even look inside. She had been working at the hotel for a while now and she knew that the mini bar was only for the very richest clients. It was the kind of thing that only people with tons of money could afford to take stuff out of. She didn’t have that kind of money, so it was going to be better for her if she didn’t even look inside.

It was a fine room, all things considered. It was the kind of room that she would have stayed at if she had gone on vacation with Seth somewhere. They would have been able to afford it with their combined incomes. This was a nice touch.

She shuddered all of a sudden. She couldn’t think about Seth. Not right now. She had to focus on something else, anything else. She had to make it so that Seth was nowhere in her mind otherwise she would start going crazy. She needed to start thinking about herself for once. She needed to start living for herself.

“This is so wonderful,” said Rochelle. “Thank you so much.”

“So you won’t be getting cleaning services of course,” said Alice. “You probably already know that I’m just putting it out there to make it official. And I’d suggest you get your food from outside. You can buy the ingredients yourself and just use the kitchen that the restaurants use to cook your food. I’ll talk to the cooking staff. You won’t have to think about anything or anyone but yourself, Rochelle. I suggest you take advantage of that. I don’t want you to be hurt. I think you’ve had enough of that to last an entire lifetime if I’m being very honest.”

Rochelle laughed and said, “I’m going to have to agree with you on that. I can’t believe I let this happen. Anyway, I’m just going to get settled here. Relax a bit, you know? I think that would do me some good. I should really take a hot shower and just lie down on the bed. I need to think about a lot of things. In order to think about these things properly I need to get myself into the right frame of mind.”

“Yes, of course,” said Alice, backing up towards the door, “take a hot shower, dry yourself off, lie down and have a think. Don’t worry too much. Just take tonight to enjoy yourself. Watch some TV if you want, you can do all of the messy stuff tomorrow. For tonight, you should focus on recuperating from the insanity that you have just gone through. Have you eaten anything?”

“I haven’t” said Rochelle. “I haven’t eaten anything. I had been planning to cook dinner today but that clearly didn’t go well, if you know what I mean.”

Alice contemplated the floor for a moment before saying, “Alright, that’s not a big deal. I’ll send you up something, okay? Something from room service. My treat. Don’t worry, I’m allowed to give certain guests certain privileges from time to time, it’s not going to be a big deal. You haven’t eaten anything in a long time and it’s going to be a while before you are in the sort of mental state that’s going to allow you to do something like cook.”

Rochelle smiled for the first time in a long time as she looked at Alice. “Thank you so much. You’re a really good person. I’m… I’m really glad that I came here, you know. I’m really glad I was able to get myself sorted out. You were the right person to come to, you really were. I’m so glad I know you, Alice.”

Alice smiled back at Rochelle and said, “Alright then, you get yourself sorted out. Go and shower, have a nice long one. I’m going to go and see what I can do about some dinner for you.”

She left and Rochelle took off all of her clothes and sat on the edge of the bed. She was utterly exhausted, more exhausted than she could ever remember being. She was wet and cold. She sighed. She really should shower but she couldn’t really bring herself to do it. It required way to much energy than she would be able to muster right now. It would require the kind of energy that she simply wouldn’t be able to muster given the level of energy that she had right now.

She looked around. At least it wouldn’t be so bad while she was staying in this room. At least she had somewhere dry to stay. She had a place where she could crash and not worry about anything. She had a place where she could simply relax and not have to think about the horrific events that had just unfolded.

And yet, as she thought about the fact that she had a place where she could feel safe, she couldn’t help but think about the events that had just unfolded. She couldn’t help but think about the fact that her boyfriend had been cheating on her with men for so long.

She started to cry. She didn’t want to be like this. She didn’t want to be all weepy. And yet she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help but feel utterly helpless and hopeless. She couldn’t help but feel like everything she had been working towards her entire life had collapsed around her.

She took a deep breath and stood up. She would not allow herself to be overcome by this grief. Her entire life she had been a doormat. Her entire life she had done what other people had wanted her to do, she had behaved in ways that other people wanted her to behave. Now, however, she was not going to stand for it. She was not going to allow herself to feel this way ever again. It was over. This had been the last straw. This had been the final nail in the coffin. Starting right now, Rochelle was going to start living for herself.

She thought about her life over the past few years. She thought about the fact that Seth had wanted her to change so many different things about herself. He had expected her to be the person that he had always wanted her to be. He had changed the way she had dressed herself, he had changed the way that she ate and spoke, he even changed the way that she talked. He had tried to change her and mold her into the person that he had wanted her to be and this had been an incredibly fu*ked up thing for him to do.

In a way she was glad that it was over. She had thought that Seth wanting to do all of these things for her had been the result of him loving her so much. He had wanted her to be a good person, he had wanted to make her into something that other people would respect. This was how she would always end up justifying the way he would try to control her, the insidious ways in which he would attempt to make her feel like she did not possess agency, like she was not worthy of the little agency that she did possess.

She thought about how it had been exactly the same way with her father, who had always told her to act more like a girl, who had said things like this every single time Rochelle displayed an interest in sports, every single time she wanted to watch an action movie or watch a TV show that was, for some reason, assumed to be the kind of thing that only boys would like to watch.